The Interior Space of the Accord Hybrid: A Well-Thought-Out Design
This interior space feels so well thought out, with everything instantly recognizable and no gimmicky or flashy features to be seen. The ergonomics are sound, and the interior space is enormous, capable of fitting everything comfortably and quietly. It's clear that a great deal of attention was paid to creating a spacious and practical cabin, making it an ideal choice for those who need a mid-size sedan with plenty of room.
A Comparison to Other Mid-Size Sedans
The Accord hybrid stands out from other mid-size sedans in its class, particularly when compared to the CR-V. It's not just a matter of size, but also of features and design. The interior of the Accord is more comfortable and practical than the CR-V, with more cargo space and a larger back seat area. Even when compared to Honda products like the HR-V, the Accord hybrid offers a more premium and well-appointed interior.
The Kia Five Miles an Hour Behind Me
One of the most impressive aspects of the Accord hybrid is its ability to handle traffic conditions smoothly and efficiently. A drive route that included a scenario where someone was just two inches away in front of you, with another car right behind you at two miles per hour under the speed limit, highlighted the Accord's capabilities in stop-and-go traffic. The Accord's all-wheel-drive system and advanced safety features made it a comfortable and confident choice for navigating tight spaces.
The K5: A Cheaper Alternative
One potential drawback of the Accord hybrid is its price, which may be higher than some competitors like the Kia K5. However, while the K5 may offer similar features and capabilities at a lower cost, it's worth considering that the Accord hybrid is still a well-regarded and reliable choice in its class.
The Accord Hybrid: A Step Up from Normal Cars
One of the most interesting aspects of the Accord hybrid is its unique blend of traditional and modern design elements. While it may not sound particularly exciting in sport mode, with synthetic sound that's reminiscent of an outboard motor, there's no denying the car's capabilities on the road. The start-stop system, which kicks in when you come to a stop or are stopped at a red light, is quite smooth and efficient.
Final Thoughts on the Accord Hybrid
In conclusion, the Accord hybrid is a well-designed and practical choice for those looking for a mid-size sedan with plenty of room and features. While it may not offer any particularly groundbreaking innovations, it's clear that a great deal of attention was paid to creating a comfortable and capable vehicle. The Accord hybrid's strengths make it an attractive option for those who want a reliable and efficient car that can handle just about anything life throws its way.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh now it is colder than a corpse buried beneath 70 feet of ice out here so i'm going to do my best to discuss this car the exterior has been refreshed and in this npc white oh you're guaranteed to fit right in they have updated the fog lamps the grille design has changed they've improved the radar or front radar integration it's just subtleties much like the interior but as we all know the accord interior space has always been amazing in this generation is one of the best of course i'm sitting in the most expensive trim level the touring at an unbelievable 37 000 but you get a whole hell of a lot here the physical controls the usability of pretty much every single thing in here is well thought out and it's amazing it's one of those cars where you sit back and you appreciate all the thought that went into where are they going to put this how simple as it is and the main thing is you don't have to think about all the knobs buttons and switches and all the technology so let's talk about the things they've added here on the hybrid version you get standard remote start all the way at the lower trim all the way to the upper one which is great for most people the infotainment has been updated to give you the standard infotainment from lower trims to upper trims but when you get up to the ex and above you get wireless apple carplay and android auto which will excite many people the upper trim like this gets cooled seats you have the standard push button gear selector here the cup holders are amazing the only disappointment here is the seats and you know i've been in a lot of cars now and i feel like the accord seats or the honda seats are vastly too stiff and i feel like there's unevenness in the foam or the padding in these so like the back have the seat is there's so many pressure points on my rear end and you go up to kind of the under part of your thighs and it's pretty soft there so there's just inconsistency in the padding the big win with the accord is its usable space the trunk is no longer compromised for being a hybrid and the back seats you can pull out the white linen and have a full-blown dinner back there it is enormous this car has a lot of usable space and that's exactly what you want but let's head into the shop and i'm going to talk about the hybrid drivetrain and some of the other technical attributes underneath the accord hybrid and before i talk about this you need to take a look at the underbody this is what it looks like when your state uses a complicated mixture of salt to melt ice now we get nasty snow storms every year in this area and i know states now with climate adjustment or change you're getting freezing conditions snow and temperatures you've never seen before and as these states adapt and get prepared for winters this is exactly what you're going to start to see happen to many cars with manufacturers that haven't really thought about good undercoating and i'm just gonna say this right up front if you have a car that you really care about that you have a lot of money in or you owe a lot of money on this is why at least in the midwest we parked those cars for five well sometimes as much as six months out of the year because of this it is so corrosive and damaging and you know certain car companies don't do a good job at protecting it but it's so hard to get all of this off here i don't care if you're a detailer or what this salt spray gets on every single part of it so if you have exposed steel you have bad sealers your car is going to be horrendous or extremely difficult to work on when it's time to take things apart so let's talk about the hybrid part of this honda has moved to a dual or two motor system now this is a big change from their old ima which i'll get into a minute the two motor system does one well a few things you can go into three distinct modes you can go to ev only from a start you can go to hybridization which is gasoline engine and hybrid when you need more power and then it can go to engine only at higher speeds with the addition of a clutch style flywheel that can disconnect and reconnect the engine but the big thing with this two motor design is it gives them the flexibility to do plug-in hybrids or more of a full ev depending on the battery pack they choose now this has the capability of going in ev only mode up to like 80 miles an hour but it's typically not going to do that because the battery pack is not big enough in the hybrids to do that but it can in the system is scaled out to do that so when you look at this as a whole it's a big change from the old ima setup which was integrated motor assist honda's first generation hybrid setup was way ahead of its time but it was also designed around one thing it was a glorified electric supercharger and battery pack they had a lean burn small gasoline engine which could get crazy fuel economy but it made no power or torque so they put in an electric motor and battery pack to kind of give it that boost to feel like a more normal four cylinder and the requirements for doing that were two things you needed a lightweight car and a smaller car to make that really work and the problem at least in the united states is small and light is herpes to most people so honda really couldn't scale this out and they tried it with the accord in the civic and it just wasn't as competitive as the toyota products that could go full ev and then just use a normal four-cylinder and you know emissions and all that stuff killed off the early lean burn engines so this is the evolution and they're on the third generation the third generation like on the crv you get more torque out of the electric motor to propel you gives you more g-force with the addition of sport mode so if you want to be thrown back more like a traditional ev that's what you would use now with this you have a strut front a multi-link rear with a trailing arm the this version the touring version gets the adaptive dampers so it gives you the flexibility different drive modes it can change and also can adjust based on road conditions go firmer or softer and with the change in these wheels which look like they're out of the farm and fleet catalog the tires have a much stiffer sidewall so you get more directness and steering it just feels like a more nimble car than some of the other mid well mid-sized larger side sedans but really that's about it let's take this out on the road and see how it drives these tires are horrible you have you have my pontoon ready the way that the cvt is and it's not there's nothing wrong with it it's really smooth and it does hold peak horsepower it doesn't fake shift but when you put sport mode on combined with the synthetic outboard engine sound that it places it has everything i want fake engine noise it's open diff it's a hybrid and it's cbt man that's real tight so i think you just covered all the negatives but it's been about what two years now since we've been in an accord so this has been updated and refreshed and you get behind the wheel of this for like 10 minutes and you realize how great of a car it is it's really good there's a reason why the accord for many many many years has been kind of the gold standard it's 20 percent sportier like 15 sportier than a camry it's big you can fit everything in this car the back seats now fold down with this hybrid variant so it's super useful it rides well it has good steering i mean it has everything you want and with the hybrid system you get good fuel economy yeah they claim you're going to get 40 everywhere anytime any day with us driving and we drive like grade a we're getting in the mid-30s yes and it's extremely cold we've been driving in sub-zero weather so you know you can expect over 40 miles to the gallon essentially doing nothing the upper trim that we're in the touring like we talked about in the shop you get adaptive dampers and this thing rides great the steering response and i'm not talking about st steering feel i'm talking about responsiveness you get a great sense of control driving this car it rides soft even in its firmness mode it's never overbearing but there's just enough firmness to give you i don't know i don't know what it is it gives you a great sense of control and that's something that i like in the accord over the camry the camry is kind of always feels a little bit floaty to me and this feels far more solid than the k5 and you brought that up there's a great sense of quality or solidity found in this architecture in this cabin that's not found in the k5 so with that said so you have the camry k5 and the accord they're similar prices they all go out to achieve the sympno a similar goal what do you like about this or don't like about it compared to its competitors well i think we talked i talked about this briefly in the interior space this feels so well thought out i mean everything is instantly recognizable on what it does there's there's no gimmicky stuff there's no flashy stuff everything ergonomically is sound the interior space is enormous you can fit everything it's comfortable it's quiet uh i i mean it's about is it's pinnacle mid-size sedan a large size sedan now that this is so good it's just a damn shame now that this this whole type of thing is not selling like it used to because people are really missing out if you this is way better than a crv oh my god way better yeah and i mean even comparing it to internal honda products i'd much rather drive this the accord than the hrv or the crv every day i mean any i need to always thought you're an hrv man no i'm not i i think you know from like what we're doing and we've purposely done a drive route where i i can't do anything like i literally can't do there's somebody right behind me like two inches away and there's somebody right in front doing this standard in a kia five miles an hour under the speed limit yep and that that's life and that's where this really excels what about the k5 it's cheaper than this and it does all-wheel drive i think that's where the accord is kind of like that's the only downfall of this i would say you know because of the all-wheel drive aspect and you can get a little bit of a peppier drivetrain from that i could drive it year round i could have more a little bit more fun i feel like the tech is well better sorted in the kia products or hyundai products than the accord is this feels very dated their software even though you're only going to use android auto and apple carplay for most people i feel like that's the only thing negative i can say honda sensing isn't as good as the yeah it's not it's not there yet but you know we're talking for most people they're not going to notice it but it does a lot more lane pogoing and like bouncing than the kia product does or the hyundai products do i don't know man i really like this car i i said it before in the original accord video it's the right car at the wrong time and this hybrid just adds one more really solid trim level if you're just looking for that cruiser sedan that does everything well this is it yeah i agree so mark let's head into the final thoughts all right jack final thoughts on the accord hybrid much like the regular accord i did a video on all the same great things are here there is so little to complain about assuming you get this you get this at a decent price interior design is great usability is great cargo capacity and the back seat room is just it blows you away they've added a whole bunch of standard features so again great car so what happens when you add hybridization to it and this is nothing to do with the accord it's every hybrid it's that half step half measure until we get to full electrification so you know that's the problem with certain evs you're kind of locked in with that battery pack capacity and then in five six years when it gets 25 better or 30 or 40 percent better people are going to be like you're going to get on this upgrade cycle and that's not something you have to do with the hybrid it just kind of gives you that good in between balance if you're getting over 30 or i'm sorry if you're getting over 40 miles per gallon like that's claimed up to 48 this is going to chew up the miles you're going to be on the highway you're not going to burn through a lot of fuel and it's a very smooth experience now the negatives are it strips away every single thing that is great kind of from normal cars it doesn't sound good in sport mode you have synthetic sound that sounds like a outboard motor and i'm not kidding if you just floor it on the height when you listen to it it sounds like going full throttle and an outboard it's it's actually comical the start stop of when the engine kicks on if you're just sitting there with the heat on it a stop light when that engine kicks on there is a lot of vibration from it that stop start process but again these are things that most hybrids deal with it's not exclusive to the accord i think it's another trim level it's a it's a really good hybrid system now that they can scale on it's more serious competition to what the other manufacturers are doing and i think if you are a honda fan and you've been looking forward to a hybrid this is going to check all those boxes thanks for watching i'll see you next time you\n"