The Honda HR-V facelift has been revealed in
Thailand, where it will be in showrooms from July 8. The refreshed B-segment
SUV made its home market debut in February this year.
No big changes to a popular product, and the
facelifted car is immediately familiar. The biggest changes are in front, where
the Honda logo now sits on a thick bar. Top spec cars get new LED headlamps in
the same “scaled” style as the Civic, while the U-shaped “mouth” is now wider.
The bumper has been reprofiled and the foglamps are now LED strips.
There’s a slim chrome bar linking the
tail lamps, which have two horizontal LED tubes in Thailand’s case. Our
neighbouring market gets a new RS trim level, and the top sporty spec adds on
unique two-tone five-spoke 17-inch wheels. The rims on E and EL grades are the
17-inch rims we’re familiar with.
Compared with the mid EL with full body coloured
trim, the RS gets contrasting gloss black on the entire lower portion and
mirror caps. The Passion Red Pearl colour you see here is new and exclusive to
the RS, and so are new-to-model items such as a panoramic sunroof and City
Brake Active System (CTBA), which is autonomous emergency braking that works
between 5 and 30 km/h.
Honda LaneWatch, a camera that comes on when the
passenger side signal is flicked on, is available on the EL and RS, along with
side curtain airbags to make it six in total (four airbags for E). The two top
trims also get a seven-inch touchscreen head unit and the Walk Away Auto Lock
function first seen on the Civic. No full Honda Sensing suite or a hybrid
variant as available in Japan, leaving the Toyota C-HR as the sole hybrid
option in the class.
No change to the powertrain, which combines a 1.8
litre SOHC i-VTEC unit with 141 hp/172 Nm to a CVT automatic gearbox with
paddle shifters as standard. Thai prices start from 949,000 baht for the E, rising to 1.059 million baht for the EL. The top RS spec
HR-V goes for 1.119 million baht.
