after 25 years, honda created this as the successor for the crx??? 
sorry, honda but hyundai produced the real spiritual successor to the crx... it's called the veloster. it has rear seats and it gets better fuel economy without wasting time with a useless hybrid system. if you want a new crx buy a veloster. 
Well the CRZ is as fuel-efficient as the old CRX (though not the HF which was capital SLOW) and is as fast as the CRX Si was, so as a successor, it's decent.
As to the Veloster... how many times do we have to say it? An hybrid's advantage is mostly in city fuel economy, not on the highway, so stop only comparing highway fuel economies to say that a non-hybrid has "hybrid-like" fuel economy, because they don't. What hybrids do is make sure that fuel economy in real-life driving conditions stay near the rated highway fuel economy and doesn't drop much below it, while conventional cars can get twice the consumption in the city than they're rated for on the highway.
For example, look at the reported gas mileage on fueleconomy.gov. For the CRZ, the worst reported fuel economy is 36 MPG (US), so 6,5 l/100 Km, for a car rate 37 or 39 MPG on the highway (manual and automatic). For the 2011 Fit, with a similar highway fuel economy, the worst reported mileage was 24 MPG, so 9,8 l/100 Km. For the 2011 Elantra, rated as better on the highway than the CRZ, the worst reported mileage is 23 MPG, a hair over 10 l/100 Km.
So in the real life, hybrid cars tend to do much better compared to their highway rating than other cars do no matter where people drive them. That's their use, they are very useful for city-dwellers, not so much for people in rural settings.
