Honda Builds the Best Interior on Sale Today

For a masterclass in interior design, we rarely look to Honda. Often that’s a function of the company’s value focus. Its cars sit in a crook between segments, neither premium nor truly entry-level. A Civic—traditionally the company’s core model—must offer tremendous value and a sense of dignity above all. Value rarely strums our heartstrings.

So Honda pairs a punchy, efficient engine with a simple and durable chassis. It follows a decision tree which underlines practicality, then slaps that five-letter badge on the back. With whatever money’s left rattling the coffers, it seems, Honda designs an interior for mass appeal, often chasing tech amenities to lure in younger buyers.

That approach appeals like ipecac to us enthusiasts.

With sportier iterations of the Civic, however, Honda tries to elevate the car’s interior, taking aim at those car-nerd heartstrings. We’ve seen red bucket seats here and there, some decent shift knobs and funky gauges, but rarely has the company raised a fast Civic entirely above the model’s cut-rate roots. All that changed with the newest Civic generation, which offers masterful interior design out of the box, even in the lowest trim levels. We’ve written about that leap before, in our review of the Civic Si.

With the Civic Type R, Honda’s gone further. It’s done something spectacular. The CTR’s interior appointments go far beyond fortifying the Civic’s baseline goodness. This Type R’s interior feels truly special. Forget Corvette, Porsche, or Ferrari – for the right kind of driving enthusiast, the Type R’s interior is the best on sale today.

In defense of this thesis, a brief primer: We judge interiors largely by two metrics, design and quality. Both are easily understood. Design is how the interior looks, how it functions. Quality is what it’s made of and how well it’s all screwed together.

Most brands do one or the other very well. Porsche offers surpassing interior quality, often with a drab, utilitarian bent to its design. Rolls Royce uses the best interior finishings on earth; the Phantom’s interior is one big billowing poof of ‘mallow-soft leather. Exquisite to touch, beautiful to behold. Gorgeous. Yet Bentley offers the better interior overall, owing to masterful fit and finish and a more usable and considered layout.

Rarely do brands earn high marks on both metrics, especially those outside the luxury space. So how’d Honda do it?

It starts with design, but also quality. Take a look at each interior element, especially ones the driver touches. The CTR’s pedals are made from metal, not heavy plastic, and covered with grippy rubberized dots. Their sporty looks offer a gleaming affirmation every time you swing open the CTR’s door. The three pedals are spaced perfectly apart for heel-toe downshifts and snap-quick gear changes, with enough grip that you can step into the interior with wet Nikes and still feel confidence during the process of braking, downshifting, then trailing the car into that first corner off a long back straight.

Ergonomically, there’s enough space between the top of the pedals and the bottom of the steering wheel to accommodate the long-legged among us (the critical wheel-to-pedal metric prevents me from owning most compact cars built before 1990). Plus the footwell’s wide enough to allow for more relaxed hip/leg positions when you’re not working the pedals in anger. On many sporty cars, ultra-wide wheels encroach on footwell real estate. Not here.

Moving up from the pedals, the seats. THE SEATS. THE HALLOWED THRONES. I love these seats. Maybe it’s gimmicky, but the red fabric just does the business for me. The shade evokes that Brian Spilner spirit of yore. It speaks to every JDM fantasy dreamed up by my sixteen-year-old self. More importantly, the seats feel supportive in traffic, relaxed on the interstate, cosseting in bending two-lanes, and perfectly firm when the CTR is stuck real deeplike into racetrack chicanes. For my body type—lanky and stretched—there’s enough space in the bucket for your posterior meat and the perfect amount of bolstering for thighs and shoulders.

The steering wheel has too many buttons for my taste (Porsche gets huge credit here, despite what I said earlier, for offering a three-spoke steering wheel with zero buttons on some models), but it is functionally a three-spoke design wrapped in leather, never mind the split bottom spoke which technically makes this a four-spoke wheel. Just the right rim thickness. Just the right kind of leather. Red stitching holds the wheel together and looks damned good. Goldilocks stuff.