Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This hitch is said to be compatible with Honda Civics from 1992-2000 as well as some other Honda models, I believe. I read several reviews via Google before purchasing, and the majority of people said this hitch installed without any trouble at all. I did, however, find one person with a 1992 Civic that said they had to get shorter carriage bolts to get it to install.
My car is a 1994 Honda Civic LX 4 door, and unfortunately, installation was not exactly easy. I imagine there are subtle differences over the various Civic years and variations (2dr vs 4dr) that can make this hitch very easy or rather troublesome to install. The instructions said to fish the carriage bolts through the box beam and into the mounting holes. The instructions were not terribly clear which holes, but after holding the hitch up to the car, it's fairly obvious which holes are correct. Once the proper holes are established, you're suppose to fish the carriage bolts through the box beam, along with a thick rectangular plate for each bolt, and pull the bolts down through the holes. Now, here was my particular problem: the bolts would stand upright and go through the holes if the thick rectangular plate wasn't present, but with the plate, they absolutely would not turn the corner. There simply wasn't enough clearance in the box beam for the bolts to get upright enough to come down through the holes. I even bought shorter bolts at the hardware store (1.5" instead of 2"), but they still would not clear. And I suspect that even if they had, I wouldn't have had enough bolt to get through the hitch mounting hole to screw on the nut (at least not on both sides). I tried fishing the bolt from both directions and neither way would allow enough clearance for the bolt to make the right angle turn into the square metal plate.
The only solution I was able to come up with was to take the Dremel to the thick metal plates. I made the square holes into long rectangular slots. This allowed the carriage bolt to feed through at an angle so it didn't have to stand upright. Just be sure that if you do this, you only cut longways. You don't want to widen in both directions else the plate will not be able to do its job and keep the carriage bolt from spinning. It also takes several cutting wheels to cut through these plates because they're thick steel, so you'll have to be patient.
With any luck, you'll have a different variation Civic and you won't have the trouble I had. In any case, it's solid now that it's installed and I'm happy with it.
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