San Marcos, California --The American car has come a long way, hasn't it? Once despised as an oversize, overweight, overwrought, and thoroughly despicable waste of resources, a comfortable, all-purpose, freeway-friendly, American-style sedan now can be found in the model lineup of every brand from Audi to Volkswagen.
For this we should thank the Honda Accord. When it arrived here in 1976, it embodied a formula that every American quickly understood: American comfort, European looks, and Japanese reliability. The Honda Accord made the American car smart instead of dumb, and as the Accord rose to the top of the yearly sales charts, other manufacturers learned from its example. Last year, 388,374 Americans voted with their pocketbooks to endorse the Accord's compelling, made-in-America mixture of comfort, style, and reliability.
Don't be talking that smack around here
There's plenty of talk that Honda has lost its way, both on Wall Street and Main Street. There's a kind of perverse fear that the newly American-centric Honda is no longer driven to excel. We think the talk might have less to do with the Honda Accord itself than with heightened competition from other mass-market sedans such as the Ford Fusion and Hyundai Sonata that seem newer and sexier, though not necessarily better.
In any case, all this doesn't seem to have thrown the Honda engineers off their game, because the 2016 Honda Accord has been improved in more ways than you would expect at this midpoint in its design cycle. Naturally it starts with the obligatory, new bodywork fascias front and rear. Fast-acting LED taillights are standard equipment. The new aluminum hood has strong character lines, and you can get 19-inch wheels if you want them. Altogether it's a flashier look, if not an elegant one.
More successful is the revision of the dashboard architecture to accommodate a 7-inch touchscreen for audio inputs. You can swipe, tap, and pinch in iPad-style, and the availability of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in the top Accord trim levels brings your smartphone stuff onto the big touchscreen display, plus you can make commands with the voice-recognition software. The high-res 7.7-inch screen above the dash displays navigation information, as well as the images from the multi-angle rearview camera that is now standard equipment. As usual with Honda, the center console is a little miracle of clever utility, a complement of bins, trays (one for your mobile phone, of course), and one of the car's four USB outlets (two of which are 2.5-amp units for simultaneous use/charging).
You're sitting on basically the same seats that you remember, although the Honda body engineers have finally allowed the use of a 60/40-split folding rear seat to improve cargo utility. Sadly the interior colors come from the same range of cold, serious tones as before, as if the Accord is one of those kids more comfortable with graph paper than a paint palette.
