Hey everybody, it's Peter and this is the 2023 Honda CR-V and it is a vehicle that really impresses me. It has a couple things that I wish they would tweak on it, but very, very good vehicle. And in this video review I'm gonna go in depth with things. I'm gonna try to show you some things that the other videos aren't showing you, but of course if you have questions, I wanna make sure that I answer them. So I have two of them in stock today. I'm just gonna film the sport model, but there's also a , LX all-wheel drive model or LX front wheel drive model that I can film. And if you have questions, let me know when the comments below and make sure you hit subscribe. If you're a fan of this vehicle, hit subscribe. I'm gonna be able to follow up with these because I'm filming here at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals of course gives me complete access to their entire vehicle lineup so that I can answer your questions.

So like I said, we're gonna go in depth. Let's get going with this review. So I'm gonna start here at the front end of this car and we're gonna talk styling, we're gonna talk safety, we're gonna talk a number of things that you probably don't see just by wandering by the car, but you know, nerds like me kind of pick it up and they make a difference to the way you drive. So first thing we should talk about is this is an all new model. It's not just a refresh. A lot of time a model will go through a mid-cycle refresh, they call it, it'll be a couple years in. They'll give it new plastic parts. So new bumpers, new headlights, that kind of thing. New taillights. This one is all new and all new is usually pretty interesting because they start to add things in to bring it right up to date and oftentimes leapfrog their competitors.

And you've got a couple little things in here that are bringing it up to date and a couple little things that are minor differences that I think make a difference. So first of all, you'll probably can't see from the camera view you're up, but just above the rear view mirror in the center of the windshield, there's a camera, pretty much class standard stuff for that right now. But that camera does a whole bunch of things for you. It helps you with forward collision avoidance, it helps you with um, lane keeping assist and all those kind of things. So basically that camera is gonna give you a whole bunch of up-to-date safety features. And of course the CR V has it in this sport model here. The other thing you get on a lot of these cards is a radar plate somewhere. Now most of the competitors in this class are not mounting it behind a logo.
It's kind of a bit of an ugly, uh, rectangular panel, usually mounted very low. This one here appears to be to me behind the logo. Now there's a couple reasons this is good. First of all, styling wise, it looks better. Who cares about styling? Let's talk about actual practicality. When these radar plates drive in, wintery, snowy, slushy conditions especially they can get covered with slush and therefore you lose some of the functionality of what that radar plate does. Again, some things like four collision avoidance, uh, advanced cruise control, those kinds of things, mounting it up higher on the dash, keeps it out of the really slushy areas on those slushy days and allows it to be a little bit more reliable when you mount it up higher it, again, it's an ugly plate, they camouflage it behind the Honda logo and that's very good. And you can see it's a good size plate here. 
Good size logo. The other thing you're gonna notice with the CRV, a little bit more of a squared off front end and you might think, oh, it's got a really big engine in it. It doesn't. It has a 1.5 liter turbo. It's also available in a hybrid 1.5 turbo sort of class competitive for for power. So I'll flash the power numbers off on screen. I have them partially memorized, but I don't wanna get them wrong. So there's your power and torque numbers up on screen and that's class competitive. Now this vehicle can tow, it has a CV T transmission, but it only tows about 1500 pounds. That is one area where some competitors can tow a little bit more. I don't know that that's gonna concern a lot of people, but 1500 pounds is not enough to pull the average small camping trailer. It is enough to pull a lightweight, um, you know, utility trailer or something like that. 

Really what they're saying is, Hey, we're gonna put a hitch on this thing. You can put your bike racks on it. If you have something very lightweight like taking your lawn tractor in for service or something like that, sure you can do that as well. But this is not a, you know, high capacity towing vehicle and I think most RV owners are gonna be fine with that. Honda does research, they know who their buyers are. So that's the front end. Let's check out the rear end. Now over here at the rear end of the vehicle, you can kind of start to see the little bit of a shape difference on this. Now if I came at it straight on, you would say, Hey, it's kind of bland and really it's lost some of that identifiable CRV look from the side. It's got some Volkswagen lines to it. 
It's got some just, you know, mix of everything else into it. It is unique, it is Honda for sure, but from the side it doesn't always look like a CR-V. What it does do is it looks a little bit longer now it is a little bit longer. It's about one and a half inches longer between the wheel base. So center of this wheel, the center of that wheel and it's about three inches longer. Overall, that does give you some interior space advantages, but it's not so much longer that it's any worse for drivability. Still very easy to park, still very easy to drive back here on the back, if we look straight on, which we'll get to in a second, you can see that, uh, still very CRV looking. This one does have the power tailgate. Higher trim levels will allow you to have that kick underneath power tailgate. 
This one does not have that, but I do wanna show you the trunk here. First of all, I'm six feet tall. You can see easy to fit underneath here and you can just reach up to close it right there. Um, or you can use your key FOB remote, lots of things. If you're shorter and you really can't reach that, use your key fob remote, no problem. But let's show you the trunk here cuz they do things well. So the big thing you're gonna notice here is very, very accessible space. Not only is it large and wide, it's also very, very square. So even though the car kind of comes down like this, they don't have that sort of cutout and cut in over here very square, which means that you can use this practically to do all kinds of things. Now there's a couple things I like and just one little thing that I don't love, but it's not the end of the world.
First of all, that square siding got the L E D lights down low here. You've got a 12 volt power port, you've got little grocery bag hooks down here, little bit storage space down here. And right now I have the floor in the lower position. Now it's not a whole lot lower, a couple inches, uh, but you have underneath here there is a spare tire down there and you, the way the spare tire is set out, you could stick some gym equipment, gym shoes, stuff like that. If you got smelly gym shoes, smelly uh shorts, that kind of thing, throw 'em underneath the floor, you won't smell 'em. Now this floor is able to rise up like this and sit in like that and that means that the floor is level with the back uh, here. So if you're sliding things in and out, you have a little bit extra under floor storage if you wanted that there.
And again, still a very large trunk space. The only thing I don't love is the seats of course fold down. There is a little lip there to fold the seats down so they are flat when they're folded. But there is a lip, I don't know it's the end of the world, but if you're designing a new model, it's the kind of thing I'd like to be able to see where you could just slide it flat, but again, really not the end of the world. Very good cargo storage space here. Slim zoom, din Z. You can't see the full vehicle here. We are gonna focus on the rear doors and rear seats here in a second. One thing I do like though is the doors front and rear wrap around the outside of the body. Now here in Canada of course we have a lot of salt, a lot of dirt, a lot of all kinds of things.

And when you're driving in the winter, all of those things accumulate right here. If you're getting out of a slightly taller vehicle, sometimes your pant legs could rub against the bottom of the door sill. But because these doors wrap around, the door sill stays clean and then you can see that you won't get that on your pant leg. Something that's very good. Some of their competitors do it. I'm looking at my watches cuz that's my viewfinder. Looks like you can see me fine. So let's just jump right in. First thing you're gonna notice the doors open really, really wide on the crv. Now that is good for two things in particular. First of all, passengers getting in and out, that kind of thing. If you have people that need a little bit extra mobility, elderly people, something like that, having those doors open, extra wide matters.Where I think it's good for a lot of people in this market is also for child seats. Whether it's kids or grands kids, you've got a lot of room to move in this door opening here to fit child seats and you've got good space overall. So this sport model is kind of an in the middle kind of model. Uh, looks very nice on the outside, doesn't have some of the luxuries on the inside, but very comfortable. Rear rear seats here. So I'm six feet tall, plenty of head room here. I have an entire fist worth of space above my head because it does kind of curl up loose space for the sunroof and then curls up above my head. L e d, white lighting in here. Cloth seats are fine. Now again, there's no plastic backing here like some of the competitors have. So if you've got kids in those car seats, they are gonna get this cloth a little bit dirty.
You may wanna run a cover down there. Interestingly as well, there's no pocket on the driver's side, only on the passenger side. This goes back to those old map book days. Used to have your map book and not MacBook like an computer but an actual map in a book. And the driver had to have that accessible to them. Nowadays those are used for the PA rear seat passengers. So why they don't put one on this side but they do on that side. I don't know, that's something I'd like to see you do events back here, but no USB ports. I don't know if that's the end of the world. I believe the higher trims would have that. But again, just for passenger comfort. Excellent here, good room, good visibility, good space. It's kind of a theater style seating so I'm looking up above the seats in front of me, you know, very, very, very good backseat here. (08:44)
So let's hop in the car now as we do that, I'll show you what the key fob looks like. If we can just get it in the light here. Simple lock unlock. You do have a remote start and you have that hold, uh, to open the trunk there. Hold for panic button, well nice Honda logo on the back. So looks nice. Not too large in your pocket. Simple, simple key. Let's throw them in my pocket right now. And of course that gives you keyless entry into the car, which you can kind of see. There's a little bit of a lock, uh, buttons there. Not even a button. Just sort of touch sensitive pad with the little three lines there. Let's jump in now and see what we've got. First of all, even though I said this kind of an in between model, you do have a proper uh, powered seat here. So you have powered seat power back and lumbar adjustment right there. And I will say the seats in this

Vehicle are excellent, very comfortable, nice long, um, seating down there, good Support, uh, laterally as well. So side to side then you get some interesting things in here. You can kind of see in the shot I'm giving you right now. Only part of this in front of us is the screen. So we're gonna turn it to the on position but not start the car. And what's interesting is if you just kind of look at it straight on the camera actually shows more of that screen than your eyes can see. But it looks like a regular set of gauges here. But you do have a proper gauge on the right and then a screen on the left, I guess that's a cost saving thing cuz you could go a screen a hole across but really you don't need it. You wanna ome ready the whole time and you could cycle through various settings in here. There's a number of things we could show you and it'll probably leave most of that right now. Tells me to fasten my seatbelt and there's things I can do. Actually you know what, lemme just see if I fasten my seatbelt if that Helps it.

Uh, show some extra things here. Tell me how to start the car. Of course we're not starting the car so there we go. Seat belt's, we're gonna go to the home. There's your fuel efficiency number of things in here. Uh, trip a, trip B, that kind of thing. Uh, and again, fuel efficiency. Again, ignore fuel efficiency numbers in any dealership. Car, uh, these cars idle a lot before they go anywhere. And you can see this one has got 111 kilometers on. It is literally brand new. So CRV is available. Two different screens. This is the smaller seven inch screen. There's also a nine inch screen available but very clear, very good. This one has am fm. It does not have satellite radio but of course you can connect your phone up to this Bluetooth stream, all sorts of things. Uh, you do see a flickering on your, on the camera, on your screen, but it does not flicker in real life at all.
That's just the way it interacts with um, the vehicle here. I will say with that larger hood here, you really don't see or feel it here. It's very good visibility out outta this car. And I'm not sure that it is a larger hood. It just appears visually, visually larger because the end of the nose instead of curling down like older CRVs is squared up a little bit more. Uh, tough looking. That might also be for um, there's passenger or uh, pedestrian collision standards now that are coming in place and having a little taller front uh, area helps with that. So good. L e d lights. Nice sharp cutoff. Again, l e d lights are standard on this vehicle. You've got a couple of interesting things. There's a missed opportunity here to me. Let's just go wide angle for a second here. It's gonna skew the view a little bit but it gives you a view of the whole dash. 
So they have this kind of metal great across here and uh, you've got these little joysticks that allow you to adjust the vents in here. I'm just gonna pull my sleeve up so I don't actually stop my watch which will uh, stop the video here. But this metal grate is an opportunity that Hyundai takes advantage in their Santa Cruz in their Tucson by making this whole area be able to diffuse air to you. They don't do that with Honda so it looks consistent visually, but it only has vents here, here and there. Hyundai does have a little interesting option down there. Really good stuff down here you have heated seats so I like to call them rump roasters. Driver's seat and passenger seat have rump roasters. You have automatic climate control. It's a dual zone system, very clear, easy to read, uh, system, very big buttons, very nice. 
Uh, uh, dials in here. So again, a relatively minimalist look to the dash but super simple, easy to control, uh, controls down here, down here on this particular model, you do have a little l e d light down there. You can see my fingers are kind of lit up so you have some lighting in this very large area to place your phone, tablet, a little small iPad with easily fit in there as well. And uh, you do have U usb uh, S B A and U SB C port. So the both style of USB as well as the 12 volt port. This one does not have wireless Android auto or Apple CarPlay, but it does have Android auto and Apple CarPlay just not wireless. So again, you can plug 'em in there and uh, get the full extension of that which is helpful. And again, the whole idea of having that map book pocket in the back of the seats, you don't really need that cuz you're gonna have Android auto and apple CarPlay, which means you can have Google maps, apple maps, all those navigation apps right up there, which is super san handy drive modes. 

You know what, I haven't played with these yet. So we have normal econ and snow. So nice little display screen in here. Let's just zoom right into that as we cycle through them again, again, screens are very hard to film clearly. Oh you can see that right there. Uh, econ is I guess a nice spring summer day. Uh, normal is driving in the city interesting and snow. So again, what this does is it doesn't really give you better efficiency in the econ mode, um, than normal. But what it does is if you're driving efficiently anyways, this car's gonna set itself up to give you great fuel efficiency. Uh, same thing with the snow. If you're driving a snow, it's gotta set itself up to not slip to do those kinds of things. So very simple stuff. Does have a little beep when it changes. I don't know if you can change that. 
Let's, we'll have to figure out that out a little bit later. Simple things like hill descent control. If you're camping going on a super steep road, it does allow it to control. These are sort of off-road type features that have made into these cars that I think most users are not gonna use. Now again, I mentioned it's a CVT transmission that's pretty class standard stuff right now, so we'll just kind of come back here. Good cup holders in here, little spot right there for extra things. And I will say there's one thing I like about this, uh, little uh, glove box here. This little piece can be moved. I know it's such a simple little thing but it locked in place there or there. So some people, you know, I like to keep my sunglasses in here. They can go deep and I have 'em in a case kind of thing. 
But if you just wanna keep your wallet up here at the easy reach, you can keep that there as well. While I mentioned sunglasses, let's just go all the way up, all the way up and you can see your sunroof controls are right here. We will flip around, show you some of that a little bit later, but later you have bright white l e d controls there, which I really like. And speaking of sunglasses, you can hold them there if you want, uh, which probably most people would. I have weird sunglasses and they need a regular case. So coming back down to the steering wheel. Now let's take a look at some of these safety controls. Again, we're still wide angle here, so there's a little bit of skewed uh, view here. Heated steering wheel buttons right on the steering wheel. I feel like that slightly ruins the look of steering wheel, but it's super logical and it makes total sense. 
Um, you know, I think this is probably where most people should put heated steering wheels down there on the pillars over here's a lot of your safety and cruise control type thing. So I'm gonna turn on, let's say the cruise control and then you can adjust the cruise control. So lemme just show you how this works for a second. Whoa, sorry about that. I'm gonna try to get the dash here again and fill me a little bit of a dark environment. So excuse the graininess, but let's turn on the cruise control for a second there. Let's, uh, adjust it here. So this allows the car to show a visual representation of how far or how close you want to get. This is a smart cruise control. So the idea being, let me just zoom right out fully is that as you're looking out the window here, you have a car in front of you.
Let's say the car is like, you know, way out there, the car, this car will go up to it and stay back a certain distance. If you want to close that distance, you have this visual representation down here which will zoom right back in again, which shows you, hey, that's a long ways out and I can close that distance. So where the car, um, can keep itself, uh, nice and close, um, with that smart cruise control. So you have that smart cruise control, again, that's using that radar plate. That is the Honda logo. You also have, let's just come normal angles here. Uh, the lane keeping assist button here with your cruise control buttons right there. Lane keeping of course is helping in some ways sort of self steer. The car keeps it centered, that uses that camera that's up in the dash. Remember we said there's a camera out above the mirror that's looking forward and that can see the lane markers and uh, do something like that. 
There's a lot of things that that camera can do over here. Mostly audio controls up here. And then you have some of the center, uh, gauge cluster controls down there as well. Good controls overall on everything. You do have a little defroster on where the windshield wipers sit on the front windshield, open the trunk right there. Uh, so good stuff all together here. Lot of uh, nice safety features and a lot I stuff. Let's sweep the camera around for one second and show you myself. So what I like about the CRV is the seats are excellent. There's really nothing to not like here. Driving position is good. You have a tilt telescopic steering wheel. Um, like I said the support on the seats, the adjustability, everything about that is very good. I can move the seat up or down quite a bit, but I mean headroom is absolutely great. (16:51)
Again, I'm six feet tall, lots of room here. If you're shorter you can move up. You still sit a little low in this car so you will want to raise that seat if you're shorter but it's not really an issue. Um, you know, compared to the dash here you can uh, certainly get high enough. Uh, you got a six speaker stereo system here even in this sort of mid trim line. So the sport trim gives it a sporty look on the outside 19 inch wheels on the outside, those black, uh, tinted rim rims, uh, but kind of that midline ish look here if you want leather and a few extra features you could move up from here. But again, there is still that LX below that. So you can go the Honda all-wheel drive or Honda front wheel drive that we have here at Jim Gilbert's, Wheels and Deals. 
And you can check that one out as well. The CRV is has been a popular vehicle for a long time. The space, you know, it's very good front and rear space, very good trunk space. So having that extra inch, uh, inch and a half of wheelbase and three inches of length, you do sort of feel that inside of the cabin here. They did a good job of giving you space. It has stepped up. It's kind of that in-betweener. Now, you know, you have competitors, uh, let's say just Kia and Hyundai. You've got that Santa Fe Sorento that's just a hair bigger than this now. And then you've got the Sportage, which is just, you know, probably similar to this now. But then you've got that whole class of cars. Um, underneath this, the Honda has the HR-V underneath this and there's a whole bunch of competitors that kind of feel the gap of where the original CRV was. (18:10)
That gap below um, was very popular and is less expensive, but it does give you a little bit less space. So this is no longer that small crossover. It's kind of that medium small crossover now and the lines are really blurred across the area. And that leads me to the one issue I have with this. Let's discuss that as we hop outta the car. While we're still here. Should point out there's a sunroof, pretty good placement right above the driver's, uh, head there. But let's talk about the one small problem I have with this car and why it's probably not a problem here at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals.

So what is that one small issue I have with this car? Well, Honda continues to believe that this is the upper end of this segment and they price it accordingly. It's a little bit higher priced than some competitors. You can go all kinds of, uh, different vehicles and get a few more options, few more features, sometimes some more size for the price point, but that's a Honda issue here at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals. The best thing is this is now a used vehicle and you can compare it alongside all of its competitors, whether that's the rav4, whether that's Kia and Hyundai products, Mitsubishi, bigger products, all kinds of things. NI Nissan Rogue is also a strong contender in this category. Now they're all here and they're all here right now. So you can compare this and decide for yourself if it's worth it. Honda continues to hold their resale values. 
So they do very well. They're priced high, but they continue to sell well in the used market. So you don't really lose the value, but it is a little bit more expensive than it maybe used to be way back in the day. And compared to its competitors, there are options below. Having said that, would I buy this car? Absolutely. I think it's a very good vehicle. There's really nothing wrong with this. And that's what Honda's done so well is they've done, uh, made it regretable to a lot of people. They've given it enough power, they've given it enough comfort, they've given enough features to make it a really competitive car in its class. You just have to decide if you wanna pay that Honda Premium. That Honda now seems to believe they can get. And let's be honest, this is still a very good selling vehicle.
They're getting that price point. So here we are filming at Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals. If you wanna see this car, like I said, there's also a front wheel drive lx. These are both 2023 models. You can compare 'em against all of its competitors. And if you have questions that I didn't get to in this video, let me know when the comments below because I'll continue to come back to you with the answers on video because again, Jim Gilbert's Wheels and Deals gives me complete access to their entire vehicle line. So thanks everybody for watching. Make sure you subscribe if you wanna know more about this vehicle cause we'll come back with it again and again. Thanks everybody for watching. Have a good one.