[vishy76]

Thanks for this awesome thread. I believe the Honda City 1st gen is a car that stands for everything Honda was famous for. The Teutonic reliability, creamy petrol engine, pure hydraulic power steering and even the way it looks! Simple lines yet elegant. A timeless low slung Japanese sedan.

What's better is the fact that a few visual mods can really transform the way the car looks and make it a proper head turner. Featured below is my friend's City 1st gen. This one is the vanilla petrol automatic, but he plans to convert it to a VTEC in the forecoming future.





Have spotted a couple of clean VTECs around the city too. Lovely alloy wheels considering this was an OE design!

[WhiteKnight]

Awesome thread, especially for old timers like me. Pages of content in Team bhp were dedicated to the city vtec vs Baleno vs Lancer vs Petra battles.

Btw, having owned Baleno and Lancer, and spend considerable amount of time in all four, I would say, City had nothing that is better than others, other than the engine.

The car held a great resale value long after the production ended. It did dominate the Indian rally scene too, which they vacated and left open to Balenos later, under mysterious circumstances.

Originally Posted by vishy76

Have spotted a couple of clean VTECs around the city too. Lovely alloy wheels considering this was an OE design!

Attachment 2221448

My friend, that doesn't look like a VTEC, no dual exhaust.

[vishy76]

Originally Posted by WhiteKnight

My friend, that doesn't look like a VTEC, no dual exhaust.

The VTEC was infamous for corroded exhaust plumbing and end cans. As a result, most of them were changed to a single exhaust from the original dual setup.

[BHPjunkie]

Originally Posted by vishy76

Attachment 2221446

Attachment 2221447

Man that is one sweet looking OHC. One of the best I have come across recently. The rims look amazing on this one.

[sirjokhi]

Great thread! I remember being 4 years old when we got a Honda city pre-owned in the family. It was in a light blue metallic shade. We soon upgraded to the facelift version and it was the first ever new car for me. I think I was around 7 years old at the time. I remember being very excited with countless sleepless nights. We bought it in Sapphire Silver Metallic shade. It was a 1.3 EXI and not the 1.5 maybe because we couldn't afford it? I don't know. If I am not mistaken, Bhavna Honda was the dealer back then in Surat and they delivered the vehicle even after closing hours with smiles all around. Such was the customer service back in the day. I remember going on multiple trips in the car with English oldies in the background ranging from Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond etc. When we used to go out as a group with my father's friends, there used to be mandatory races. One of my uncles had a Ford Ikon and my other uncle had a Mitsubishi Lancer. They used to tease me if they reached the destination sooner. This thread reminded me of such simpler times with tears of happiness in my eyes. Thank you!

[GreasyCarb55]

The Gen 1 Honda City is one hell of a versatile machine.

• A good family sedan? -> Check
• A good project car? -> Check
• A good rally car? -> Check
• A head turner? -> Check

Not many cars can fullfil all these roles, let alone in our Indian market.

The Gen 1 City will go down in the history books as one of the cars that revolutionized the Indian car market and in my opinion has rightfully earned it place in the Indian Automotive Hall of Fame alongside cars like the old Baleno, CRDi Thar, Polo GT TDI/TDI, Gypsy and Premier Padmini to name a few.

[SShandilya]

I remember my father got a pre-owned OHC vtec for my brother when he got into college. Since both of us were car nuts we used to save money to get upgrades on it. We got an automec exhaust, k&n filter and music system in it.
The car was nimble, power was useable and car sat so low that you could really ‘feel the car’.
We even raced it at souls of speed event, I don’t know till date how but we did manage to beat A4 3.2 FSI in a drag (maybe the Audi had a botched up start) but still shows what a car it was.
Those of you who wonder if I have some footage, I do but it’s not a clear one (given the camera quality we had that time plus it was night time) and it’s from about 10+ years back.
Link is below

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7srjDELmHtQ

[Thegermanbadger]

Thanks for the great read and road down memory lane.

My dad had a OHC vtec back in 2003. I have driven that a fair bit and it was just brilliant. Have had a mk1 vrs, e60 530i, x3 3.0d. But the raw induction roar and feeling of the vtec back then was just something else.

Many happy miles and loads of redlines. Never faltered. It was also the car I did my first solo highway drive in.

I have one near my house just wasting away. Fully stock. But the owner doesn't want to sell �� would have added that back to my garage

[Sandeep500]

Awesome thread. This car is truely a benchmark for enthusiasts. I too am a owner of this car, which I have kept till today though it is not used for many years. I can vouch for its reliability that it starts at first crank even after a month of lying idle. I have thought many times about disposing it off, but just then I come across a thread like this and the plan goes awery. My family has asked me many times that why is it kept if it is not being used.

The beauty of this machine is that almost no one who has owned it has been able to forget it even after having owned many high end cars afterwards.

[Amsdoc]

Such an awesome car. We were in the market for a sedan at the time the 1st gen city was launched. However there was no Honda showroom in Pune! We asked for a test drive and the car came to us from Mumbai! I was a new driver then but I absolutely loved it! Begged dad to buy one but he just wasn't keen about not having a service network in Pune. So we ended up buying a Maruti esteem . Soon the service network et all reached pune and everywhere in India and rest is history.
Had the chance to drive one of these beauties from Jhansi to Khajuraho and I loved it and realised that the Esteem was such a bad choice!
Amongst the challengers...I have had the fortune of having friends whose families owned some and amazingly allowed me drive in multiple places.
The Opel Astra was driven on a road trip through Kerala and the Baleno in Goa.

The 1st gen City was a class apart however, especially for the engine and this is a fitting tribute to it. I have never liked any City since the 1st Gen with the current one coming closest!

[KKapadia]

Owned the 1998 1.5 EXI(S) Cost over a million bucks back in the day. Came with cute 13 inch alloys, Just changed the tires to 185’s with Bridgestone potenza G111’s and it was quite a good handler. Later on added a K&N cold air intake with a free flow stainless steel exhaust and we were the king of the roads back then. Nothing came close except for some big engined imports. Used it for 80k km for 12 years. Never broke down or skipped a beat. Only issue was the suspension never lasted more than 20k km since it was driven over bad roads. So went through 3-4 sets of struts and a steering rack assembly somewhere in between. But all this never cost a lot. For 20k had a brand new suspension from tHe A.S.C.
Owned an Accord V6 later on for a few years but that was the last Honda we owned since the products were no where close to the German counterparts. Most of the current Hondas feel like domestic appliances in comparison to the old city!

[chethan.ram]

First of all, thank you for such a detailed post. I have never owned a City, but I have driven them on few occasions. I just loved this car when it was launched and it still remains as one of my favourite cars. I somehow never liked the City once they moved to a new design.

[Horizon85]

Thanks for the wonderful thread @Shreyfiesta. To this date, this car remains my first crush. I was in school when this car was launched and I'd keep all paper advertisements. Always wanted to get one, but the last 3 iterations haven't impressed much as an overall package.

[R2D2]

Thanks for a thread that sent me down memory lane

The metallic black City 1.5 EXi facelift was my 1st premium Jap car. And I loved it to bits. Purchased in mid 2002, it was sold in '05 as I was mostly overseas on work. Black paint is a pain to maintain but I kept it shiny and waxed all the time. I had installed VTEC alloy wheels on my car with Falken ZIEX (yuck, never again) tyres in a +1 upsize. I'll try and pull some pics of my old car if possible and share on this thread.

Thanks again bro.

[ssjr0498]

Forget the posts, there are some video's of the OHC vtec vs the new City doing the rounds and the latter thrashing the former.! Watching the video made me laugh my guts off and had I still been the former myself, I would have raised a hue and cry about it! But now I understand the economics better and I know that showing the full truth at times does not make sense to big corporations and companies/institutions. Because in the real world, even today, there is no generation of city that can beat the ohc vtec!

Anyway, a great post by the OP and I'm loving it, I still have 3 of these beasts and everytime I drive them, they put a smile on my face!

Originally Posted by Rocketscience

Wow, great thread and can't come at a better time, just last week i was reading about a comparison of current gen City vs 1st gen one on instagram by a sort of reputed page and they got their facts either wrong or were in the dark of VTEC's existence.

They compared the power figures of non-VTEC 1.5 to today's car which is VTEC which is totally misleading.

So you see that power comparison between the 1st and 5th gen was sort of misleading but i would't have explained in such detail on instagram and to its ignorant crowd.

So to get the facts correct in my brain i googled about the first gen City last week, and surprisingly there were zero good articles about that on the internet, wikipedia hardly had anything, even the best of magazines had terribly basic and sometimes even wrong articles presumably typed by uninterested or non-enthusiastic interns as the first gen car was genuinely a sort of big deal for the Indian car market and was commercially successful too.
This thread should be on top of google search result for when a young enthusiast searches for the City, they should get the right and detailed knowledge.

Attaching some relevant bits about the City and its impact on my life i posted in Baleno's thread recently.