We Need To Talk About The Honda Civic Type R's Supposed CVT Gearbox

Last week we reported news that was dominating the corner of the Internet devoted to cars, suggesting Honda was putting a CVT gearbox in the next Civic Type R. Since then, the waters have been muddied a little (a lot).

You’ll now find the likes of Road & Track saying it’s not happening, and that the original words from Car magazine were misinterpreted. For the US, Honda has confirmed that only a manual cog box will be imported.

But there’s still no official line on cars built for Europe and Japan. That could mean Honda is doing the usual Japanese thing and refusing to say anything unscheduled about upcoming products, or it could mean that there’s some very hasty re-planning going on in the wake of the huge online fallout when the ‘news’ originally broke.

What we definitely do know is that automatic Civics will have a CVT. Whether the CVT will extend up to the Type R, it seems we don’t actually know yet.

It’s going to be interesting to see what Honda says about all this. Perhaps it had the idea on the table but has binned it, or maybe it was just down to excitable car types getting ahead of themselves about a totally unexpected bomb being dropped on hot hatchdom. Only time will tell.

You can read the original (potentially incorrect) story here.