A story published yesterday on the GoAuto (Australian) website indicates that Honda may be prepping a new variant of the Civic platform for Asia/ASEAN markets. According to the article, since importing Euro Civics to the region would be prohibitively expensive due to currency exchange rates, Honda is said to be prepping a new lower cost hatchback version of the Civic that could be built in the region for a substantial cost savings.
The story suggests that this new iteration would be based on the current Civic sedan platform, which we would expect to mean that this version would likely be larger than the Euro Civic. To further speculate, we assume this car would lose both the "magic seat" feature and the Euro Civic's torsion beam rear suspension, presumably in favor of the independent multilink setup currently found in the rest of the Civic lineup. Even if this new version of the Civic is built, we're skeptical that we'd ever see it in the US unless hatchbacks suddenly turn "hip".
[Source: Temple of VTEC via GoAuto]
