As anyone who is remotely sniffy about car design will tell you, it's the doors that get in the way. They ruin the line and spoil the shape. Most cars would look fantastic, if you didn't have to get in and out of them.
Confronted by this bind, purists have two choices: they can buy a Formula One car, which doesn't have any doors, but which, on the negative side, is the very devil to get insured and not too useful on school runs; or they can carefully minimise the number of doors their car has - a line of thinking that might lead one eventually to consider buying a Honda Civic Coupe.
Being a Coupe, this ambitious new version of the Honda Civic comes in with a reassuringly low door-count (just the two) on a body which, as the informed among us will immediately notice, is technically large enough to justify at least twice as many. The result is a compact/sports hybrid - a nippy number that seats five, a sports car you can invite your friends to.
The Coupe represents a big strike on behalf of the marque's social ambitions. Though rightly famous for worthwhile causes such as reliability and economy, Honda has never seemed particularly interested in creating cars that set fire to the imagination, or particularly encourage James Bond fantasies. Let's face it: a four-door Honda on this scale would normally be a minicab.
The new two-door is looking to make a slightly zestier impression - especially since Honda has noticed that the outgoing version of the Civic Coupe was mostly bought by older drivers with families. This has prompted the company to take measures that they hope will make the car look snappy and enticing to those in the 25-40 age group - people known technically, in the demographics business, as singles with money to burn.
How successful is this initiative set to be? Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe within a few months you won't be able to move on your local High Street on a Saturday night on account of all the twentysomethings cruising in their Honda Civic Coupes, but my own hunch is that these new take-it-to-the-kids measures may not quite ignite the desired response among the footloose.
Beside the Peugeot 206 or even the Renault Megane, the Civic Coupe looks buttoned-up and a long way from ready to loosen its tie. Honda has shortened the front end to increase a sense of incipient power about the car, but, sitting there by the kerb, it's still hardly a leashed beast. Clearly it's one thing to create a low, tapering roofline, steeply rake the rear wind screen and tighten up the steering, but quite another to magnetise the attention of people who could be driving a Ford Puma. In any case, if Honda really wanted the car to talk to people in their 20s, it should have plumbed in a condom dispenser and somewhere to stand a Smirnoff Ice.
In many ways, Honda would be better off leaving the car where it is - as one for the grown-ups - and not bothering to strain for effect or worry too hard about whether the alloys are exciting enough to appeal to Craig David fans. The Civic Coupe has got a sizeable enough contradiction on its hands in the first place. There is commonly something rather grand and patrician about a long car with only two doors, something which, dare one say it in the context of the determinedly democratic Civic range, puts one in mind of the realm of luxury motoring.
That's a realm, of course, like the realms of luxury chocolates and luxury carpeting, where the wheel of good taste spins right back round to the top again. Cars fitted out with luxury in mind must inevitably flirt with the possibility of seeming to be in howlingly grim taste - all spurious gold knobs and walnut trims, and clad in the kind of fabric you might only otherwise find on Michael Caine's bathrobe.
In this respect, it's something of a relief to be driving a coupe made by Honda. Even granted the boundaries of this new pro-youth project, its designers have managed to temper the car to suit the rest of the range. Which is to say the seats are wrapped in a pragmatic, durable cloth, rather than in mock moleskin and, with its crisply serviceable grey clocks and buttons, the dashboard comes across like a functioning office rather than like the reception area at a gentleman's club.
Overall the car is likely to appeal most to people grateful for small innovations, such as an electric sunroof that opens via a simple button on the dashboard, rather than via a baffling dial or incomprehensible rocker-switch mounted overhead. No more putting your hand up and cricking your neck trying to decipher puzzling hieroglyphs written on the underside of the car's roof.
Just to think: with a couple of incautious twists, the new Coupe could easily have been the Ferrero Rocher in the Honda fleet. Fortunately, it came out plain and simple, and is all the more attractive for that.
