Well, the wifey is actually the one who's driven the civic, and I won't get a chance to drive it for another month or so since the car is in Dallas and I'm in Korea. Plus the wife managed to drive the car a whole 20 ft before somehow managing to stick a nail through the sidewall of a front tire, so the car has been parked with a flat tire since we bought it. It has a new tire now but sheesh... women
Anyhow, the civic seems to be a winner on almost all fronts. The "car guy" in me hates honda for really stupid anti-car-guy marketing decisions. For example, there are no engine or performance options for the sedan, and you can't get 4-wheel disc brakes until you go for the top of the line EX model, which has about a $4000 price premium and a moonroof we didn't really want. Compare that to the Mazda 3, where even the base model has 4 wheel disc brakes and the 4 door sedan is fairly peppy, and the marketing and options for the civic are downright insulting. It's like they're saying "if you care about options like brakes, go the hell away, buy something else".
That said, the car itself pretty much leads it's class. The dealers won't even consider making deals because they are just flying off the lot as they arrive. 40 no-kidding mpg on the freeway helps a lot. Plus the car does have 140hp which doesn't exactly suck, and the rest of the standard features are pretty much what you'd expect from a refreshed design new car. It's not a tiny econobox and the styling takes just a little after the accord, and I think that's an intentional styling cue to distinguish the civic from Honda's new teeny tiny cars.
I think we'll be happy with the civic because it's designed to do exactly what we want it to do - putt around town efficiently but more comfortably than a sub-compact, and still be a nice enough car to be comfortable on road trips. The folding rear seats and other travel features sort of make the deal there (even the BMW 3 series doesn't have standard folding rear seatbacks... duh!).
I was seriously looking into the Mazda 3, but it has 4 things going against it. First, the wifey didn't like it as much as the civic. Second, it gets worse gas mileage than the civic. Third, the styling cues for the upscale package makes the car look like a middle age boi-racer nightmare... Leather seats are an option but they're BLACK with RED seat and back inserts! Ugliest damn seats I've EVER seen except for this one WRX I saw this one time at band camp. And Fourth, the wifey didn't like it as much as the civic
Seriously, the fourth problem is that the mazda 3 design looks pretty much like the civic did before the design refresh, and that means right off the lot it looks like a used car compared to the civic. Yea you can get more HP than the civic, but the extra 10 or 20 hp comes at a cost of around 20% lower fuel efficiency. Bad tradeoff there IMHO.
My wife did like the toyota corolla a lot, but the interior dimensions flat-out suck for any male american taller than 5 ft 6 inches. The pedals are too close to the seat so in order to have a comfortable foot position, you have to literally lean forward off of the seatback to reach the steering wheel. Consumer reports has complained about this with the corolla for over a decade now, and the corolla I drove a couple of years ago was a shining example of this problem. I couldn't drive the car for more than an hour without getting either calf leg cramps or upper back muscle spasms. Terrible ergonomics for most American men.
