This would be nobody's idea of a golden age for the hatchback. Where once Golfs proudly roamed the land looking very young and pleased with themselves, the fun now seems to be elsewhere and the Golf has come to seem, certainly in its new form, a little clumpy and outstripped, just one of the cluster of impersonal, interchangeable and deeply unexciting blobs which characterise the hatchback sector.
Elsewhere, people who might once have gone for a hatchback are excitedly bombing about in newly affordable combat vehicles and miniature people carriers which, despite miniaturisation, still have enough room for the children in the back to watch movies, play five-a-side football and have friends over to stay. Meanwhile, all the poor old hatchback can do is hunker down and try to sound enthusiastic while saying: "Look, if you put the rear seats down, you can get four sacks of garden rubbish inside me." Fashion can be cruel like that.
Periodically, though, a hatchback noses its way to the front of this uneasy and quietly lowing herd and makes a claim to be thought dynamic. The Ford Focus was one example and the new Honda Civic is another. It is a stern corrective for anyone who still thinks anything made by Honda should, by rights, be a motorbike.
It is less flashy than the Focus (which, for all its brilliance, does still smack slightly of a design seminar staffed by men with ponytails) and more appealing in many other respects. Things that tend now to feel like a drag about hatchbacks in general somehow appear to be pert virtues in the Civic.
It seems modest rather than merely anodyne, crisply practical rather than merely boring. It is too much, perhaps, to expect it single-handedly to turn the tide against its heartily established, non-hatchback rivals. At the same time, you look at the Civic and wonder anew what the fuss is, really, about MPVs and Jeep-alikes. And it has a cute bonnet too.
It is unusually roomy, despite taking up little space on the road. Dr Who would be impressed. You can sit in the back without having your knees plugged into your ears; and you can get out of the back without assistance from other people and winches. The result of this emphasis is that there is less boot-space than you might get from other hatchbacks. But this simply means that Honda is placing the needs of humans above sacks of garden rubbish, which cannot be an entirely bad thing.
Honda refers to the Civic's "walk-through interior", which, in the context, is ambitious. I would like to see someone try it. The point is, though, that movement around the car is entirely unhampered by lumps in the floor. It's the world's first open-plan hatchback.
Even the gear stick is removed to the dashboard, in the manner of ancient Citroëns, making it altogether easier to climb on top of the passenger next to you, should you need to for any reason. I think we can safely say that, in the matter of space distribution, Honda has thought of everything here.
The gear fob looks a little comical up there on the dash; something like the control from a long since outmoted arcade video game. But, though it feels peculiar to be fiddling about regularly on the dashboard with something which isn't the controls for the radio, I grew to love it and particularly the short distance it affords between gears, which are, highly satisfyingly, just a click apart and which made the sensation of driving the car actually quite sporty.
You can sling the car about a bit, too, without enduring muscular-skeletal damage. According to the Honda literature, "ride comfort has been improved by reducing the spring rates of the front and rear compliance bushings". I think we can all be grateful to them for that, even those of us who don't know our rear compliance bushing from our elbow.
The problem with most hatchbacks driven at speed is the noise. It is like perching inside an air-extraction unit; you emerge afterwards feeling deafened and stupid. Surely only someone with a relaxed attitude to the future of their hearing would wish to engage in an extended bout of high-speed overtaking in a hatchback.
But even here Honda comes good. No one would suggest that the Civic offers whisper-quiet motoring in the manner of a Rolls-Royce, but at the same time it did, in motorway conditions, sound less like a hand-held vacuum cleaner than other cars of its shape and size.
The Civic comes with the usual slew of toys which, until relatively recently, would only have appeared in heavyweight saloons but which now appear everywhere as a matter of course - electric windows, heated mirrors, air conditioning units, hot and cold-running CD players, etc. Extras are the new standards. Soon, in order to distinguish themselves from each other, cars will have to start giving away extraneous white goods: dishwashers, fridge-freezers and so forth.
In addition, because this is its first month on sale, the Civic is currently available at challenging launch prices. But it is not the kind of car that needs toys and discounts to speak for it. It can stand on its own.
The lowdown
Honda Civic 1.4 S
Price: from £11,991
Top speed: 108 mph
Acceleration: 0-62 in 12.1 seconds
Consumption: 44.1 mpg combined
At the wheel: Charlie Dimmock
On the stereo: Kiss FM
En route for: the dump
