"Squirrelly" [sic] Handling (Globe and Mail)

What happens is that in an overly aggressive cornering, the rear motors go into the kind of vectoring that you might have experienced if you've driven an old fashioned Honda or Acura equipped with a Torsen axle.

This could be anything like the DC2 ITR to the modern day Civic Si Coupe.

If you've pushed it to the limit, the car starts hunting for traction left/right, left/right, left/right until you're done with whatever it is you've done to provoke this.

I'm sort of used to this because my '00 ITR #110 ended its life as a high HP K Motor hybrid with a mechanical Torsen axle on the front end. You got used to it and expected the car to hunt left, right, left, right if you pushed it beyond what was normally logical.

But we should not drive that way on the street. It's there for an ultimate handling scenario and controlling it can be unexpected if you're not prepared for it.

What happens with the Sport Hybrid when you push it that far is very similar, but with one major exception: Since it's happening at the back end of the car, it can have an adverse effect if you're not prepared, causing an inexperienced driver to provoke wider yaw angles trying to correct something that does not need correcting, and before you know it the car will intervene aggressively, thinking that you've lost control....and maybe you are about to lose control without the car's intervention.

If you watch the video of how the car handles roads that are partially iced over, you can see a visual representation of how the rear motors power left/right, left/right until you're on solid ground.

On dry pavement, a roundabout or a hard corner isn't necessarily going to have consistent and appropriately abrasive traction across the entire section of it just because it is dry.

Moreover, if you've pushed the car to its limits it is going to lose traction somehow, on one side or the other first, and when it gets traction on the lost side it might have lost it on the side that had traction when you started this unwise maneuver.

At some point the car is going to intervene because it will think you've lost your mind and the car's on the verge of going out of control.

But it is possible to be at the limit without intervention, with the rear motors searching for traction at the tail end while at the same time trying to keep track of what you are doing with the greater power on the nose of the car. One or the other of the front wheels is probably not at full grip while you're doing this, either, and you don't have a Torsen axle on the nose the way you did in your ITR or your old six speed TL, which further exacerbates what the computer is trying to do with the rear motors.

The Sport Hybrid is in no way any kind of super car.

However, it has a hell of a lot more power than we are used to seeing in a Honda sedan, and if you don't realize that it is not a Glorified Accord then you might be in for some surprises.