This year’s winner of the ecoEnergy for Vehicles Award in the compact-car category was the Honda Civic Hybrid, which delivers a remarkable 4.7 litres per 100 kilometres in town and 4.3 litres per 100 kilometres on the highway. The awards, handed out by Natural Resources Canada, recognize the most fuel-efficient cars sold each year, and the Civic Hybrid is the second-most-frugal automobile on the market, right behind the Toyota Prius.

But everyone and his dog wants a hybrid these days, and they’re in short supply. They’re also, well, somewhat less than stimulating. The Civic Hybrid (which isn’t a “full” hybrid, but that’s another story) is amazingly thrifty, no argument, but it’s about as much fun behind the wheel as a root canal. We all want to do the right thing besides softening the blow of rising fuel costs, but does driving have to be boring?

With extremely competitive fuel economy and a high drivability factor, the Honda Civic DX-G Coupe says no. This is a stylish, thrifty, clean, and enjoyable nonhybrid car to spend time in. And not just in flat-out acceleration; the DX-G has superior braking ability, corners better, and has a much higher level of refinement than anything else in this category.

And it isn’t even the high-performance version of the Civic. It’s near the bottom of the model range, in terms of trim level and equipment. The Si version-with almost 200 horsepower-is a seriously fast little car, but the DX-G, with some 140 horses on tap, is still lively enough to go from a standing start to 100 kilometres per hour in about eight seconds, according to my unofficial acceleration runs.

This is thanks, of course, to the marvellous i-VTEC power plant that sits under the hood. Displacing 1.8 litres, it has a single overhead camshaft, four valves per cylinder, and Honda’s variable valve timing arrangement, which gives it a nice little power boost when the engine is spinning at higher rates. You simply won’t find a smoother, livelier, or more frugal four-cylinder engine on the market today. In addition to serving up sports-car-like performance, the Civic DX-G with five-speed manual transmission qualifies for a federal-government ecoAuto rebate to the tune of $1,000. (This is only for the current model year; after that, it’s up in the air. For information, go to www.ecoaction.gc.ca/.)

The manual transmission in this car is a thing of beauty. Tight shift gate, well-spaced gear ratios, buttery-smooth linkage, light clutch action-I think it’s safe to say that Honda has pretty much mastered this end of the market in terms of drivetrain refinement. You can get a five-speed automatic with the DX-G for an additional $1,200, but that changes its character. Given the usability of the manual-gearbox setup, I’d save the money and go on a holiday somewhere. The automatic is also slightly thirstier.

For its $19,780 base price ($300 more than the sedan), the DX-G Coupe comes with all the basic prerequisites. Interior amenities include air conditioning-which is an option with the base DX version-power windows, remote locking, steering-wheel-mounted cruise control, tilt steering, an auxiliary MP3 input jack, and a fold-down rear seatback. It isn’t exactly brimming with mod cons or luxury features, but it has what you need.

But enough brown-nosing. A couple of things about this car bugged me severely. Number one is back-seat access, which is terrible. Although there’s a release pedal on the passenger-side front seat, I could find no such convenience on the driver’s side. Once they’ve shimmied in, back-seat passengers will find things almost claustrophobic back there-or cozy, depending on your point of view-and to get into the back seat requires a bit of squeezing and flexibility. Large people will find it particularly snug, and if you have a family or plan to carry passengers on a regular basis, my advice would be to check out the DX-G sedan. The sedan also has a slightly larger trunk-340 litres versus the coupe’s 327 litres.

Nor do I like the instrumentation and dash binnacle, which strike me as unnecessary and an example of change for its own sake. The previous-generation Civic had ergonomics and instrumentation that were just fine, thank you very much.

That said, these things wouldn’t stop me from buying the car, were I in the market for a thrifty, very drivable economy coupe. They just don’t come any better.