Bread&butter; Seventh-generation model is best yet.(Honda set to introduce the 7th generartion Accord)

Say what you will about the staid ol' family car, Honda knows from whence it butters its bread. And it's not trucks.

Granted, sales of its popular sport/utes continue to soar-from the best-selling compact CR-V to the newly introduced Pilot-and with each success in trucks Honda needs to rely less and less on the Accord to carry the bulk of the automaker's sales load. But when you consider that yearly sales of the Accord have consistently hovered near the 400,000 mark since 1991, it's clear the midsize family car still sits at the cornerstone of Honda's lineup.

``The Accord is still the most important product for Honda,'' says Dan Bonawitz, vice president of planning and logistics for American Honda. And it's one of the most popular choices among the American car-buying public. Not counting fleet sales, the Accord has outsold all other cars in America for nine of the last 10 years. That's a lot of butter.

Part of the Accord's success can be pinned on the fact Honda keeps the car fresh, redesigning it every four years or so. Following that tradition, Honda will roll out its seventh-generation Accord this September, and by every measure, from power to refinement, it's the best Accord yet.

The car comes in two forms, sedan and coupe, with a more marked difference in styling between the two than ever. The sedan remains conservatively styled, with an upright stance and fairly uncluttered sheetmetal. The coupe, on the other hand, gets a shapely makeover, with a swooping profile and Mercedes-like wraparound taillights dominating a rounded-over rear end. And both cars carry a hint of S2000 in them, mostly in the way the triangular, jeweled-lens headlights stretch back over the fenders and the nose tapers down to a simple grille.

While neither sedan nor coupe is likely to win any awards for breakthrough design, few potential Accord buyers will find much in the cars' shapes to turn them off. The Accord's interior, however, could easily win over a few shoppers. Not only does the interior look better than the current car, it works better, too. Honda replaced the Accord's squared-off center dash stack with a stylish, V-shaped setup highlighted by large, easy-to-manipulate stereo and climate control knobs. Even Honda's navigation system, the best in the business, has been improved, both in its operation and its content. And now all Accords get a standard tilt-and-telescoping steering wheel.

The entire design and layout of the interior is clean and handsome, and yet the best part of the interior is something you'll rarely look at: the seats.