The 1991 Honda Civic Si Was an Early Hot Hatchback

this is a 1991 honda civic si and it is a hot hatchback from a different era this car has only 108 horsepower so it's not exactly a ford focus rs but it's still a fun car aimed at driving enthusiasts it is basically impossible to find one of these in nice shape but i have done just that and today i'm going to review this civic si [Music] before i get started be sure to check out cars and bids which is my new online enthusiast car auction website with live auctions of cool enthusiast cars from the modern era everything from the 80s and up right now on the site we have this live for auction and also this which is very cool and also this and many more cars so if you're looking to sell or buy a cool car from the modern era cars and bids is the place to do it i've borrowed this si from a viewer here in the san diego area and i'm going to start with a little history now the exact origin of the hot hatchback is a bit disputed but most people think it started in the mid to late 1970s with the original volkswagen gti honda jumped in on the hot hatchback fun in the early 1980s with the original civic si which had 91 horsepower that's not a huge amount but then again the original gti had just over a hundred horses the fourth generation honda civic debuted for the 1988 model year and that meant the arrival of a new version of the s i and that would be this enthusiasts refer to this as the ef generation of the civic hatchback and the si was undoubtedly the performance king in the lineup 108 horsepower might not sound like much but this car only weighed 23 pounds by comparison a new civic weighs just under 3 000 pounds a lot of equipment has been added over the years with luxury features and safety features and new technology but this car had none of that it's a tremendously basic hatchback with only the essentials and the base model version of this car had only 92 horsepower so 108 was a treat the si also got a few other upgrades over the base civic which i will show you but it wasn't much one of them was a tachometer unfortunately the u.s market civic si wasn't quite as potent as the ones sold in japan which had up to 130 horsepower but this car was still pretty cool and today i'm going to check it out an incredibly rare preserved example of the ef civic si hatchback first i'm going to take you on a tour of this car and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a doug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the civic si with getting in and opening the door the weird thing here is the seat belt is mounted on the door and it's not one of those electronic seat belt systems that some cars had in this era it's just a normal seat belt but they put it on the door instead of on a fixed point on the car this is a very unusual thing certainly you don't see it that often and it seems kind of unsafe if you're in an accident the door flies open or off or maybe that's ridiculous but it still is just so strange to see a seat belt fully mounted on the door now the reason they did this is the door is massive relative to the size of this car in order to allow rear passengers to get in easier and so if they had mounted the seat belt further back you just wouldn't have been able to reach it so instead they put it there on the door what a strange place for it now one funny result of this seat belt door situation is that in the gauge cluster the warning light letting you know your seat belt is unbuckled is the same as the warning light letting you know your door is open because i guess they figure if the door is open the seat belt pretty much has to be unbuckled so why not combine it into one warning light honda was all about simplicity 30 years ago and i think that's funny the old door seat belt combo warning light and next up speaking of the seat belts and the seats the driver's seat has been changed in this car it's pretty much the only thing in this entire vehicle that isn't original but the passenger seat is original this is how the seat looked in the civic si it got a sportier more heavily bolstered seat than the regular civic to keep you in place when you were going around those sharp turns with your 108 horsepower now if you're wondering about the color of the seat and the interior in general well look no further than the passenger door jam where there is a decal that specifically says off black telling you precisely what color honda calls your interior imagine sticking an interior color decal like this in modern cars it would never fly it would look totally unprofessional but back then well your interior color was on a decal in your door jam it's just what they did but i'm getting a little ahead of myself here i want to go back to the door panel there are still a few quirks here worth mentioning for one thing this car has manual mirrors no surprise you have this little lever coming off the mirror and you just kind of adjust it to place the mirror exactly where you want this car also has crank windows so you crank the window and that's how it goes up or down pretty common of cars from this era especially a lightweight kind of basic hatchback like this one the reason i mentioned that though is this car has a power sunroof this little button to the left of the steering wheel you can press it and the sunroof automatically opens or of course if you press it in the other direction then the sunroof automatically closes electronically so it has a powered sunroof you can probably see why i think this is strange this car has manual windows but a power sunroof of course you'd think it'd be the other way around you use the windows a lot more frequently than the sunroof so you think you would want power windows and a manual sunroof but that's not what they did but a strange decision and also in that vicinity you have insanely simple sun visors over on the driver's side it is just a sun visor put it down that's all it is that's all you get over on the passenger side put it down you get a mirror but there's no light in there and the driver has no mirror at all it was a sun visor and nothing else and indeed that simplicity with the sun visors is carried over to basically everything in this interior nothing is more than it needs to be you look around this interior you can see everything is basic and simple there are no extraneous lines or style or design anywhere this car only has the necessities everything you needed and literally nothing more it was just a very simple car except the performance version of a very simple car and you can see in the middle this car still has the original radio which is really really impressive throughout the 90s everybody was swapping head units it was a common trend but the owner of this car kept this radio and you can see they called it the honda 1000 to really drive home the point of just how great it was you had a cassette player and six presets in the honda 1000 not bad now above the radio you have the climate controls and again very basic everything you need a dial and a few levers one interesting thing about the climate controls though there is a separate control for the driver to allow in outside fresh air for just the driver's vent to the left of the steering wheel this little vent only controls the driver's side vent for fresh air the other vents are all controlled by this lever in the center but for some reason that doesn't work for the driver's side one you had your own control maybe the only kind of extraneous thing in this entire car and next up another simple item in here in the center you have the clock which looks like all japanese car clocks in the 90s the thing i like is the clock adjustment you want to change the clock there's no menu or button on your turn signal stock you have to figure out instead you just put down this little door next to the clock and there are your buttons to change it but they're behind this door so that you don't accidentally change the clock you had a little clock button changer door pretty smart thinking also simple in this car the door locks you can see when they're unlocked they're red with a little arrow telling you which way to push it to lock it and then when you push it that way it says lock so you know it's locked they don't necessarily look all that good with the bright red and the word lock printed there but they're very functional that was the whole point also another notable item in here you can see the parking brake in the center and on either side there's a giant red warning label that says emergency release for seat belt is located on buckle uh yeah do they mean the press button we already knew that you didn't have to tell us honda and even if they mean something else what are we going to be in a crash and a fire and i'm going to read that and then try to figure out what they mean it's such a strange place for a bright red warning label but they've put it there on both the driver and the passenger sides and next up we move on to the back seat in the civic si and getting back here is surprisingly easy a large gap is opened up when you move the front seat forward there's just not all that much pillar or side crumple zone that you have to deal with so it's pretty easy to get in back even for someone pretty tall like me now as you might expect the back seat is also very basic and simple no surprise given what we've just seen up front but it is unusually basic and simple by modern standards for instance there's no headrest back here it's not that they've been removed they never existed in the first place that whole neck whiplash situation hadn't really been fully thought out by the time this car came out rear headrests were deemed not entirely necessary but beyond the lack of headrest there's more to talk about back here for instance there's a little storage cubby to the right of the back seat over from the passenger side where you can put stuff i mentioned this as interesting because there isn't a storage cubby on the left on the driver's side they've only put it on the right only one rear passenger needs to store stuff in the back of the civic si but my very favorite thing back here is undoubtedly the windows by modern standards these rear windows are absolutely huge massive things with no side impact beams or side air bags that have to go in here these windows can really really be huge and so the visibility is incredible back here you feel like you're in an open vehicle basically it's unbelievable how big these windows are i had forgotten how big late 80s early 90s cars had their windows you can see everything now another interesting item with these windows is that they open they don't roll down that would be impossible because the wheel is there but they do open out just a couple inches you can push them open and get a little vent and air come through the weird thing though is the latch for the windows is all the way back behind the cargo area so if you're actually sitting in the back seats you can't really reach the latch to open the back windows you have to do that through the cargo area before you start driving it's hilarious but at least they open a little bit there was some comfort provided for rear seat passengers and next up we move on to the back of the civic si where there are a few quirks worth noting but before i do that for one thing just again look at how much glass there is you can see from your angle there's just so much visibility in this car you can see so much it's really impressive especially by modern standards with rising window lines that make cars a lot harder to see out of but anyway on to the back of the civic si one thing you notice back here immediately is this light bar that goes across the entire back the center part doesn't light up it's just there for show but it does have a big light bar going across the entire car which was a big trend in the late 80s and early 90s and it's becoming a big trend again reminder that everything is cyclical but anyway you want to get into the cargo area in the civic hatch there's a little keyhole back here off-center just kind of sticking out not placed very thoughtfully but it's there this was honda in the late 80s and early 90s didn't have to look good it just had to be functional and work and indeed that does anyway you stick the key in you twist it and then it unlocks and you can open up the hatch and get into the back of your civic si anyway once you're back here you see a few interesting things one is this cargo cover which obviously keeps your stuff private when you have stuff back here and you park the car and walk away one cool thing about this cargo cover is it folds in half so you can put stuff in it and then fold it right back over to cover up your stuff a clever little honda civic si solution other interesting items back here one is you have a light but it doesn't come on automatically when you open up the hatch instead there's a little switch you have to turn it on so when it's dark and you want to get something out of your cargo area you open it up turn on the light like you would in your basement and then you can find it next up another notable item back here underneath the floor you can see this car has the world's most pathetic spare tire unbelievably tiny but of course that's all it really needed it wasn't exactly a very large car with very large regular tires either now one item especially worth noting there's not all that much space back here this is not an especially large cargo area nor an especially practical place for large items you can fold down the rear seats which helps but back here behind the seats there's not all that much room that's because this car is not all that big i told you before it only weighs 2 300 pounds and in terms of length it's about as long as a mini cooper today much shorter than a current honda civic but this is how they looked back then now with that said you do have a little extra storage space back here there's a little cubby next to the cargo cover where you can put stuff except why would you want to put anything there it's just going to bounce around when you're driving along and bounce right out of there but it exists and unlike the back seat it exists on the other side too so you have two extra shallow storage cubbies in back in case you want them for some reason and next up we move up front under the hood and the first thing you notice when you open the hood is this label up front and center proudly announcing that this car was built by honda of canada manufacturing incorporated that's right this vehicle which comes from kind of the heyday of early japanese cars was built in canada believe it or not honda was already building in canada by then but the canadians clearly did a good job with it since it's still on the road and of course the other important item under here is the engine the civic si had a 1.6 liter four-cylinder as opposed to the mere 1.5 liter engine in the other civics of its day now i mentioned earlier that the base model civic from this era had about 90 horsepower that wasn't strictly true there was a base base model civic with 75 horsepower but virtually nobody got that one most people got the 90 horsepower version or if you wanted performance you stepped up to the 108 horsepower civic si now 108 not a huge number especially by today's standards and it's a far cry from the current civic si with 205 horsepower but it was something it was the beginning of the performance civic by the way one other thing i like under here is this big label that says pgmfi and it makes you think it's some special new technology they've put in this engine to make it way better but then you look and it's actually stands for programmed fuel injection pgmfi programmed fuel injection it's not really anything special at all they've just given it a weird acronym to make it seem special nice work now beyond the engine i want to discuss some of the other upgrades that the civic si had over the standard civic now earlier i mentioned tachometer that was one of the benefits you got when you got the si you also got a clock in the interior the one i showed you before that was an option on the regular civic but it was standard on the si same deal with a passenger side mirror this was not mandated by the government at the time it was optional on this era of civic but it was standard on the s i the performance car needs two exterior mirrors now the other upgrades were more performance oriented than that one is larger wheels and these are those wheels most si models had hubcaps on top of these steel wheels but this was the steel wheel underneath a 14 inch wheel larger than the standard civic 185 width tires seems pretty pathetic by modern standards but that was the time period frankly as for the other upgrades civic si models also had front and rear anti-roll bars for a little better handling a little less body roll and they had the seats like i showed you before those slightly grippier heavily bolstered sport seats to keep you in place when you were flying around corners with your 108 horsepower and so those are the quirks and features of the 1991 honda civic si now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the civic si now one thing worth noting the civic si also had a larger exhaust compared to the standard civic the exhaust in this one was replaced so i didn't show it but uh that was another benefit over the regular model now one special thing about this car it does not have power steering manual steering now manual steering is often very annoying because it can get very heavy and cumbersome but in the case of this car it only weighs 2 300 pounds it's not really all that difficult and of course it contributes to a feeling of the road a lot more than cars with power steering well it isn't fast that is for sure certainly doesn't feel like a fast car but the thing about this car and the thing that makes this car cool is it feels like a fun car very little body roll because there's really not all that much body to roll and an unbelievable directness to the steering that just isn't really available in modern cars today it's so small and it's manual steering and it's so light you just feel like you're so connected to this car that term you know go-kart like a go kart it's so overused but this car has some of that feel to it um because it really is that size and that level of maneuverability now obviously you want to hear the story about how this car came to exist um the current owner is the second owner he bought it off the original owner who had bought it new in 91 owned it for years put 177 000 miles on it this is the nicest 177 mile car in the world uh and then it got to a point he got too old couldn't use the car anymore and the current owner found it it was like a family friend and he bought it from him obviously there's so few of these in this kind of condition around um that he understands kind of the specialness of it and and i implored him please keep it stock don't don't mod it like everybody else did in the 90s because these were really hot tuner cars back then and people modded them and street raced them and engine swapped them and that was fun and all that but now there's like none left except for this one this card does have a five speed manual uh which kind of surprised me considering how early it is the owner told me that the basic civics at the time had a four-speed um but that the size had a five-speed really i i love this car because it's just so simple and so basic and so to the point of what a hot hatchback should be i love the focus rs and the golf r they're great cars and they're very capable well-rounded vehicles but they've obviously lost the plot from sort of the original hot hatch thing now if you made a car like this today no one would buy it nobody wants a car with no features 2 300 pounds even enthusiasts who say they do you give them that in actuality they don't want to crank their own windows they don't want no air conditioning no power steering but it is cool to at least revisit that and kind of see what it was like where it started and to see how a 2300 pound car feels when you throw it around corners and drive it around that's neat and and that's enjoyable the closest thing to this car today is the fiesta st and it gets relatively close but it's amazing how different it still feels this car is just so much more basic and simple and connected to the road and you just feel like it's such an original simple hot hatch and i really really love that aspect of it this car is just fun even though it's not the fastest car in the world and so that's the 1991 honda civic si this isn't the fastest car nor is it the best equipped car in fact it's kind of the opposite but it is really cool and it gives us some insight into where the high performance honda hatchback started all of the ones that followed up to today's civic type r this is the older brother of all of them it is amazing to find this car in this condition and it was great to spend the day with it and now it's time to give this civic si a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the civic si is fine nowhere near beautiful it had a very functional design and it gets a 4 out of 10. acceleration 0 to 60 is 7.5 seconds which gives it a 1 out of 10 although i swear it feels faster handling is reasonably sharp but given the small tires and front wheel drive it's no sports car and it gets a 4 out of 10. fun factor is decent this car feels quick and tossable and exciting and it gets a 4 out of 10. cool factor is higher finding one of these in nice shape is totally crazy and i would freak out if i saw it it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 19 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features this car has only the basics and it gets a 2 out of 10. comfort is ok it's not particularly comfortable or plush and it gets a 4 out of 10. quality is fine these are known for long-term reliability but they aren't exactly nice or luxurious it splits the difference with a six out of ten practicality is also a bit mixed you have good cargo room for their size but they're small cars with small back seats and it gets a six out of ten finally value and this is a fun reliable honda that should be cheap but prices are going up the secret seems to be out for well-kept sporty older hondas and they're getting more expensive i suspect this would be approaching a 10 000 car at this point or it will be soon that gives it a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 24 out of 50. add it up and the doug score is 43 out of 100 which places it here against some sort of relevant cars i haven't reviewed any direct rivals to the civic si but i'm thrilled i had the chance to review this car it's absolutely impossible to find them in this condition anymore and it's amazing to experience and it's no wonder these older hondas are getting more valuable you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 908,252

Rating: 4.9151006 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: MUVnTqLA_b0

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Darkfire757]

It probably got stolen before he finished filming

[u/[deleted]]

I don’t know how Doug managed to find a clean, unmolested early 90s Civic. But the madman did it.

[u/acrspeed]

Inb4 $70k on Bring a Trailer Cars and Bids

[u/Zeeblackbaron]

The one thing that has really disappeared in newer civics is the amazing visibility and toss-ability these older ones had

[u/bostonwhaler]

The red seatbelt stickers was because they were intended to be buckled at all times... Even when the car is unoccupied. Obviously nobody did this.

Car makers had a choice in the early 90s... Either install an airbag, use the motorized shoulder belt, or this setup. GM N Body cars like the Grand Am did the same.

This is why you see that 2nd latch in the door jamb behind the window.

[u/myfunnyquarantine]

Those seatbelt "emergency release" decals were always perplexing to me. I think the idea is that you're supposed to leave the belt buckled all the time because opening the door gives you enough space to get out. Of course, nobody used them that way and for some reason I always have to help passengers find the belt buckle in my car. I guess it's better than those dopey electronic shoulder belts that were also around at the time.

[u/KashiTheKat]

this car's really cool, but good luck finding one that isnt either 1) rusted to death, 2) gutted + motor swapped, or 3) stolen

[u/Deinococcaceae]

I've been watching Doug's videos since he was doing 3 minute skits about grocery shopping in a Ferrari and I think this is the fastest I've clicked on a new upload.

[u/narfcake]

No storage cubby on driver's side rear because that's where the fuel filler is located.