The Honda CR-V Hybrid is a small hybrid SUV that we added to our long-term fleet and have spent the last year driving it around Southern California. In this video, Travis Langness from Edmunds reviews what it was like to live with the 2021 Honda CR-V Hybrid for the past year. Travis talks about all the things you should know about the CR-V Hybrid, including its mpg numbers, how it handles on the road, how comfortable the interior is, and so much more. The hybrid SUV market has exploded in recent years, and the CR-V Hybrid has been a popular choice for those looking for a compact SUV. But is it the right hybrid SUV for you and your lifestyle? We drove it for a year to answer this question and more. This is our long-term review of the 2021 Honda CR-V Hybrid.
The honda crv is the best small suv out there and it’s been that way for years how do we know well we rated one back in 2017 when it was redesigned we rated one at the top of its class and we wanted one in our long-term fleet to see if it could stand up to the test of time and wow us after a full year of ownership and continue to beat out vehicles like the mazda
Cx-5 and the nissan rogue and guess what after 40 000 miles we were still smitten with the crv leaving it at the top of its class so when honda released a hybrid version we wanted to test that too so we got one in our long-term fleet as soon as we could this is an suv that’s rated at 38 mpg combined by the epa that’s a big promise if you want to read all of
Our editors comments about the nitty-gritty details of life with the crv hybrid click the link in the description below that’s where you’ll find our whole long term fleet let us know in the comments what you think we should put in our long-term fleet next for a cash offer on your car today go to edmunds.com sell my car more than just seeing what the ownership
Experience was like this was a way for us to compare long-term fuel economy between the standard crv and the hybrid and also stuff like driving characteristics and cargo space so how did it do after 17 000 miles well let’s dive right in fuel economy in this vehicle is rated by the epa with all-wheel drive the only way it comes at 38 miles per gallon combined
40 in the city whoa and 35 on the highway unfortunately during our 17 000 miles of driving we didn’t even get close to those numbers we averaged around 30 miles to the gallon over all of that time and the closest we got to that 40 mpg rating was 36.5 that’s all we could manage even with a light foot with a mind towards fuel economy and driving in stop and go
City traffic that’s the best we could get now you compare that with our old long-term crv with the optional 1.5 liter engine it did much better 38.9 miles per gallon on a particular tank which is frankly much better and you don’t have to pay the cost premium of going up to the hybrid which is pretty expensive even on the ex trim level the base version of the
Crv hybrid it’s twelve hundred dollars more than the standard crb that’s a big difference that won’t pay off in fuel economy for quite a while the base trim for the hybrid is the ex trim level the lowest price you’re going to pay is around 32 000 the standard crv’s base trim level is called the lx and it’s about five grand less but the features don’t exactly
Line up between the two vehicles the ex hybrid you get all-wheel drive as standard and a number of honda’s driver aids like adaptive cruise control and forward collision mitigation but we wanted more so we went with the top of the line touring model it comes with stuff like a heated steering wheel wireless smartphone charging a hands-free power liftgate and
The optional 9 speaker stereo add all those options up and what do you get well including destination the price is around 37 000 now we can’t buy every single vehicle in our long-term fleet we run too many cars to make that a reality so we reached out to honda and they loaned us this one for a year which meant that there was no haggling over the price which was
Nice what was our crv like to drive well in the city it was fine pulling away from a light or in stop and go traffic feels like there’s plenty of power but on the highway it’s a different story several of our editors had complaints about the way the cr-v drove on the highway in terms of passing power and engine noise you really have to plan passing maneuvers
Well in advance at the edmunds test track it was pretty slow taking 8.6 seconds to reach 60 miles an hour and nearly 17 seconds to pass the quarter mile both figures are well behind our old standard cr-v and this is a bummer because in a lot of cases today hybrid versions are better to drive than the normal suv especially with vehicles like the tucson or the
Rav4 but it’s not so here we had really good experiences in the gas only version of the crv so we had high expectations for the hybrid and overall it didn’t let us down now on the highway it was pretty quiet and comfortable easy to drive except for when you went up long grades or went to make passes i mean there was a ton of racket from the engine and none of
That was accompanied by a lot of power it’s really unsatisfying then there’s the seats and the ride quality those are still top of the class just as we expected from the standard model honestly you could drive this vehicle for thousands of miles across the country as some of our staff members did and have no complaints about the seats of the ride they’re great
For drivers and passengers alike let’s talk about tech for a minute one of the honda’s biggest drawbacks is this center console mounted transmission controller button system difficult to learn at first and it’s hard to use in practice when you do things like a three-point turn for example or if it’s been a while since you’ve driven your cr-v you’re going to be
Fiddling with it for a while the buttons and the controls on the dashboard and the steering wheel they’re all well laid out and logical to use aside from the transmission unfortunately when it comes to the touch screen that’s going to take some learning as well some of the controls are buried in the menus and we’ve had poor performance over our year of ownership
In terms of connectivity and the screen just generally staying on it’s glitched out on us several times and multiple editors have had problems connecting their smartphones so you have to plug out plug in and sometimes reboot the whole system just to get it to work yuck tech features that you’d call driver aids forward collision warning adaptive cruise control
Blind spot monitoring those have been let’s say an issue for us on hondas of the past our long-term pilot our long-term passport our long-term ridgeline all had really sensitive driver aids luckily though the crv hybrid that didn’t seem to be an issue all of those systems worked well so we’d call that a win in our book one of honda’s best qualities is how well
They lay out interior space there are tons of cubbies and cup holders and pockets everywhere your smartphone your water bottles your soda cans everything is going gonna fit in this interior with space to spare and then cargo space is impressive too the standard crv leads its class in terms of cargo space and the hybrid isn’t far behind it only loses six cubic
Feet of cargo space which is like that much i think i don’t know it’s not that big of a difference and interior space for the passengers anyways isn’t affected by the hybrids batteries let’s see what our other editors had to say about the crv hybrid used that thing a bunch when we had it over the year we included you know taking my family on road trips hauling
Stuff just driving around town and it was great but but the problem was a lot of things that i liked about it were the things that were inherent with any survey so it’s the comfort of the space and when it came to the fuel economy which is the big reason why you buy the hybrids it was better but not a whole lot better and given some of the trade-offs uh that
We’re also talking about in this video i think overall it just really wasn’t worth it for me i drove the crv over 5000 miles on a road trip with my kid through the texas ice storm of 2021 the handling on this car outperformed my expectations considering the crazy weather we packed the back seat with clothing pillows a huge folding crate and i will say we had
Enough room in that back seat for my kid and all our stuff but she wasn’t too happy about the comfort during the long road trip said it wasn’t all that great however i was in the driver’s seat the entire time and i was very comfortable considering i did at least 16 hours each day i felt really good the 2021 honda crv hybrid did have a recall for seat belts but
It didn’t apply to our car specifically so no recalls to address which is a good thing maintenance was a pretty hassle-free part of the ownership experience at around 12 000 miles a service reminder popped up on our dashboard so we scheduled an appointment and went to our local honda dealership we like to go to the dealer to see what the ownership experience
Is like in this case it was super easy all we needed was an oil change and a tire rotation it took a grand total of 90 minutes and the total cost was 100 and 71 cents oh yeah and later on we got a nail in one of the tires and that cost us 40 bucks to repair so pretty easy overall so how much is our crv hybrid worth now well the only way to know for sure is by
Selling it or we can use the edmonds appraisal tool to get an approximate value and it puts in things like specific trim level condition mileage options and location after plugging all that in we were able to get a private party estimate of around 33 000 and a dealer trade-in value of around 31 000. now we are living in the weird used car price spike times so
Depending on when you watch this video your values may not be reflected in your appraisal did the crv hybrid live up to the promise of its gas-only twin brother is it the best vehicle in its class not really the cr-v hybrid has significant issues in terms of powertrain and fuel economy so in the compact suv hybrid class it falls behind the ford escape hybrid
And the hyundai tucson hybrid that’s not to say that the crv hybrid is bad it’s still good at what it does and if you spend a lot of time in stop and go traffic it’s certainly worth a closer look but if you’re given the choice between the hybrid and the standard model we’d go with the standard almost every time bye
Transcribed from video
2021 Honda CR-V Hybrid Review: One Year and 17K Miles in Our Honda Hybrid SUV | Long-Term Review By Edmunds Cars