Here's Why The Honda Civic Type R Has Three Exhaust Pipes

[Honda Civic News]

The middle exhaust is meant to quiet down the car at certain times, the folks at Road & Track found out from a product planner on the new Civic recently. Before you freak out and potentially regret spending way over MSRP on the new Type R, hold up: The quieting down is meant for highway speeds, so that your engine can grunt and growl all it wants taking off from a stoplight but won?t snarl you all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific on your cross-country road trip.

?Traditionally with these big flow exhaust systems, when you get up into highway speeds, you can get a lot of droning, booming, buzzing-not very comfortable for high speed cruising,? [10th-generation Civic product planner Rob] Keough told R&T. Honda wanted to offer a sporty, engaging sound in aggressive driving, without punishing drivers on long commutes or highway trips. And the automaker wanted to do so without resorting to stereo-enhanced engine sounds or complex (and expensive) multi-mode muffler systems.

The solution is to split the single exhaust into three pipes just behind the rear axle. The two outer pipes include large straight-flow mufflers. The center, smaller diameter pipe is a resonator, shaped and sized to perform a particular aural trick.