• Good rear seat space
• Can be a pain to get into
• Boot is small

How much space is there?

Up front there are no complaints. Tall people will find enough head and legroom, while front-seat passengers won’t be knocking knees with the drivers. There are plenty of storage cubbies, including good-size door bins and two small spaces for phones and similar small items below the infotainment screen. The cupholders are acceptable, if not entirely suitable for large bottles.

Rear space is impressive, with only headroom for the tallest of adults being affected ever so slightly by the HR-V’s sloping, coupe-like roofline. However the shape of the roof and small-ish door openings make getting into the rear a bit of a faff. Even short people will have to duck to get in.

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Boot space and storage

Honda’s very clever Magic Seats in the rear are still present and correct. These allow you to flip the seat bases up and out of the way, so you can stand tall things in the rear footwells. While they are clever, they only come into play if you have two people on board. In this instance, the rear seat squabs can be raised out of the way, releasing additional rear storage room (above), significantly increasing the height of the loadbay compared with its rivals.

Open the electrically-operated boot and you’ll be disappointed though. The seats-up load capacity of 316 litres is paltry, even compared to the form-over-function Vauxhall Mokka, despite the Honda being around 300mm longer. This figure drops to 304 litres on top spec Advance Style models because of the upgraded sound system.

Boot space expands to 1,290 litres when the rear seats are lowered and also includes the boot/luggage floor box which acts as an additional storage compartment. This compares with 456 and 1,216 for the Ford Puma, 588/1,810 for the Skoda Karoq and 422/1,305 for the Nissan Juke. So, if you want a consummate load carrier, go elsewhere.

As our reviewer Percy Lawman commented during his six-month long-term test of an HR-V, ‘a large family weekly shop filled the boot with ease (below) and we needed to double-stack the bags. While dropping the rear seats helped immensely, together with Honda’s Magic Seats being prodded into action, you’d struggle to get very much inside if you were seating four people.’

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Is it easy to park?

The car’s squat dimensions ensure it is relatively easy to park. The sloping roofline makes the rear window a bit narrow, but all models come with a reversing camera and front and rear parking sensors.

Safety

• Four out of five star safety rating
• Lots of kit as standard
• Some of it is quite annoying

Safety authority EuroNCAP gave the HR-V four out of five in 2022. It scored particularly well for adult occupation safety, but didn’t achieve a high enough result in the vulnerable road users category to achieve a full five out of five scoring.

All trims broadly share the same safety features. This includes a Lane Keeping Assist System, Lane Departure Warning and Road Departure Mitigation. Only the Blindspot Info and Cross Traffic Monitor are absent from the now discontinued entry-level Elegance model.

Generally all of the safety tech works well, but the Road Departure Mitigation Warning system kicks in far too easily. It really tugs at the steering wheel aggressively at times when it simply doesn’t need to, and you need to manually switch it off every time your drive.

Watch: Honda HR-V Euro NCAP crash test