I’m not exactly sure when automakers fully embraced the idea that for a little extra time when you’re designing injection-molded plastic bits for your car, you can include little visual treats that make people happy. And, generally, this plan works! People love finding little surprises (fun stuff, not a jumped timing chain) in their cars, and we call them Easter Eggs, after the practice of hiding similar things in video games, which was named after the practice of hiding actual dyed chicken eggs from a rabbit, which is a mammal that does not lay eggs, to somehow commemorate that Jesus didn’t stay dead for too long, or something. Anyway, Honda’s new Civic has one, and it’s great.
A poster on the Civic 11 Forum message board discovered the Easter Egg, which is a nice line drawing of the original first-gen Civic:
The drawing is one of those flattened-out sorts of things, where all sides of the car are there, which makes me think that if you had a sharp enough blade and were willing to sacrifice the plastic coin tray that’s under the center console lid (and probably some blood from your fingertips), you could laboriously make yourself a little old-school (looks like a 1972 JDM one to me) Civic model!
It might look like this:
Seriously, if anyone does decide to hack up that little plastic tray to make this, please take a picture and send it in. I bet it would be really cool! That plastic is usually pretty tough, but I bet you could just score and bend most of those edges.
That same poster, DallasCRX, also made a nice little interior tour of the 2022 Civic, if you’d like to take a look:
Anyway, good job, Honda, and I encourage all automakers to keep this kind of thing up, because why the hell not, right?
DISCUSSION
I LOVED those folding cars when I was a kid. Mid 90's when I was around 7 years old I saw a folding paper car maybe as an advertisement in a paper airplane book. I thought the idea was brilliant and developed my own hand-drawn blueprint and made the entire NASCAR field at the time. A few years later I learned enough about Microsoft PowerPoint to digitize it and again reproduced the whole fleet, maybe age 9 at that point. I made some custom cars as well, and had some oval tracks made of masking tape lines and cardboard in my bedroom, and would pretend race the cars and crash them, etc. I recently uncovered a box of them when I was cleaning my storage area of my childhood home. Nothing says mid 90s like choosing to put Pokemon as the trunk lid sponsor.