The Honda CR-Z takes the cake

They say that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

At first I struggled with that idiom. I mean, what is the point of having a cake if you can’t eat it. But if you read it as, “You can’t eat your cake, and have it too,” it becomes a lot easier to understand, because once you have eaten your cake, it is quite obvious that you can no longer have it. Unless you’re Janet Napoles. Then it doesn’t even have be your cake or pork, you can pig out as much as you like and keep it too. But I digress.

Plundering aside, the phrase basically shows us the impossibility of having something both ways, if those two ways conflict. Like pork and peace, corruption and progress, power and economy.

It has always been a given that fuel economy and performance tug on opposite sides of the rope. Yes, you can have both––just not at the same time.

To illustrate the point, Honda set up a particular challenge that they take around the world using their all-new CR-Z. Unlike other media challenges that require the fastest time of the day, or those fuel economy challenges that ask you squeeze out unsustainable figures by driving like a pedestrian, the CR-Z challenge requires you to do both simultaneously.

With that, members of the motoring media were all asked to take two CR-Z models (Manual and CVT) out on the Batangas Racing Circuit last Tuesday, August 6, for three timed laps of the 3.4km track and given a maximum of 13 minutes to achieve the best balance between performance and economy in a very unique wheel-to-wheel challenge. Points are given for each finishing position both in fastest time and in fuel economy in the same scoring system used in F1, then added together to find the winner.

In other words, you could gun it and nail 1st place in the lap time, and then just hope you get maybe a 6th place or so in economy, while the 1st placer in economy gets, say, 7th in speed giving you a higher total score. In the case of a tie, the winner would be the one who achieved a better fuel consumption figure. So whether you favor speed over economy, or the reverse, the winner would be the one who could make them converse. Got it?

The driver in me automatically favored speed. I followed the shift light of the CR-Z manual and used momentum as much as possible. Maintaining a fast line with the least resistance was crucial if I wanted to save fuel and not pay for it on the stopwatch, and the responsive steering and agility of the CR-Z made it quite easy to do just that.

However, as easy as it may sound, the CR-Z is not an easy car to drive slow as it is always willing to play, leaning into the corners expecting to be flogged, and is as disappointed as a Labrador whose owner refuses to throw the ball for when it is not.

Slow is relative, however, as I would reach double apex corners at 70 km/h and 100 km/h down the main straight. It only feels slow when you are driving something that was born for so much more. Yet despite never coming within a politician’s promise near the limits of the CR-Z, I was as white-knuckled as any race I’ve ever been in, simply because of the stress of trying to balance the speed and economy in what I visualized to be a cup of water sitting on my hood that I wasn’t allowed to spill.

Warning: Shameless plug alert.

In the end, not only did I achieve the fastest time of the day, Honda also announced during the awarding that it was the first time in the world that a competitor in this challenge had gotten both the fastest time as well as the best economy figure of the day, which may sound too good to be true, but it proves that with the power of dreams, you can have your cake and eat it too.