Published:
27 March 2012The Honda Jazz owes plenty to the larger Honda Civic’s spacecraft-style cabin, with design themes apparent in the steering wheel, swooping dashboard curves and chunky ancillary controls.
Fortunately, and probably thanks to the Jazz’s conservative customer base, the Honda Civic’s rather eccentric and occasionally confusing interior styling has been greatly toned down for the Jazz.
The result is both easier on the eye and more sensible for daily use than the Honda Civic’s fussy interior.
It is leagues ahead of the previous Jazz’s plasticky, unimaginative dash layout but still lags some way behind the most imaginative interiors in the class - the quality of materials errs on the side of hard-wearing rather than luxury.
One of the most distinctive features of the old Jazz was its space-efficient interior packaging. The new car moves this to new levels. In the boot (as long as you include the underfloor well), the new Jazz has a seats-up luggage capacity of 399 litres, which comfortably outsizes anything in the supermini class, and even beats the 396-litre boot of the Ford Focus.
Hybrid models are slightly less capacious though, but with more than 300 litres of space, it can hardly be called small.
The Jazz also does some very clever things with its seating. The rears not only fold flat at the pull of a lever, but the squabs can also be locked vertically, turning the rear seats into a tall extra luggage compartment. Even in their conventional positions, there’s a generous amount of legroom.
