You are looking at an honest-to-goodness Honda Integra, available for sale soon to our friends in China. It goes on sale later this year, and GAC Honda is taking reservations right now. But you certainly have questions, as did we when we saw this announcement. This is most decidedly a different animal than the impending acura integra for North America. So what exactly are we looking at?
Clearly, the basis of the GAC Honda Integra is the new (and excellent) 2022 Honda Civic sedan. GAC Honda doesn’t sell the current Honda Civic, although another Honda joint-venture, Dongfeng Honda, does. GAC does sell the Accord, the slightly larger-than-Civic-sized Crider, and the Life (Fit). That leaves some white space in the lineup for the sportier Integra to slide into GAC’s lineup.
The GAC Honda Integra features an unusual and aggressive front bumper design, with nearly horizontal stylized inlets in the corners and a sharper hood overhang that gives the grille and headlights an inset appearance. Smaller, sportier taillights have thinner elements that sweep onto the rear decklid, which also gets a small contrasting spoiler. Blacked-out brightwork and a sporty dual exhaust complete the picture.
We don’t know much about what’s inside, but the decklid badge promises turbo power, and GAC Honda promises a manual transmission to match “users’ expectations with pure control performance.” Sounds good to us.
We don’t think you should expect any of GAC Honda’s specific styling changes to come stateside on a sportier U.S.-market Honda Civic, but the whole thing does give you a general sense of what a sportier 11th-generation Civic could look like. And if you’re bristling at the idea of the Integra nameplate being slapped on what amounts to a lightly-altered Civic Sedan, you really shouldn’t. The Integra was born out of the Honda Quint Integra, heavily based on Civic mechanicals but hotted up a bit with a DA16A1 DOHC I-4. This GAC Honda Integra is, in one sense, a back-to-basics Integra. And it’ll be very interesting to compare it to our North American acura integra once that model lands.
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