Furniture shopping can be fun, especially if you plan to buy furniture at IKEA. Going through the maze of faux living rooms, kitchens, and home décor makes it feel like you’re “playing house” on another level. But the fun can stop when it comes time to load your furniture into your car, especially if it doesn’t have enough cargo room. However, I found out that the 2022 Honda Civic Sport Touring does have enough cargo room, and then some, on a recent trip to the Swedish furniture store.

The 2022 Honda Civic Hatchback’s cargo space is impressive

At first glance, you might look at the 2022 Honda Civic Hatchback and dismiss it as another small commuter car. Sure, it’s small, but its looks from the outside can be deceiving. For the 2022 model year, Honda stretched the Civic Hatchback by an inch lengthwise, which makes for a little more room on the inside. To be precise, when it comes to cargo volume, the Civic Hatchback has 25.4 cubic feet of cargo volume with the rear seats folded up and 46.3 cubic feet when they are folded down.

Those numbers might not sound like anything special, but consider that rivals like the Mazda3 and Subaru Impreza each only have around 20 cubic feet of space in their cargo areas. But the real test of the Civic’s boot room was when I had to buy a dresser at IKEA. I backed into the loading spot and had no worries that the three boxes that made up my newly acquired clothes bin would fit in the car. However, I didn’t think it would cut it so close.

I folded down the rear seatbacks to maximize the space and loaded the boxes. Two of them were smaller, so I laid those flat on the bottom and then rested the longer box on top. That longer box took up the whole cargo area and it almost didn’t fit. Fortunately, with a little adjustment, the hatch closed just fine.

The Civic Hatchback can fit more than just a dresser

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to buy more build-it-yourself furniture, but I’m sure that if I did, the Civic Hatchback would accommodate everything just fine. As you can see in the pictures, there was a lot of room on the sides of the cabin to fit other stuff. However, if I had another passenger that needed to sit in the back seat, then fitting everything would have been tougher. Although, the rear seat does fold down in a 60:40 configuration, so a little bit of shuffling could have given a third passenger adequate seating room.

The Civic made the drive home a breeze, even in heavy traffic

On the way home from IKEA, I surprisingly ran into a massive traffic jam on the freeway. Fortunately, my Civic Sport Touring tester was outfitted with a CVT transmission, which meant that it was equipped with adaptive cruise control with low-speed follow. The latter part meant that in a slow crawl, the car will use its onboard cameras and sensors to automatically slow down and speed up with the flow of traffic.

Considering the traffic that I hit was ridiculously slow due to an accident, that feature really came in clutch at the time. So much so, that I wasn’t even fatigued or stressed by the time I got home, which took almost twice as long as it should have.

Overall, I can highly recommend the 2022 Honda Civic Hatchback Sport Touring and its copious amounts of cargo space and tech features. One thing is for sure, it won’t ruin your trips to IKEA, even if you buy more stuff than you can afford.