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!
CVCC stands for consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant, like in my vocab lessons at the time. I never knew why that was relevant…
Here in Canada we got both regular and CVCC versions.
IIRC regulars were lighter, more responsive and cheaper than the fancy stratified charge version. I believe the CVCC engine met US emission specs., whereas the standard did not.
I cannot remember the misspelling phenomena taking hold, here the first Monday in August is Civic Holiday and I’ve never seen it spelled CVCC.
The rally guys thought the CVCC engine was superior.
Maybe just potentially quicker?
It was faster only if you used a 8 valve head from a Canadian Market Honda on a CVCC block as the alternative was an aluminum 1200 engine that made the Vega’s engine look reliable…
I’m pretty sure they were fans of the CVCC but I never learned details.
I think the more serious were using the charge to fire a heavier fuel load, so some sort of serious mods going on.
I never pursued it since I didn’t own one, but the fans made me consider the car.
I thought the CVCC engine disappeared fairly quickly in USA though?
Re Vegas, I know a highly skilled mechanic that raced Vegas.
They were using a Mercedes casting technique, but getting a percentage of castings wrong.
He vetted blocks and snapped up good ones, and he said they all needed better cooling.
Had an original Civic CVCC as well as a CRC CVCC and never had anyone refer to it as anything but a Civic or CRX. A couple of friends had Accords with the CVCC engine and the experience was the same. Course I live in Canada so your kilometerage may vary.
When I was younger, (early ’80s) nobody really bought import cars in my town due to the nearest foreign car dealerships being hours away. Everybody drove Fords, GM products, or Dodges, with the occasional AMC vehicle thrown in the mix. The first Hondas and Toyotas I saw had out-of-state plates. American cars also only had engines that were identified by cubic inches of displacement… 250s, 292s, 302s, 305s, 350s, 454s, etc.
So my mistake with the early Hondas was that I thought CVCC meant it had 105 CCs of displacement. I was only a kid, so I did not know metric-imperial conversion formulas back then. I didn’t know 105 CCs was only about 6-1/2 cubic inches.
OT, but Suzuki Kizashi (“something great is coming”) is the automotive nomenclature walk-off homer. (ItsStillRealToMeDammit.gif)
I have a ’78 Civic CVCC. At shows, I get folks that walk up to the car, look right at the CVCC on the grille ( no Civic badging up there ) and say with some uncertainty “Civic?” as if their brain read it as Civic, but maybe threw a parity error indicating a bad read and thus were not sure.
Most of the time, they just pass right over that until I point out what’s special about the CVCC, at which point they’ll sometimes mention their mistake.
I just get rolled eyes whenever I attempt to explain anything more complicated than rocks or gravel.
They are fantastic little cars. I owned several Civics, way back when: a ’74 1200, two ’78s and a ’79, and later an ’80 wagon. The current corral includes a ’95 4-door Civic. So much goodness!
I owned a few bought from customers when they gave up on them, one at only 40,000 had blown two engines from a cracked block. The cars were garbage that rusted out in just a few years…
More than a few people believed it was Honda misspelling CIVIC. They said so, out loud. I wept.
This is a pretty serious mistake to make. After all, it’s the difference between a Honda and a Honda:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54487942493_267adb2d15_h.jpg
My parents subscribed to car magazines and owed a 77 Accord so I always understood it as CVCC and never heard otherwise.
OTOH I have heard some amazing mispronounciations of Takeuchi, the excavator and skid steer maker. I cannot figure out how someone gets Takahoochie from that
As the only “Car Nerd” among my friends when I was young (still the biggest “CN” among them today) I ran into this sort of ignorance all the time. I still cringe at the memory of my friends pronunciation of the Pontiac Grand Pricks.
The funniest ones were the Buick names. Hearing people say “Luck urn” or “Ren duh vuss” made that urge to corect them rise in me. The one I never understood was the Chevrolet Cavalier. People always said “Cava lyer” for some reason.
I was always particularly tickled by some insisting at an acquaintance/relative/whatever had a cherry 454 hemi Buick/Olds/Mercury.
When I was a kid my dad had a ’75 Civic CVCC and my uncle had a ’76 Accord CVCC and I never heard anyone mistake the “CVCC” badge for a “Civic” badge. That being said, I could see it happening with so many crossover letters.
I bought a ’78 Accord LX as my first car, and I had never heard of it before.
I was such a car nerd that I had no problem keeping CVCC separate. The non-CVCC Civic came out at least a few months before the CVCC technology was put into play. Whether it was some clever bit of marketing wordplay or coincidental, I’ll never know. I do remember as a layman, it was a fairly big deal when it came out, and I’m guessing quite the eye-opener for Detroit and perhaps the rest of the automotive world. But I would enjoy reading what insiders of all types thought/felt when the CVCC-equipped Civics (and subsequently, Accords) were introduced.
I had a friend who got a ’74 5-door hatchback Civic in some sporty trim and it was a hoot to drive. It was faster and did pretty much everything better than my ’68 Datsun 510. And I wish I could have afforded a first gen Accord back then. The dashboard was clean and elegant.
I eventually bought a Gen 3 Accord sedan and loved it. And I’ve now got a Gen 9 from the last year the 3.5L V-6 was available. There were some interesting cars and pickups (and a couple of motorcycles) in between.
Aye but how did the CVCC engines hold up over time?
Could you get 200,000+ miles out of them?
My friend with the CVCC Civic was well on his way at ~150,000 miles and got T-boned, killing his girlfriend. Sorry to be grim there.
And getting much past 150K in an economy car was a non-zero achievement back then. At least domestic (US) ones. Ahem, Vega.
My friend and her girlfriend accidentally pulled out in front of a Ford Ranger causing a T-bone accident because the sun was in her eyes. [this happens twice a year, usually causing an accident.They had their seat belts on yet both died. The Ranger drove home leaking a bit of coolant…
My sympathies. That sucks. Always. When someone dies, especially from unnatural causes, so much pain ensures.
I have an insurance gizmo that enables a discount, dings me for making an extraordinarily hard braking event when I nail the brakes to avoid taking out a pedestrian wearing all dark clothing at night.
Some MAGA people who might know a little bit about Darwinism, may think that I should have hit them, remove them from the gene pool and maybe the welfare rolls, but I’ll take that over killing someone.
I had a ’83 Civic that I traded at 205k, but I’m not sure if it was the CVCC engine or not. It was the high-mpg 1300FE model.
You could get 200 miles out of a Honda if you replaced or rebuilt the engine at least once. They were garbage, but I bought a few of them cheap from customers who gave up on them, until I bought a decent car, a new 1986 Ford Escort Pony for $4800 or about the average total cost of repairing a Honda until the owner gave up on it…
We didn’t get the CVCC heads on Hondas in Canada. I guess our emissions standards were more lax back then….I remember as a nerdy-future-engineer reading all about the tech and then being disappointed when we didn’t get it.
Are you sure? My old neighbour had a 1st or 2nd gen wagon that had the CVCC badge on the grill. Now being that he was a retired college auto instructor who also had something like 15 cars he may well have imported it because he was very into different auto technology. Or just got the grill as a replacement.
My comment comes from personal experience – My 1977 Accord and my GF’s 1978 Civic both didn’t have CVCC heads (both blew their head gaskets at some point), nor did my mother’s 1981 Civic. Other family members then owned mid ’80s Hondas (’84 CRX and ’85 Prelude) that also didn’t have CVCC heads.
Honda might have snuck a couple of CVCC models in that I wasn’t exposed to, but I was pretty into Hondas at the time.
I also remember seeing some cars with CVCC badges but from what I remember they were US cars.
I’m pretty sure we also didn’t get the MCA-Jet heads on the Mitsu 2.6 in Canada – at least not on the captive import Chrysler cars. Can’t be sure on the minivans and K cars.
Oh wow! I haven’t thought of MCA-Jets in oh, five decades now, Ha!! Never owned one, but I remember reading about them in the car mags. Thanks!!
We did, a good friend had one from new in a challenger.
Interesting – what year? I had a 1978 Challenger and it didn’t have the MCA Jet head or the exhaust manifold mounted cat like the one on the Dead Dodge Garage Youtube channel has.
It was so long ago I cannot recall. It might also have been a Sapporo. I do recall that it was gold in color with Herb Tarlek jacket seat material. Nice little car although a little cramped for my extra large frame.
I remember checking out the engine compartment because it had the mcajet emblems and the gear head engineer in me had to check it out.
The CVCC engines made less power than their non-CVCC counterparts. So it really only made sense to have the CVCC engine in places where it was needed… like in CARB states.
For example… the Honda ED engine was the CVCC version of the EC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_E_engine
The EC made 64-75hp depending on the application.
The ED only made 52hp.
But having said that, there were CVCC Hondas that made it to Canada as I recall seeing them.
I owned from new a 75 Civic and a. 85 CRC with CVCC engines and I am from Canada.
I wonder why the CVCC technology isn’t used to this day.
Honda was clearly demonstrating how well CVCC technology by adapting Chevy 350 V8 engine and proving it worked on any engine, number of cylinders, and displacement…
CVCC was a clever way to improve combustion efficiency and reduce the unburned hydrocarbon (HC) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, which were the first exhaust pollutants to be regulated. Increased turbulence from the flow out of the prechamber improved combustion to more fully oxidize the fuel. But once NOx emissions were regulated, CVCC did nothing since NOx is generated by the high temperatures of combustion. That’s when the three-way catalyst came into use – the NOx oxidizes the HC and CO in its reaction to be reduced to N2 and H2O. Discovering catalysts that could cause that reaction was a world-changing moment for engine exhaust.
Since CVCC couldn’t control NOx emissions and since the three-way catalyst used the HC and CO in the exhaust as part of the NOx control, Honda didn’t need to carry on with CVCC – simplified the cylinder head design and improved engine efficiency (prechambers have lots of heat loss to the coolant, so they reduce fuel efficiency).
Doesn’t make CVCC any less innovative, and the bit where Honda modified a GM V8 to demonstrate that their technology wasn’t just for “cheap Japanese motors” was awesome.
Thanks!
Honda did try to extend the technology for a couple of years in the City, Prelude, and Accord with the CVCC-II, which used both CVCC and a catalytic converter. By this time, though, the success of Honda’s PGM fuel injection introduced in 1982 was clearly the path forward.
Damn, I love the comment section here. This should be up for COTD.
The CVCC engines only met pollution regulations for a few years before polluting more than a pre-emissions engine. It had a few dozen vacuum hoses, a thermo-reactor that failed and was basically a crappy cars when compared to a Corolla, Pinto, Escort or similar car of the day…
I’m pretty sure Maserati and several motorsport grade engines use a modern interpretation of CVCC. I believe the modern rationale is to improve combustion efficiency to improve emissions and keep temperatures in check for high output motors. The example that comes to mind first is the Maserati Nettuno V6 with its pre-combustion chamber ignition.
Prechamber ignition systems help a lot when you’re doing a high power density, high RPM engine. As power goes up, you run into knock and the solution is to retard spark timing. But the crank angle duration of combustion stays the same regardless of spark timing, so as you retard timing you increase the temperature of the gases when the exhaust valve opens. The now-dying solution was to run rich so the extra fuel would cool the chamber (since it’s just a bunch of thermal mass that doesn’t burn) but that’s not ok under EU emissions rules and is strictly proscribed for US rules. If you can make combustion faster then you can retard spark timing more and keep everything happy.
Prechamber ignition speeds up combustion by effectively making a huge “spark zone” when ignition occurs – the jets of partially combusted fuel/air coming out of the prechamber ignite large volumes of the mixture, and combustion duration gets far shorter. Lets you push load higher, retard spark more, and get more power.
It brings lots of engineering challenges and doesn’t really get you anything for a more pedestrian engine design, which is why you don’t see it showing up on mainstream engines. But it’s a powerful tool for the performance market.
CombustionResearch name checks out 🙂
I’ve read that one of the downsides of CVCC back in the late ’70s was the need for a mechanical fuel pump, which guarantees the engine is getting the proper amount of fuel based on camshaft position. I forget why the electric fuel pump didn’t work for this system, but since the rest of the industry had already moved toward much cheaper electric pumps there was little interest in going back to mechanical pumps.
As for the general stratified charge concept, it certainly persisted. Jaguar used a the concept to create its V12 HE in the 1980s, which was done purely for fuel economy. And VW Group has adopted it for a wide variety of engines. But the fuel pressures are much higher and require more expensive injection components. There’s also usually the need to combine both direct and port injection to reduce contaminant buildup on the intake valves and, in the case of Nettuno, reduce the NVH effects of very rapid combustion rates.
I’ve got a ’78 Civic 1.5l CVCC and there’s an electric fuel pump back by the tank and no mechanical pump on the motor. AFAIK, there’s no special timing with fuel delivery based on camshaft position. I haven’t had the car for too long ( a year ) but I work on it myself and I don’t recall seeing anything about that in my shop manuals.
Check out the parts listed on RockAuto, there’s an aftermarket inline electric pump shown, but also an OEM style electric pump. https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/honda,1978,civic,1.5l+l4,1167645,fuel+&+air,fuel+pump,6256
What is unusual about the air/fuel delivery is that there’s a special three barrel carb, with a special tiny barrel that runs super rich ( I’ve heard 4:1?) through dedicated passages in the intake to the tiny valve in the CVCC chamber. That rich mixture is used to light off the lean ( again, I’ve heard 20:1 ) for the other, normal intake fed by the other two conventional carb barrels.
You’ve got a unicorn there. Preserve and cherish it. Around here they have all returned to their constituent elements or have been recycled into manhole covers.
All my CVCCs had an electric fuel pump, mounted under the back seat.
Because you haven’t been able to get parts like a ball joint or water pump for an early Honda Civic CVCC from Honda since they were 7 years old…
Ah, I have forgotten about the Jaguar “Fireball” V12 engine.
To be VERY pedantic, this is inaccurate – it’s 75% of the letters of “CVCC” (CVC) that is shared with “CIVIC”. What percentage of the word “CIVIC” is shared would depend on whether you’re counting every individual letter separately (in which case it would be CVC out of CIVIC, 60%) or only unique letters (CV out of CIV, 66.67%).
Pedantry aside, yeah I’ve definitely heard CVCC referred to as Civic.
For those of us who wisely recognize subtractive notation as a later abomination inflicted upon otherwise perfectly fine Roman numerals, CVCC = 305 and CIVIC = 207, so, at a value of 205, the shared letters CVC constitute slightly more than 99% of CIVIC. That form isn’t a word in Latin on its own anyway, so quite clearly the only reasonable interpretation of it is arithmetical.
Tangentially related, but similarly worthy of discussion…
Japan has its own language, complete with its own character set.
Yet every single model, even those never destined for export, has an English-language name, spelled out in the Latin/English alphabet, on their badges.
Who can explain it?
And phonetically in Katakana.
They secretly yearn for all the Freedom we have. /s
I remember reading something about this a number of years ago. It was from an interview with a Japanese auto exec (CEO?) but I’m foggy on the details.
The gist of it was automobiles weren’t a traditional Japanese “thing”, they were a concept that was (ironically enough) imported into their culture. As such, they did what they typically do with things like this and adopted the norms of the foreign originators.
Since the cars that were first introduced to them didn’t have Japanese language branding on them, the stuff they produced didn’t get Japanese language branding either. (The implication was that if any of the first cars had come over with Japanese language branding, we’d see it on all of their cars today.)
That was basically the takeaway from that part of the discussion. If anybody has any more specific info about it, I too would love to hear it.
Japanese people think English is cool. Same reason they wear shirts with (often nonsensical) English writing that they can’t read or understand.
Much like westerners will tattoo nonsense Chinese and Japanese characters onto their bodies.
“why do you have soup tattooed on your buttocks?”
Mine actually translates as –
‘NO TRANSLATION’
https://frinkiac.com/video/S14E03/i9AnLgNufLa0ZJJQB6Ud0clf1Bs=.gif
I asked about this long ago! And have an answer! https://web.archive.org/web/20130917042111/https://www.jalopnik.com/why-japanese-cars-only-use-english-badges-1170502981/
Interesting, thanks!
This brings up one of my pet peeves: “Civic” should either be pronounced “kivik” or “sivis.” It’s just common sense to pronounce one letter the same way at both the beginning and the ending of one word.
We should just get rid of ‘C’ entirely exsept when used in the ‘ch’ sound.
What’s your baseline for Vaseline? Sean Bean would like to know.
Great point, though I may have to queue this up for some rough thought while sitting on my butt sipping champagne on my yacht, but I probably won’t because I lack the will.
I’ll probably just spend the time wondering why the word abbreviation is so long.
English is strange.
And no, I don’t actually have a yacht – it’s just another one of those words that doesn’t look like it sounds. But hey, c’est la vie (just to drag French into this).
Hyphenated
Non-hyphenated
Oh, the irony!
I was just a kid and a friend of the family bought one. We all called it the CVCC thinking that was the model. I remember he used our garage once to do a brake job and we were all amazed at how tiny everything was compared to our big American boats. Brake pads were the size of a business card.
And you had to take the front suspension to a machinist to replace the rotors as they were pressed on…
I didn’t know that but it sounds about right from a company that continued to do stupid things with rotors. My 94 Accord has captive rotors.
My pedantic, engineer father taught me to be a pedantic engineer from a young age, so I learned what the CVCC stood for immediately from him and never confused it for Civic. However, my friends all did, to which I would immediately correct them and then pray they would decide to be my friend again at a later point in time.
Reminds me of playing with my older cousin’s game boy and to me, “DOT MATRIX WITH STEREO SOUND” meant “DON’T MESS WITH STEREO SOUND”
Had me freaked out that touching the volume slider would break it.
broken link but y’all know what the OG game boy looked like
All I remember was being confused about why it had that non-word on the grille. I knew about GTs, RSs, and all the typical letters companies added to cars to make them sound fast or fancy, but I was pretty sure CVCC was too long and unsexy to be that.
I blame the CVCC = Civic phenomenon on typoglycemia.
Tihs is a raelly itnrestnig cpalabity of teh hmuan barin.
I definitely jumped to the conclusion that this was a Civic submodel of the Accord, something like how the Supra was introduced as the Celica Supra or more peripherally the the Datsun models that were “by Nissan”. I knew that there was a separate Civic, and that the “i” was missing, but that was the best way I could make it work in my seven year old brain.
I feel seen.
I agree. How the heck do people say “look Civic!” when it was obviously CVCC, it has no I’s! It’s like that one scene from Inside Out where the pink elephant dude reads a sign and says,” See, D-A-N-G-E-R. Shortcut!” and then proceeds to run right into the danger and nearly die. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/40894455-186c-4e96-b0d4-7cda17671394