#CivicCoupe

It wouldn’t have escaped your attention that there have been some bumpy years in #CivicNation. Honda acknowledged this itself, scuttling back to the drawing board for an “emergency refresh” in 2013 after the people with adenoids Consumer Reports pulled its Recommended rating.

What caused the problem? A misfire in focus groups? Bean counters? Aliens? Alien bean counters in focus groups? We may never know. What we do know is the 2017 Honda Civic is quite good, so let’s see how the coupe version stacks up in base LX trim against its higher-spec brothers.

Remember when Every. Single. Car. Model. came in a two-door version?

Sure, the days of luxurious and lengthy Olds 98 two-doors and Lincoln Town Coupes are long gone, but it wasn’t long ago that coupe offerings stretched from one end of the compact car market to the other.

A buyer was once able to choose between the forgettable Ford Escort and equally forgettable but nicer-looking ZX2. You could get the bland Nissan Sentra or the slightly less bland 200SX. And so on and so forth.

A purported screenshot of a Honda ordering screen over at CivicX shows the new turbo-powered, tenth-generation Civic will be made available with a six-speed manual transmission starting next year.

The only engine available with a row-your-own box for this year’s Civic is the naturally aspirated K20 2-liter four that cranks 158 horsepower — 16 horsepower fewer than the turbocharged mill — in the base LX model. Starting with the EX-T model, Honda is planting its 1.5-liter turbo into many of its trims with a CVT only to start.

The recently announced Civic Coupe will get the same powertrain options as the sedan — manual only on the base model, CVT everywhere else — when it goes on sale in March. It’s unclear if the coupe would receive a mid-year update to add manual transmissions.

Arriving with the Clarity Fuel Cell at the 2015 LA Auto Show, the 2016 Honda Civic Coupe is ready for its close-up as the co-star to the 2016 Civic Sedan.

The second of five models in the 10th-gen Civic lineup to arrive within the next 18 months, the Coupe will ride upon the same “athletic” platform as the Civic Sedan. Design cues include sportier lines and an intimate high-tech interior.