Is Now The Time To Buy An FL5 Honda Civic Type R?

It’s really not been a good week for front-wheel drive, manual hot hatches. In fact, the only two cars of this type left on sale in Europe – the Ford Focus ST and Honda Civic Type R – have both had their imminent demise confirmed in the past few days. This saddens us.

The Focus is very good, but the FL5-generation Civic Type R is without doubt one of the hot hatch greats. It does come with one big caveat, though: pricing starts at £51,905, which is huge money for a front-drive hot hatch, no matter how good it is.

Given how limited the quantities of Type Rs brought to the UK have been, and how relatively short its life has been, pricing hasn’t had the chance to drop to properly attainable levels, either.

A quick glance at Auto Trader reveals that the lowest you’re likely to pay for an FL5 at the moment is around £38,000. It doesn’t help that people seem to be keeping the mileage on these sensational cars tragically low, with very few cresting the 10,000-mile mark.

Still, if you do have a wad of cash to spend on a hot hatch, now might be the time to grab a used FL5 while you can – with the enormously in-demand model soon dying, we can’t imagine prices are going to drop much lower for a good while yet.

Towards that bottom end of the market, you’ll find something like this lovely early 2023 example. Clearly, it’s been passed around by some speculative buyers, because it’s already had three owners, who between them have only put 3949 miles on it. This, we think, is borderline criminal, but it does mean that those past owners have effectively done the job of running it for the next buyer.

We like the fact that it sits on some classy silver wheels rather than the black ones usually found on FL5s (well, I do anyway – my esteemed colleague Ryan Hirons ‘hates’ them, but he’s clearly wrong). The vivid red upholstery sits better with a more subdued exterior colour, like Crystal Black Pearl, too.

Thankfully, that speculation between those first three owners clearly hasn’t worked, because despite its almost non-existent mileage, it’s listed at £38,950, making it one of the cheapest FL5s available. Nearly everything else at this price point has covered at least twice the distance.

It’s still a lot for a used hot hatch, but the FL5 is a very special car – one that’s about to get a whole lot more special given its tragically short life. We just hope whoever buys this one will get to properly experience what a joy it is.