2021 Honda CR-V Hybrid Review

"You can't have your cake and eat it" has to be one of the more confusing English phrases around, right alongside "going cold turkey" and "by the skin of your teeth." But what if we changed it to: "You can't buy an SUV and get good fuel economy." See, instantly better! This page relates our experiences testing a CR-V Hybrid Touring over the course of one year. Our long-term testing program is where we go into more detail than our normal vehicle reviews. Here you'll read comments and see videos from our entire editorial test team as they go about their daily lives in our CR-V Hybrid.

While sometimes we purchases vehicles for its long-term test program, this particular CR-V Hybrid is graciously on loan from Honda. It's the top-level Touring trim, which means it's fully loaded with features such as leather upholstery, a sunroof, a premium audio system and a hands-free power liftgate. Our color combo is Obsidian Blue Pearl paint and gray leather upholstery. This is the only interior leather color available for the blue paint, but you can get black or ivory leather with some of the CR-V's other paint colors. Honda doesn't do option packages, so picking a CR-V Hybrid simply comes down to deciding which one of the three trims EX, EX-L and Touring has the features you need and/or matches your budget. The MSRP of our test vehicle was $37,470, including the destination and handling charge. One cool thing about among many, I assure you! is that we do our own fuel economy testing. The long-term program, in particular, allows us to determine how well a vehicle does over many thousands of miles compared to the EPA's official estimates. Naturally, higher fuel economy is a big reason you'd want to consider a Honda CR-V Hybrid instead of a regular CR-V. Based on EPA estimates, a CR-V Hybrid will get 38 mpg in combined driving. That's an attractive 31% boost over a regular CR-V with all-wheel drive (AWD); it gets an estimated 29 mpg. I'm comparing AWD models here because the CR-V Hybrid only comes with AWD. Yeah, pretty much. Our test started in January of 2021. Through that month and early February, we had a lifetime average of around 31 mpg. Not great but not terrible either. Then we took our CR-V Hybrid on a 4,300-mile cross-country road trip in late February and its fuel economy nose-dived. The CR-V's lifetime nadir was 26.4 mpg. We've since gotten a string of better fill-ups, boosting our CR-V to 28.3 mpg lifetime as of early August 2021. Cue up the saying: "Your mileage may vary." As a partial explanation, the road conditions on that 4,300-mile road trip were awful. Our video production manager, Amy Sillman, drove from Los Angeles to Louisiana, Louisiana to Chicago, and then back home to Los Angeles. This was in late February and right at the time of a big nationwide snowstorm. You know, the one where Texas froze over and stranded big rigs littered the highways. The freezing temperatures and frozen roads didn't do our CR-V's fuel economy any favors. First off, know that we've never gotten the EPA's estimate of 38 mpg from any fill-up. But we're recorded two fill-ups that show the CR-V Hybrid's potential. The first was back in February 2021 when I got 35.4 mpg after driving about 290 miles in the city. For those 290 miles I made an effort to not accelerate hard or do anything that would kill fuel economy. More recently, in July 2021, I got an even better result: 36.1 mpg. This came from 267 miles of primarily driving on curvy two-lane roads north of San Francisco along the Pacific coast. Most of the time I was driving about 50 mph. I'm actually proud of that 36.1 mpg result, as if I got a new all-time high score on a video game. I'll also point out that: a) 2 mpg equates to about 5% less than the EPA's 38 mpg, which means we're pretty close; and b) hey, 36.1 mpg! Not too shabby from a small SUV. But there's also a caveat: That 36.1 mpg result came about from what I'd consider optimum conditions — slowish speeds, not too many stops, and enjoyable temperatures that did not require much heating or air conditioning. My guess is that it's going to stand as our CR-V Hybrid's upper limit.