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Remember 1972? Stewart and Fittipaldi jostle for the Formula One world championship, 22 bombs batter Belfast in one day, terrorists attack the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, T-Rex and Slade glam it up on Top of the Pops and Marlon Brando immortalises himself in 'The Godfather'. It was a time of loud clothes, loud music and loud cars. It was also the year Honda - better known at the time for motorbikes than for car production - decided to have a second stab at the small car market following the failure of the disastrous air-cooled 1300 saloon, a complicated and poorly developed car that had been the brainchild of Soichiro Honda on one of his rare off-days.
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Happily, Honda had more luck with the Civic, whose launch could not have come at a more opportune moment. Cute, pocketable and possessed of a particularly clean and fuel-efficient engine, the diminutive hatchback Civic tapped into the European demand for small, agile and economical cars, shortly after the Renault 5 and Fiat 127 laid the foundation stones for the now enormous supermini market. It may not have been the first front-wheel drive small hatchback, but it certainly made an impact. The Civic was even embraced across the Atlantic too; the fuel crisis that gripped America a year later saw sales of the little Honda take off, partly because it was economical and reliable, and partly because the domestic offerings were so hopeless.
While its hatchback design trod ground already explored by European car makers - contemporary but hardly groundbreaking - the Civic's engine showed the rest of the world the way ahead. The Civic's name was derived from the first model's Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion CVCC engine, its secret being a finely-honed combustion chamber that enabled the mixture to burn more cleanly and efficiently - and it arrived just in time for the 1973 fuel crisis, and America's tightening emissions regulations. Honda would not innovate as effectively as this with every Civic generation - and there have been seven to date - but the car has always moved with the times, inching ahead in every area with each four year cycle. Among the more significant innovations of the Civic were platform sharing, variable valve timing technology, electrically assisted steering and a novel approach to the supermini tailgate.
Since its launch more than 14 million Civics have been sold around the world, making it Honda's - and arguably one of the world's - most successful cars. In league with the Accord - a success in the US, if not so hot globally - the Civic has propelled Honda into the world's top ten vehicle manufacturers. Line all seven generations up in chronological order, from the first pocket-sized Civic through to today's much larger pseudo-people carrier model, and the link from one Civic to the next doesn't always follow the simple slightly-bigger-and-slightly-better formula that so many manufacturers fall back on. So, here's a closer look at the Civic's genealogy.
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