2025 Honda Civic Hybrid: What's It Like to Live With?

• The Honda Civic Hybrid was the Edmunds Top Rated Car and Best of the Best award winner for 2025.
• We've just added a Sport Touring hatchback to our One-Year Road Test fleet.
• We'll see how this highly lauded Honda holds up over a year of testing.

What did we get?

Honda only offers the hybrid powertrain on the Civic Sport and Civic Sport Touring, and as we discussed in our recent buying guide, we firmly believe that the more expensive Sport Touring trim is the way to go. This model gets you niceties like heated leather seats and a full suite of driver assistance features, but crucially, also upgrades the tech to a 9-inch touchscreen running the Google built-in suite of apps.

You can get hybrid power in both the Civic sedan and hatchback, and we opted for the latter. It's more functional and better-looking, and it makes the Civic a compelling alternative for a higher-riding compact SUV.

The Civic Sport hatchback starts at $28,600 including a $1,150 destination charge, and the Sport Hybrid comes in at $32,300. Our Sport Touring costs $34,300. And in the interest of full disclosure, while Edmunds frequently buys vehicles for our One-Year Road Test fleet, this Civic was loaned to us by Honda for this 12-month test.

Testing time

The Civic's hybrid system combines a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine with two electric motors, and total output is a healthy 200 horsepower and 232 lb-ft of torque. That's more power than what you get in the sporty Civic Si.

At the Edmunds test track, our Civic Sport Touring Hybrid accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in 7.5 seconds and ran through the quarter mile in 15.7 seconds at 87.8 mph. Interestingly, the hybrid is 0.2 second quicker than the last Civic Si we tested, though the Si was able to complete the quarter mile 0.2 second quicker, and at a faster trap speed, too (91.5 mph). This largely comes down to the fact that the Civic Si rides on stickier summer tires as opposed to the all-season rubber on our hybrid hatch.

This disparity really shows on our 200-foot skidpad, where the Civic Si pulled 0.99 g of lateral grip, compared to the hybrid hatch's 0.85 g. The Civic Si was more sure-footed under braking, too, with panic stops from 60 mph taking 106 feet, while the Sport Touring Hybrid hatch did the same deed in 131 feet.

All that said, we love the way our Civic hybrid drives. The Civic Hybrid is spacious, comfy and zippy," says executive director of written content Jodi Tourkow. "I was able to move around on the highway with ease, and acceleration wasn’t a problem."

Our fuel economy's been great right off the bat, too. The EPA rates our car at 50 mpg city, 45 mpg highway and 48 mpg combined — numbers that are super easy to hit. We're also looking forward to putting the EPA's bladder-busting 595-mile range figure to the test on long trips.

What do we think so far?

"This is such a pleasant car," vehicle test editor Reese Counts writes in our logbook. "It's not fancy or luxurious, but it's such a nice vehicle to drive every day. It's comfortable, quiet, and easy to see out of. The powertrain is smooth and reasonably powerful for a hybrid, and you don't have to work hard to get great fuel economy. The hatch makes it super practical too. It's hard to fault the Civic Hybrid as a daily driver."

Exactly how practical is the hatch, though? Senior reviews editor Brian Wong says, "The hatchback doesn't offer as much extra storage as you might think. On paper there's a giant disparity between it and the sedan (24.5 cubic feet vs 14.8 cubic feet) in terms of trunk space, but in practice I was only able to fit one more small carry-on bag into the hatchback because it's kind of oddly shaped. The advantage it offers is the ability to fold the seats down, and the hatch's giant opening allows you to load larger items that won't fit in the sedan (like an office chair)."

Parents with young children take note: "The rear seat-belt buckles are set a little narrow," notes video manager Will Kaufman. "What I mean is, if you've got a kid buckling into a booster seat, the buckle winds up right at the edge of the booster. That makes it a tiny bit harder to reach and buckle up, which can be frustrating for, say, younger kids who recently learned to buckle up and really, really want to do it themselves every time."

Overall, we're impressed with the Civic so far; Tourkow describes this hybrid hatchback as "an all-around good buy." Here's hoping we continue to feel this way once the honeymoon phase is over.

Photos by Keith Buglewicz