Honda City comes with more safety features
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Safety has become the standard in the automotive industry, with automakers striving to provide more safety features to lure safety-conscious consumers. These safety features range from simple seat belts and crash beams to the more sophisticated anti- lock braking system (ABS) and air bags, to name but a few.
While top-of-the-line and premium cars can have the luxury of having all of the safety features available on the market, carmakers usually have to cut down on the more sophisticated safety features due to cost constraints in the lower market segments.
Amid rising demand for safety features on cars that won't break the budget, PT Honda Prospect Motor launched on April 24 the improved All New Honda City with additional safety features, making it virtually the safest car in its class.
The improvements introduced in the car include the provision of dual supplemental restraint system (SRS) air bags for driver and front passenger, as well as anti-lock braking system (ABS), electronic brake force distribution (EBD) and brake assist (BA) functions.
Previously, the All New Honda City was equipped with G-force control technology (G-Con), seat belt with pretensioner and load limiter and neck shock mitigation seat.
Apart from the enhanced safety features, there are no other additions to the All New Honda City.
The Honda City still uses an in-line, four-cylinder 1,500 cc engine with intelligent dual and sequential ignition (i-DSI) technology to enhance fuel efficiency, which is available in two transmission types.
Buyers can choose between the five-speed manual transmission or the seven-speed Steermatic automatic transmission with continuously variable transmission (CVT) technology.
Those who prefer the CVT automatic version can choose to operate their car in automatic transmission or manually right from the steering wheel.
With manual transmission the cost is Rp 158 million (US$18,300), while with automatic transmission the cost is Rp 168 million.
There are seven color options: eternal blue pearl, ice blue metallic, night hawk black pearl, royal ruby red pearl, satellite silver metallic, satin silver metallic and silverstone metallic.
The provision of advanced safety features in the All New Honda City makes it the safest car in the 1,500 cc sedan class, as other vehicles in the compact car segment do not come with such complete safety features.
Honda City's closest competitor, Toyota Vios, comes with ABS and EBD but without air bags.