Slightly Riced: A Review of the Honda Del Sol

The Honda CRX is a famous name. It is known as one of the best drivers’ cars to come out of the 1980’s, and many examples have been tuned to crazy numbers.
In the early 1990’s, Honda decided to create a follow up. It was given updated styling, a VTEC motor and all models came as a hard top convertible as standard.
The particular model I am reviewing is somewhere near the top of the lineage with a B16 twin cam and electric roof.

The Exterior

At first glance, it is really small. And it’s not exactly a pretty sight, but it grows on you.
A black bonnet? Pure rice.
The plastic bodykit all the way around? Rice.
The 17” wheels with red striping? Looks nice but the stripe literally is just red tape, so… you guessed it, rice.

But you start to notice the small things like the C-pillars with their muscle-car shape, the mirror that sits on the door like a Dodge Viper, and the inverted hatch at the rear that will always be cool.
But most importantly, this one doesn’t have a spoiler which I was so grateful for as you might find out later.

Normally, there would be a set of lights in between the headlights. Did this model come with them? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the lack of those small inner lights draws your attention towards the headlights which look very bug-eye.
On a Supra or Impreza they look cool. But on a small Honda, they make the car look cute. And that’s not exactly the look I want to go or when I’m racing around the city. That’s why I put eyelids on the car. They give it an angry look, and blend in with the bonnet as if it were meant to be that way.
That brings me to my next point about the styling - the bonnet.
It looks very large, as you can see above, and the bulge across the top is so wide, it might as well not be there.
Comparing this to a Nissan Cefiro where the lines are very close together giving it a sleek, sporty look much like a cowl induction hood.

Overall for the styling, it is a small 2-seater which should have taken its design cues from the Integra or Civic, but instead retained its uniqueness with its own bug-eye style. Everything from the doors to rear of the vehicle looks cool, but the front just doesn’t do it any justice.
A lot of you reading this would be thinking “this thing is so rice”. But that was part of the enjoyment for me - people looking at it and thinking “what an ugly car” or “what a cute little car”. You have to admit, if it wasn’t riced, they wouldn’t have looked at all.

The Interior

The interior is typical of a 1990’s Japanese car.
It has bucket seats that are so soft, they might as well just be ordinary seats - when you sit in them, they wrap around your legs and sides, but in the corners I can imagine them bending under any weight.
The dashboard and centre console are made out of plastic - the sort of hard plastic that Honda put in all its cars that really makes it feel well put together.
Getting into the car really makes you feel like you are in for a great ride - the vehicle is low, the doors are huge, and the seating is so low, you feel like you are sitting on the road or in a go-kart.
The steering wheel is at the right height and at the right distance to make you reach forwards and stretch your arms to grab it. You can see from the angle of the seats that this thing is meant to be raced.
The floor has a thin layer of material, but you can see and feel the metal grooves of the underbody.

The model I bought was a 4-speed automatic. Despite being an auto, you can use the gear lever to lock it into any of the 4 gears - including first - for all that VTEC goodness.
The dashboard cluster is typical of Honda, and looks the same as every other car Honda made during the 90’s. You can see that the redline starts at 8,000RPM and extends almost into 10,000RPM suggesting that VTEC was indeed meant to be used in this car.
When you selected reverse, there was a chime. Not the beep you get in a Subaru, but more like the speedometer warning in Takumi’s AE86. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Almost like the sound of a bell. And every passenger sits there like “Awww, how cute!”.
On the right of the steering wheel there is a switch for traction control, and a switch that allows you to open the roof, as this car is in fact a convertible.

If you travel alone, this is a great car. You can go grocery shopping and place your bags on the passenger seat, you can go on a roadtrip and, once again, leave your bags on the passenger seat.
If you travel with yourself and another, this might be a little cramped.
Behind the driver and passenger seats, there is clearance of about 20cm, or a little under 8 inches. You can try to be smart and place a bag of groceries here, but the items are very likely to slide behind the seat and onto the floor, or just get stuck and make a mess.
Typical of Honda, there are two secret compartments, as can be seen in the photo on the top left. These are locked by a key at the centre, and are useful for holding, well, nothing. They are so small, the only use I found for them was to hold cards and pens.

The Boot and Roof

If you read the previous section, you might be thinking “Why don’t you put your groceries and bags in the boot?”.
To answer your question, I want you to look carefully at the photo above.
Or if you are much too busy and must allocate more time to scrolling through some Car-Throttle memes, look at the photo below.
As I mentioned earlier, it is a convertible. And much like any other convertible, it has an electric motor to open and close the roof.
But unlike any other convertible, the boot-lid is electronically lifted and the hard roof gets pulled into the boot-lid.
So one-third of the boot-space was lost to the electric motor, and another third was lost to the thickness of the boot-lid.

Are there any problems with this electronic system? Well…. where do I start.
Okay, so I know the car isn’t new - it’s the same age as me. And despite being so young, it had its share of problems.
First of all, the boot would open and close electronically, but the roof wouldn’t - mine was broken. On the inside of the ceiling, there are three swivel clips that unhook the roof. After pulling these, you press the switch on the dashboard. Doing this did nothing.
If you wanted to remove the roof, you would do it by hand.
You can still place it into the bootlid, right? Wrong. There is some sort of clip that holds the roof in place, and without the electronics, it could only sit in about two-thirds of the way.
But you can place the roof in the boot, can’t you? No you can not. The boot is the exact size for fitting the roof, but the lid is suspended by two plastic beams.
Okay, so if you want to go topless, you have to leave your top at home.
What if you just place the roof in the boot-lid and lower it as much as it can go without actually closing the boot? Now we get into a string of problems - the car will not start if the boot is open. And the boot will not open if the rear window is open. And the rear window will not open if the roof is open. Why did I mention the rear window? Because if you hit a bump, it will open - or the car will think it is open.

There are also practicality issues associated with it - it takes a good fifteen to twenty seconds to open; the first second or two it sits there trying to figure out which part of the car it is before moving. Now you could imagine that you would insert the key, and turn it then as it lifts up, you pull the key out and it continues.
Wrong - the second you let the key rest, the boot stops. If you turn the key the other way, it will close all the way.
So you will be standing there with your hand on her ass for a good fifteen seconds while people stare at you like a ricer playing with Lamborghini-swivel doors.
Ignore that, and you will be fine…. on a sunny day. But when it starts raining, you have to stand out there and bear with it. Waiting for it to open while you get soaked. Wait for it while the inside of your boot gets soaked. As the wind blows the heavy rain into the boot, you wonder if the electronics are going to get wet and leave you stranded - remember that the car will not start with an open boot.
Just be glad that there is no wing on the back being lifted above the roof for all the world to laugh at.

Taming the Beast

My Del Sol CRX was powered by a supposedly rebuilt B16A1 packing a mighty 150HP.
Okay, so 150 horses isn’t much. But it’s a 1.6 Litre, and it has VTEC and that has got to mean something, right?
Well, yes, because the VTEC gives it more power in the higher rev ranges.
Also i said supposedly rebuilt because there are no receipts to prove it. What it does have is an aftermarket whale p#nis, a repainted cam cover, a set of shiny headers, and MSD ignition for the extra sparks.

After you turn the key, you are greeted by a noise at either end of the car - the constant loud sucking from the intake, and the tiny rumble from the exhaust.
My car was an automatic. However, in saying that you can control which gear it is in. On my usual commute from the big city to my apartment in the countryside, I would practice downshifting. Entering the roundabout to my street, I would slam the gear switch into D1 and listen to the car whine to a stop. Then I step on the brakes until the road was clear and begin to slowly floor the accelerator. BwwwwwwwwWWWWWWWWwwwwww. Okay…. no VTEC. That’s a bit strange.
Upon leaving my apartment and exiting the roundabout the other way, there is a lot more road - about 2 miles of straight countryside open-ness. In the early morning the roads are virtually dead, so I don’t put her into first gear at the roundabout.
BwwwwwwwwWWWWW click BWAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
The VTEC kicks in at exactly 5,500RPM with a quiet click and the tone of the car changes almost to a scream, like a Skyline, but more like someone swapped the exhaust for a trumpet. You can feel the car accelerate more rapidly than before, but it doesn’t push you into your seat. Until you change gear, that is, and the VTEC keeps working for the next half second before realising the revs are below 5,500.

The car is low like a go-kart. It is FWD and has a lot of grip, like a go-kart. It is the successor to the CRX, but my only gripe is the lack of power steering.
It looks like a car from the 1990’s, and that’s because it is. But the steering makes it turn like a car from the 1980’s. I love power steering. All my Skylines had power steering. But for me, the only cars without power steering should be classics. Not a riced boy racer car.
But that’s not to say I haven’t had a couple slides while cornering too fast.

Reliability

In a previous section I mentioned that the roof was a pain. The rear-window was really cool in the sense that you could open it while driving, but it would add to the confusion of trying to open the roof.
Now here are a few fun things I experienced:
On a cold morning, the car wouldn’t start. Every Sunday I would work a morning shift starting at 6AM. One day in the middle of winter when it was almost snowing, this car would not start. I had to walk back to the flat and grab the keys to the R33.
On a hot afternoon, the car wouldn’t start. After finishing work, I would often hang around waiting for the car to start. I turn the key, the starter motor turns the flywheel, the injectors spray into the chamber, the spark plugs fire, but the car stutters straight after and dies.
The roof leaks. Maybe I didn’t put the roof in properly, but if I did then it wouldn’t have locked in. Maybe the seals around the roof just need to be replaced after twenty years. I took the car into a petrol station car wash and it dripped about once every two seconds. The car wash takes about seven minutes to complete, so at the end I must have had about a cup of water leaked into the car.
The interior squeaks - like all the time. Okay, this isn’t reliability, but it did get annoying. Drive over an uneven part of road or driving fast; squeaky squeaky.
The motor leaks oil. Now this happens on a lot of Hondas - and I mean A LOT. Like I worked at a petrol station for a couple years and just about every Honda I checked had fresh oil seeping down the engine block coating the engine on the outside.
Every time I used VTEC, I would check the oil level once I got home.

However in saying that, it still got me the 1,200KM across the country without too much hassle.

Final Thoughts

My Honda was riced. And is therefore not representative of all Hondas - just those owned by most young drivers.
It was a fun car to drive, it is awesome to sit in, and you get the gimmick of playing with VTEC. It was a real head turner, and often got trolled on the motorway by guys in turbo cars.
But the downsides outweighed the positives. Some days I would look outside and say “I better not risk getting stranded in town today”, or even “It’s raining, you can get soaked by yourself today”, or “I don’t feel like being publicly ridiculed today”.
If you are looking for a car for track day, or a front-wheel drive worthy of twisting mountain roads, then it will be a great car.
But for every day commuting, I would not buy one again.