I must admit I still don't like the interior or exterior.
It's dark, that door card is both awkward in shape for getting in / out with a big pointy piece sticking forwards and ugly, and every time I've sat in the new Civic I've failed to see any real improvement in interior materials.
The new cabin seems smaller and more tightly wrapped around the driver. Some might call it ergonomic, personally I'd call it more claustrophobic (the dark colours may be a contributing factor here).
To me the steering wheel no longer appears or feels leather (maybe it isn't in some models I don't know, only that I've sat in several £23K versions and for which price I'd expect leather and leather that looked and felt to me like leather).
At a time when other manufacturers are putting alu accents on their steering wheels and dash as it adds a real quality feel, Honda have removed the alu look inserts from theirs again making it look dark and boring. If they wanted to improve quality then why not real alu as the mesh was never going to get caught and scratched as its pretty hard to scratch mesh.
Against the new dark wheel with no accents the info button / cruise control buttons are very difficult to spot in lower light conditions as they're black on black.
The dash top looks / feels no real improvement in material to me, just darker.
The gear lever is leather but just looks plusher, again I'm not seeing the material improvement, in fact to me it looks a little bulbous and fat now as the leather seems fatter. If anything my 1st thought was it looks like one of those cheap after market ones you buy from tuning companies.
I agree entirely on the rear wiper. why not park it at the bottom against the spoiler?
I've heard the new information system doesn't work well, but not tried it myself. Personally, I saw nothing wrong with the last one. Some journalists blasted it as complicated but I thought it was simple with a simple rotation through the menus and compared to some of the new twist controls with multi level menus on the new BMW's and Audi's, the old Civic one looks easy to access to me and it worked well.
As for the exterior, nose ok, sides ok, back dreadful. Saw one in a car park last week in blue and honestly mistook it for a Prius until I drove past it on the way out and saw the Honda badge.
That said, I've seen a Milano Red one on the road at long last and I have to admit the rear doesn't look as bad on the Milano as on the other colours. However, can you really seriously seek to sell a car based on it looking ok in one colour?
TBH I still don't know why Honda toned the looks of the Civic down as they were it's best selling point - individuality. To my mind taking those looks forward and introducing higher quality materials to co-inside with those looks eg real alu instead of plastic was the real way forwards.
Externally I suppose a lot of the shape is dictated by wind tunnel, but then again I'm sure something could have been done with the back to improve the cosmetics and if there were drag compromises to be made on the rear due to aesthetic considerations, these could easily have been countered with a full under tray as I suggested before as the underside of a car is widely acknowledged as I understand it to be the biggest contributor to drag.