New Honda City facelift is only offered with a petrol and hybrid option – Diesel is no longer on offer
Sedans and Honda often go hand in hand. With the City lineup, Honda has had a great run in its 25-year-long stint. With City as its formidable weapon, Honda is getting ready for a battle in the mid-size sedan space. We’re talking about Hyundai 4th gen Verna for India which is coming in hot with more power and heavy with more features.
Anticipating a bloodbath, Honda is now fortifying City with features borrowed from its Hybrid counterpart. Honda hopes to retain its dominance in mid-size sedan space with this update. New City facelift 2023 model is priced from Rs 11.49 lakh for the base petrol MT variant while the top of the line City hybrid variant is priced at Rs 20.39 lakh. All prices are ex-sh. This makes the new City up to Rs 35k more expensive than before.
Honda City Facelift Updates
In typical Honda fashion, changes on the City facelift are very subtle. Honda is known to establish design differences with very minimal changes. By keeping most things similar, Honda has priced the new City aggressively. They have concentrated more on introducing features and new tech into this segment.
With City facelift, the main change that Honda has come up with is in its front bumper. Other than that, there are a few faux carbon fiber bits of composites used in front and rear bumpers. This sort of radiates City RS vibes that is not offered in India.
Design Changes
At the front, bumper is now re-profiled to make it slightly sportier. The thick chrome below its bonnet shut line is slightly smaller, which adds a lot of sporty character to City’s front fascia. Adding to that effect is a slightly larger grille. Speaking of grille, Honda is now offering a mesh-type grille as opposed to older one with horizontal elements.
Lower half of the bumper is slightly revised too. We now get design elements that mimic winglets on a superbike. Lower air dam gets a mesh treatment too, replacing horizontal slats on outgoing model. Only oddity is that Honda hasn’t matched upper and lower grilles. In this sense, upper grille has much larger crevices than lower one.
Feature Additions
Honda City was a fairly feature-loaded sedan, to begin with. It offered a leather-wrapped steering wheel and gear knob, padded door pads, auto-dimming IRVM, electrically operated and foldable ORVMs, an 8” infotainment system, a fully digital instrument console, a sunroof, automatic climate control and a lot more.
With the facelift, Honda has added its Sensing Suite of camera-based ADAS tech. Unlike upcoming Hyundai Verna with a radar-based ADAS suite, Honda’s camera unit is installed below its IRVM. It offers automatic emergency breaking, lane change assist, adaptive cruise control, blindspot monitoring and a lot more. The lane change assist camera below left ORVM is retained as is with same functionality as before.
Specs & Rivals
With RDE norms setting in from March 31st 2023, Honda has discontinued diesel powertrains with City and Amaze. A sole 1.5L NA petrol motor making 118 bhp of power and 145 Nm of torque, mated to either a 6-speed manual or a CVT. Fuel efficiency claimed is around 18 km/l. It also comes with strong hybrid option, the only one in the segment claiming mileage of more than 26 kmpl. It will be interesting to see how the new City takes on rivals.
We say this because, all of its main rivals except for Ciaz are offering a 1.5L turbo petrol with up to 160 PS of power and modern and quick-shifting DSG gearboxes as well. What City offers is a no-nonsense approach in the mid-size sedan segment.
