So Many People Made This Baffling Mistake About Hondas When I Was Growing Up

I hope you don’t mind my using the vast and powerful megaphone that is the Cold Start platform to voice complaints and irritations of mine that are, at least, several decades old. This particular one is about, oh, 40-something years old, but I’ve never really discussed it with anyone. And now I’m wondering how pervasive it may be, or if anyone else felt this same thing? It has to do with Hondas from the 1970s and 1980s, and how people tended to read their badges.

I remember dealing with this a surprising amount as a kid, and it always kind of drove me nuts and baffled me, but the frequency it came up made it impossible to ignore. I’m deeply curious if anyone may already know what I’m talking about here?

I should just tell you. Save us all some time. Here it is: a shocking number of people in the 1970s and 1980s would read the CVCC badges on Hondas as “Civic,” even when the car was not a Civic.

Yes, that’s right. That collection of letters on the grille of that Accord, which, to be fair, do share 75% of the letters of the word “civic,” were almost always misread as “Civic.”

In case you’ve forgotten what CVCC means, and can’t refer to the CVCC diagram you have tattooed on your back, let’s just refresh. The letters stand for Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion, which is a sort of deliberately-obfuscating set of words to describe Honda’s revolutionary cylinder head technology that used a combustion pre-chamber to ignite the fuel-air mixture and cause a little vortex that then propagated into the main chamber, the result of which was an engine that burned so clean it didn’t even need a catalytic converter.

As you can imagine, Honda was very proud of their CVCC technology, so they put badges announcing it on all their cars that had it, like the Civic:

… and the Accord:

These CVCC badges on the Accord were almost always read as “Civic,” as crazy as that sounds, since it does not say “Civic.” I remember other kids doing this, and adults, too, and as a car-obsessed kid at the time, it drove me bonkers. I remember having arguments with people about what was an Accord and what was a Civic and people pointing to the CVCC badges and telling me “see, it’s a Civic!”

Am I alone here? Does anyone else remember this phenomenon of lazy reading? Is it just me? I hope not. I suppose this also says something about how similar Civics and Accords were in general styling, outside of scale. I mean, they never looked that alike to me, but for people who don’t really give a shit about cars and live those sorts of empty lives? I guess they did.

Anyway, if anyone remembers anything similar happening, please, let me know!