2025 Honda Civic Si First Test: Sportier Isn’t Necessarily Quicker

Manual transmissions are becoming as rare as bipartisanship and civil discourse, so the fact you can only get a 2025 Honda Civic Si with a six-speed stick seems borderline miraculous. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Honda reckons buyers choose its stick even at a substantial cost to the car’s objective performance—both relative to the competition and to its less overtly sporty Civic Sport Hybrid stablemate. Should fun-minded enthusiast buyers be conflicted between a summer-tire-shod, be-spoilered Si and a quicker Hyundai ElantraN, VW Jetta GLI, or even a Civic Sport Hybrid?  

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Why It’s Important

Sticks may be rare in the market at large, but amidst the sport compact sedan class, they’re less so. The Civic Si’s two strongest competitors are the Hyundai Elantra N and the Volkswagen GLI (both of which also offer a twin-clutch automatic option). The competitors’ 2.0-liter turbo engines both outmuscle the Civic’s wee 1.5-liter 200-hp/192-lb-ft turbo four-cylinder, but each is stuffed into slightly larger and heavier bodywork.

So those cars form appropriate class bookends. All three cars wear their sporty intentions proudly in the form of spoilers, stripes, and red accents, with aggressive tires and wheels framing snazzy painted calipers. Measuring nearly 3 inches longer and 2 inches taller, the GLI’s 228-hp/258-lb-ft engine is just peppier enough to offset its 257 pounds of added pork, allowing it to eke out a slight performance advantage. At 7.0 seconds to 60 mph, it’s 0.4 second quicker than the Si, but the Civic catches it, crossing the quarter-mile mark in the same 15.4 seconds, albeit at a slightly slower 92.1 mph trap speed. Of course, the Elantra N smokes both the Honda and the VW, its 276-hp/289-lb-ft mill hustling it to 60 mph in a legit-quick 5.7 seconds, and a quarter-mile timeslip reading 14.3 seconds at 100.0 mph.

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Pros: What We Like

Honda delivers most of the straight-line performance of the VW with most of the handling prowess of the Elantra N in a somewhat nimbler package that beats them both for fuel efficiency, besting the GLI by 1 mpg across the board, and the Elantra N by 6–8 mpg. Chassis dynamics are impressive, with our Civic Si—equipped with the $300 high-performance tire option—outbraking the Elantra N by 6 feet from 60 mph, in a sports-car-like 102 feet. Max lateral grip from these aggressive meats was 0.94, a scant 0.02 less than the N. Its weaker engine means it laps our figure-eight course in the same 26.1 seconds the GLI needs, but with slightly higher average g’s, while the N runs nearly a second quicker.

And what about the Civic Sport Hybrid? It splits the straight-line acceleration difference between the Si and the Elantra N, hitting 60 mph in 6.1 seconds, en route to a 14.8-second quarter mile. But dynamically, its 256 extra pounds and less aggressive tires stretch stopping distance to 120 feet, dull lateral grip to 0.83 g, and stretch the figure-eight time to 27.3 seconds.

Let’s face it, nobody buys any of these cars hoping for a champagne shower on a winners’ podium. They’re more about feeling quick or sporty. Sure, drivers love the F1-style shift indicators that illuminate sequentially from yellow to red and the lightning-quick rev matching on downshifts in serious supercars. But they’ll really revel in the feel of the Si’s billet-aluminum shift knob, the action of the lever mechanism, and the mid-travel bite of the clutch.

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Cons: What We Don’t Like

That having been said, there’s a nonmonetary price to be paid for all these sporty feelz. The Civic Si’s ride is flinty—definitely crisper than the GLI’s; it’s about on par with the middle Sport mode of the N, and way less comfy than the heftier Hybrid. And at highway speeds, especially on certain concrete stretches, those tires sing like Corey Taylor in a Slipknot concert encore—hard to hear over and maybe worthy of a bit of ear-cotton.

And although we love the black and red interior with its all-digital instrumentation, we’re a little let down that Honda doesn’t leverage this technology to better differentiate the look of the instrument cluster in the different drive modes (Normal, Sport, and Individual). Subtle changes in background color are about all you get, and you may find yourself squinting to note even these differences. We’d also have appreciated some SRT-like performance pages on the infotainment screen.

The Bottom Line

We could easily justify choosing the Si over the roughly $3,000 to $4,000 pricier GLI or Elantra N on the basis of its sublime shifter and nimble dynamics, if not its superior reliability and resale value track record. But justifying an Si over the $1,200 cheaper Hybrid may take a bit more soul searching.