gear kereta

You really can’t please everyone, that’s for sure. Build a car with 10 unique features novel to a price segment, and someone will invariably ask for 11 or 15. Offer a stylish, purposeful vehicle that you think will fit its design brief and market segmentation to a T, and someone will come along and pick at the lack of commission in it.

Sometimes though, there’s some validity to the latter. While no one is expecting the plushness and feel of a Roller if you’re paying for a Viva, you can certainly attempt to win hearts and minds by offering better than the price asked for.

It really is all about perception, and not just from the number of bling items and cool features you can put before someone. Presentation, like with everything else, is key, and the consumer must really believe that the vehicle being offered before him is really worth the asking price. Or, at the very least, feel like it.

The Honda Freed is bit like that, really. It’s stylish enough from a design perspective, and it drives as well as you would expect a Honda to do. There’s more than decent space for four and cargo, and at a pinch, it becomes a small personnel carrier, seating seven.

So, what’s there to jump on then? Well, there is the price, which is where it all starts getting a bit murky. At RM112,980, on the road with insurance, the Freed sits at a rather premium price point, and tagging it as a premium compact MPV sort of cements that thought process.

The trouble with going the premium route is that you also up expectations, and in the case of the Freed, buyers are going to expect quite a fair bit more from a vehicle that shares the same platform as a Fit/Jazz and the engine as the City.

Not that there isn’t, really. The Freed does have a good number of pluses, which were brought to the fore during the Freed media drive to Penang earlier in the week. The interior has a marvellous sense of space given the size of the vehicle, aided suitably by the walk-through cabin layout and second row captain’s chairs. Meanwhile, the automatic sliding doors are a boon, tidy and uneventful in use.

Seat comfort is high, even across long distance, and of note is the suspension setup, which offers exemplary compliance and stability at speeds for a vehicle in this class. There is still some pitching, given the vehicle’s MPV legs, but the suppleness of its ride is very commendable. At low levels, the ride has firmness to it, but it’s never jarring.

Other positives include low wind noise at high speeds, another laudable plus. As for performance, the Freed manages to get to highway speeds rapidly and doesn’t start getting breathless until you reach the 140kmh mark, from where it will get to 160kmh or so eventually, with enough road. Though the exhaust exhibits a raspy tonal quality when the vehicle is pushed hard, the overall noise level coming off the block is quite civil, actually.

The five-speed auto box is smooth in operation, but has to work hard when the car is pushed - out on the highways, and on inclines, the gearbox tends to hunt a little. Still, there’s little to complain about in this regard. The biggest point of contention in the Freed isn’t with how it performs or looks, but rather with the lack of premium in its interior. For the asking price, the cabin feels a little low rent in terms of trim and plushness.

The shortcomings - I wouldn’t call them outright flaws - begin with the texture of the plastic panelling, which isn’t only hard to the sight, but to touch as well, especially so with the door cards. Granted, the panel looks resistant to scuffing and dirt, but surely there has to be a better solution somewhere. There were also some fitment issues evident in the demonstrators.

The main contact points, in this case the plastic steering wheel and gearshift knob lever, amplify things that bit more. The anomalies - and omissions - don’t end there. There’s no armrest on the rear sliding door panels (in order to achieve a required travel clearance), but instead these are offered on the inside of each second row seat.

Not a problem if you have overhead grip handles, but surprisingly there are none to compensate for the handle omission on the door cards. There is a grip handle located on the B-pillar, but this is meant more as a means in assisting ingress and egress, and requires too much arm extension as a grip handle in normal use.

It’s not lost upon Honda, which agreed with the consensus of most of the motoring journalists present that the level of trim doesn’t reflect the price point, and the same amount of feedback has apparently been received in Japan. The company says that the choice of texture for the plastic makes it easy to clean (and, keep clean, presumably), but given the feedback gathered from markets, is considering how to upgrade the interior.

The third row seats fold up and sideways, instead of down flat, in a simple three-step process, a layout choice Honda says was made so the flat floor through the cabin could be had. While there is some space lost in cargo carrying ability, a Freed on display showed that a fair amount can be carried, which is surprisingly good.

The Freed doesn’t have second row blower vents, which may or not be a point of contention depending on how you value the condition of your air. In the vehicle I was in, this didn’t crop up as a problem, even for the person sitting in the third row, but there were other test drive teams reporting the lack of this to offer less than perfect climate control at the back. Honda says that implementing the blower vent couldn’t be done with the layout chosen, but with feedback, is considering an add-on recirculation improver to move air faster around the cabin. Your guess is as good as mine as to what it’ll look like, and where it will be sited.

There’s a plus to the AC system, and that is that it’s quiet. The blower, even at maximum level, offers good output volume but without being shouty; indeed, this must be one of the easiest on the ear climate control systems I’ve come across, and that’s a definite plus.

In all fairness, it’s not about the Freed being less than what it set out to be. It really isn’t, and in truth is a neat, compact MPV with a set of good attributes. From a performance perspective, it’s winsome, and ditto the overall functionality. Given the pricing, however, the ‘premium’ tag may be stretching it a bit too thin, especially with those plastics on call. Sometimes, the small things really do matter.