I see Civics every day. There are lots of them that people use to get from point A to point B; different generations and in different shapes – some are shining and proudly showing off their body-lines, others eaten by the rust from the ground up.
But there is one thing that has always made Hondas stand from the crowd of similar Toyotas, Nissans, and countless Korean makes presently storming the market, and it is their engines. Tracing their heritage to the car and motorcycle racing, Honda continues to design its engines being more performance oriented, comparing to the other fellow Asian opponents.

It’s interesting that it is a rather common practice to use Honda’s souped-up engines in building one of a kind concept cars or racing fireballs. Have a look at the following example of this phenomenon.

What you see here is called Ariel Atom – which is nothing, but a student project of Nick Smart from the University of Coventry. This concept car is built around Honda Civic Type R power train and is ready to be driven on the common highways, though it doesn’t have the doors, or windows, neither stereo system or air conditioning.

I wonder, if you had asked yourself a question, as to why so many boutique companies that are capable of coming up with rare and exceptional sports cars choose the easy way and equip their creations with already known and widely used engines bought from the mainline manufacturers? Why in stead of coming up with an exclusive multi-cylinder engine, they instead weld together two Volkswagen V6s, for example?

And the answer to this is the resource and reliability of a well tested and time-proven engine that can not be beaten by exclusive, newly designed prototype engines. The same goes true in the case of the Ariel Atom – Honda’s Civic Type R engine has all the muscles, reliability and the output one may want, with none of the hassles. This popularized creation of the engineering craftsmanship produces 245 horse powers and 218 N·m of torque at 7,000 r/pm, utilizing Mugen parts, namely camshafts, exhaust and ECU. All this power derived from Honda’s engine allows Atom to reach 60 mph in just 2.9 s, with the maximum speed of 225 km/h.

So regardless what would be the choice of the prospective buyer – a fast and furious Civic or Accord Type R, a supercharged Honda-powered Atom, or a reliable and socially acceptable Civic, with Honda engines one can never go wrong!