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Originally Posted by psyshack
I cant help but get alittle pissed when I open the hood of my EX and see the intergrated exhaust manifold into the head. I honestly beleive if they had built the 1.8 with no vtec it would do as good as the hybrid. IE a HX. Which IMO is why there isnt a HX. the one place i know I could have got some grunt out of my EX they saw fit to take away with the head exhaust manifold design.
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The HX as well as the VX before it had VTEC. In fact, they claimed you can't really do the lean-burn without it because you need the very high swirl of the single intake valve mode in learn-burn mode to avoid detonation. Speaking as an HX owner though, I have serious doubts that the HX can come anywhere near the hybrid in city driving. Maybe real close on the highway, especially at higher speeds where the FE really drops off for the hybrids, but there's just some physical limitations to a larger ICE that doesn't do autostop.
As for the cylinder head design, the HX was actually the first Civic to adopt that, back in 1996. The header wasn't
totally built into the head the way it is now, but the HX was different from all the other Civics in that it had a special super short exhaust runner exhaust manifold that went directly into the catalyst, immidiately next to the exhuast ports on the cylinder head. Most everyone started doing it that way in the years that followed, but that was definitely something you saw very early on in the HX. It's pretty much mandatory these days if you want to pass the latest emissions regs.