2017 Honda CRV in Malaysia! An owner's review

After years of driving an old car, I finally decide to change. And having a small family, I was eyeing a SUV. Last year, we were considering a Mazda CX5 because of its exterior look but after inspecting it in a showroom and then sitting on a Honda CRV, we have no doubt that Honda was the choice to go. Our decision was simply based on how spacious the interior cabin of the CRV is compared to the CX5.

Symbolic - inside a new CRV, looking at a billboard about the new CRV

And so, we have to decide whether to get one early this year or wait for the new CRV which was supposed to launch in May 2017 (well, that was before Honda Malaysia decided to delay the launch date after Raya). What made me wait for the new model was that the sales agent told me that the new CRV will have a new engine and Apple CarPlay! Being an Apple fan, as you can tell from this blog, I definitely wanted CarPlay. We dropped a deposit with the showroom sales agent in April.

I waited patiently and when Honda finally launched the car on 12 July, the wife and I went to the showroom for a look. What a beautiful and gorgeous car! On the frontal view, the car has a "fierce lion" look.. very sporty and very "garang"! From the back view, it has a much more pleasant symmetry as compared to the previous generations, likely due to the fact that the tail lights span across to the back tail gate.

We immediately told the sales agent to processed our "application" and we chose the 1.5 Turbo Charge variant. In less than two weeks, we collected our car! There are a few key differences between the 4th gen and 5th gen CRV - it comes with a price, of course - almost RM$20K difference mainly because Honda had a sale for the 4th gen where they gave an additional $8K discount.

So, what does the extra $20K get you?

1. a new turbo charge engine! A 1.5TC has a 193 horsepower vs the old 2.0 engine which gives you around 180hp. This itself is worth the price differentiation, to be honest. A state of the art engine technology - fuel efficient, powerful, low litre (so, roadtax is cheaper)

2. a digital dashboard behind the steering wheel. You see a digital speedometer and RPM. You also get a preview of your engine condition, fuel efficiency, current songs playing, who is calling you on the phone. I have always envied Civic's digital speedometer when it was first introduced a few years ago and at that time none other Honda models have this. Even last year's Accord didn't have a digital speedometer, if I am not wrong.

Oh ya, did you see the curve white light above the RPM? The first outline in the photo below? It turns green when you are driving on a highway to signifies fuel efficient driving. It is now white because I have been accelerating and decelerating (in traffic) and that means it is not efficient fuel consumption (cool, right?)

My digital dashboard is set to display song name and album art.
Not sure if you can see the pretty songstress, Beverly Craven.

The Dashboard is fully configurable. I like how minimalist I can make it by removing everything - even the tachometer.

3. CarPlay... omg! You gotta really see how beautiful 7" screen is with all the familiar high res Apple icons! This is a retina equivalent display of a car infortainment system that I have ever seen. Even 4th gen CRV's display screen feels like a low res, non-retina ready screen! With CarPlay, you get Siri, Apple Music, your Contacts and calls, Apple Maps (ugh! Not good), Podcast of your choice (mine is Overcast) and Audible.

Note: there is no CD player, so some might be disappointed. But there are enough USB ports around for you to plug in a USB stick with thousands of songs to play.

Note again: there is also no Garmin navigator built in, which the previous gen CR-V has. Plus 1 to previous gen! They expect you to use Waze (Android Auto) or Apple Maps (CarPlay). 

Seriously, who did not think that CarPlay is an eye grabber?

4. 18" rim and wheels. That's already a very impressive set of Toyo wheels. Oh, even the spare tyre is not something low end. The spare tyre is also a Toyo 18" just like the four ones that driving the car. Some say that 18" is going to cost you a bomb.. ok, that is true.. but Honda recommend to change tyres every 4 years (in their manual), so 4 years to save up, I guess :) After a week of driving around and just seeing the car as compared to other SUV, I think the 18" made the 2017 CRV more sporty, very presentable and feel like a Cayenne-like class of SUV. I believe Honda made a great choice to go with 18" tyres for the CRV.

5. Both the driver and passenger seat has those cool motorized latches that adjust your seat's height, move it forward and backward and leaning. The 4th gen CRV only provide this for the driver seat while the passenger seat is still manual.

6. Walk Away Lock - this feature took some getting used to but after two days, I am totally comfortable with it. It's as simple as once you exit the car, you hear a beep, which means that all doors are closed properly. As you walked a further 150cm away, another beep happened, which means that the car auto locked! You don't have to worry about locking. Of course, if you needed to lock manually, a light touch and hold to the door handle will trigger a manual lock.

7. Automatic Brake Hold - I am not sure if the 4th gen CRV have this feature or not, if anyone can help verify, that will be great but boy, another super quality of life feature that I have been missing. This feature is very useful in Malaysia especially if we get stuck in traffic jam or our route has many traffic lights. When this is turned on, when you reach a traffic light and you stopped, you can relief your leg by taking it off the brake pedal. The Automatic Brake Hold will hold the car. And when the light turn green, you press accelerator and just go. No need to engage the parking brake. And when you stopped again in the next traffic light, you just let go of the brake and the system will hold the car again. Super convenient.

When turned on, the dashboard showed the message briefly and them it disappear. An indication on the lower right (beside the fuel indicator) will lit up, showing that Auto Brake Hold is in place.

8. Front sensor - ok, most modern cars have the back sensor and video when you reverse park. This 5th gen CRV has two front sensors to detect if your front will hit any object when you are near them. While there is no video for the front, the warning, in the form of a outline of a car, does show up side by side to the reverse sensor video on the 7" screen (when you are reverse parking, you also need to watch your front) or .. if you are just going forward to park, the front sensor took up the whole screen.

The front sensor in action. The cone of coverage is quite large.
The second bar from the left is red because of a leaf from my plant in my flower pot

The reverse camera. In addition though, it has the outline of the car (to the right)
which will also alert you of anything behind and in the front of the car. Excellent design choices!

There's also the usual stuff that both gen CRV have - auto cruise, LED headlamps, rear view video (for reversing), spacious trunk, 5 seater (he he he), lots of compartments for drinks on all the doors, 6 air bags (nice!!); buttons on the steering wheels for cruise controls, infotainment and phone calls; Econ button for economy driving which will automatically adjust your engine and climate; And god knows what else!

Seriously, this car is going to be a best seller for Honda. I agree with the sales agent when he told me that Honda didn't skimp in this gen CRV. They gave all out especially on the interior. It's easy to to think that way, that it is all interior add-on, but don't forget that the 1.5TC engine is a major thing as well. I am just not a technical driver to tell you what is so great about the engine but I feel that this is as good as a new tech engine you can get, aside from Hybrid - but yeah, it is a major thing for Honda to also change the engine in this gen.

Update 1-Oct-2018: guys... Waze in CarPlay.. This is awesome!

Secondly - I have driven this car for almost 15 months - and it is still a superb car. I have zero issues with it. I am happy (and maybe lucky as I have also heard some not so good news from forum) about this car and I'd recommend to anyone. I think this is a very popular car. So when the volume of cars on the road is a lot, definitely you hear more issues but perhaps the issues affected only a very small percentage of the car - it's because there's so many of them on the road (quantity), that you may have the impressions that the problem is common. I assure you it is not.

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Learned a new tip - the volume switch on the steering wheel is touch sensitive, meaning you can slide up and down on it with your finger to increase or decrease the volume. Nice!