Manual Survivor: 1985 Honda Civic DX Hatchback
Lightweight, carbureted, and built with a focus on durability over refinement, mid 80s Civics delivered straightforward transportation with just enough engagement to keep drivers interested. Before fuel injection and added complexity became standard, this generation captured Honda at its most elemental: small, efficient, and engineered to work with minimal fuss. Today’s example is a manual transmission equipped survivor that rarely makes it this far intact and free from tuners, stickers, or telephone polls. Find this 1985 Honda Civic DX Hatchback offered for $4,500 in Seattle, WA via craigslist.
From the seller:
1985 honda civic
fuel: gas
odometer: 127,000
title status: clean
transmission: manual
more ads by this sellerFor sale is a 1985 Honda Civic in well preserved original condition. It’s remarkably original, right down to the sheepskin seat covers, factory radio, and original owner’s manual.
The car has a 5-speed manual transmission and shows just 127,000 miles. It is a local Washington car from Bellevue and had only one owner before I acquired it.
Everything on the car functions properly. The original Keihin carburetor is still in place and has not been modified. It does take a little while to warm up due to the original emissions era carburetor.
If your plan is to daily drive the car, some preventative maintenance may be worth considering simply due to its originality and age. Happy to go over with prospective buyers what that might look like.
I am a licensed Washington State auto dealer. Any in-state sale will include applicable tax and licensing. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to schedule a time to come see the car.
See a better way to drive something reddish? tips@dailyturismo.com
The icing on the cake for me is the factory passenger side mirror delete. I would daily drive it.
It was too clean not to send in…
Oh my, the car that got me all the way through college as a flat-broke student with no parents to grease the chute into adulthood. Seriously, a silver DX identical to this one gave me 100k miles of trouble free service on top of the 100k miles on its odometer when I bought it, making it the most reliable and faithful steed one could hope for. Hyperbole aside, it was almost mythical in its trustworthiness.
If we weren’t packing our household to F-off to the Netherlands for the rest of our lives, I’d be calling this seller.
Careful – you’ll make everyone jealous.
So much love. I had the SI version of this car in the 90s on Maui. Finished putting in a new clutch sometime after dark one night and drove that thing like a bat out of hell down Hana Hwy on its first test drive. So sweet.
When it came time to sell I arranged to meet a woman at her house that was interested. When I got there she told me she was too high to drive herself but she asked if it was ok if she sat in the passenger seat while I test drove it for her. Funniest part of this is that being a maui car older than a year or two not was riddled with rust. Especially around the sunroof. Especially around the passenger side of the sunroof. Also being on the north shore it was pouring rain. So, I handed her the towel I kept for just this purpose, and took off down the road with buckets of water pouring on her. She didn’t seem to mind and bought it.