Honda's transmissions fail, corporate says "tough luck"...

What? A visit to Pgh and no call :(

Do you think a Toyota minivan would be a better choice than a Honda Odyssey? I'm trying to decide on a minivan in the next year or so.

My husband and I have our eye on a Honda Odyssey for our next major purchase. We'll be looking at the 2005+, then! Toyota Sienna has been the "runner-up" choice.

I lost my transmission on my 2003 Odyssey at 90k miles. Same exact story, we kept taking it into the dealer and they "couldn't reproduce the problem" that we described. She finally dropped and I paid $5k to get a whole new transmission. After reading your story and knowing what I know about mine, I am done with Honda regardless of what generation it is.

Phil Ryken used to do a five-minute talk in the evening service at Tenth Pres. called "Window on the World" which was a meditation about Christians in the culture. I remember a particular one between 2001-03 which was titled "What Would Jesus Drive?" By the end he determined, a Honda Odyssey.

So I went to look up the article on Tenth's website, and wouldn't you know it, he changed the ending to "So what would Jesus drive? I don’t know, because the Bible doesn’t say. But I like to think that if he were a father of four planning a summer vacation, he might drive a good minivan." Amy and I both remember him saying "Honda Odyssey" in place of "good minivan."

Maybe Phil had problems with his car too!

Read the full link here: http://www.tenth.org/index.php?id=57&tx_xdssermonbase_pi1[showUid]=62&cHash=d1ad40b432

Tim: "I'd not buy any Dodge/Ford/Chevy minivan"

I hear you. But when are Honda and Toyota going to start making a care for those families with more than 6 kids? I guess when the bazillions of evangelicals in America start having babies and there's more money to be made.

oops. That's "making a car" not making a "care."

Had a 1998 Odyssey - they honored the warranty at just over 100K miles. It was doing well at 200K when I traded it in on a 2008 Odyssey. Still have a 2001 Accord - they honored the warranty at 100K, currently has 150K and is doing well.

One possible difference-maker in customer service: the local Honda dealer does all my service except oil changes and alignments...if I was not a long-standing customer, they may have been more nit-picky about terms and conditions. In any event, remember the parable of the persistent consumer...keep escalating (graciously).

Domestic cars can work out. All cars are a gamble, and when you buy a used Ford, you merely gamble that it will last half as long as the Honda/Toyota that costs twice as much.

My family owns a Ford minivan that we bought when it was three years old for 10,000. I think that's a better deal than spending 10,000 on a eight year old Toyota, or 18,000 on a three year old Honda.

But keep in mind, I don't get that special ownership experience, the nods of approval from my Honda/Toyota owning friends, etc.

In other news, I've never owned a Mac . . .

We service our cars faithfully, including oil changes every 4k or so. Always have.

After 100k on two vehicles I'd bought with only a few miles on them--one a Ford van and the other a Honda Civic--I added up the repair bills and had less than $1,500 of repairs on the Civic and close to $5,000 on the Ford. Then I looked at frequency of repair records for Fords, Toyotas, and Hondas and saw this was true over and over again, year after year. Since then, my Civic (now owned by my daughter and her husband) has gone over 200k and still ticks with almost no mechanical ever. Just CV joints and boots, and the occasional muffler. That's it.

My old Camry is over 200k also, and no repairs. Ever.

So I tell all poor young couples in the church to buy small Toyotas or Hondas for about $2,500. And boy does it save them money.

When Americans have the frequency of repair history that foreign cars have, and have had for well over a decade, now, then I'll tell them to switch back.

Yes, there are exceptions to the rule. But even those exceptions are proven by objective frequency of repair records. Check out the 2001 Honda Odyssey's trannys. They're the exception to the rule with Honda--an unreliable car in a stable of reliable cars.

Frequency of repair, men. Not coolness or hipness. High miles per gallon and low cost to purchase and to run. That's the car I want.

Love,

We have had GM mini-vans (Astro, Safari) for several years now, and love them. Our current one is a 2000 Astro that we bought second-hand with 14,000 miles on it, and now it has 253,000 miles on it with original equipment. We beat these up, too, hauling several thousand LPs (that's a RECORD, the ancestor of tapes, CDs, MP players, for those too young to know what an LP is). That's a lot of weight. We would stick with them. We drive them till they die.

I do miss my truck, though! You just can't haul a refrigerator, let alone lots of mulch and dirt in a Ford Explorer.

Honda's quality far surpasses GM's. My husband works at a dealer that sells both products. He'd put us in a Honda a million times over before he'd put us in a GM. That being said they don't pay him enough for us to afford a used Pilot so I drive a Commander. Four wheel drive is a necessity he feels for me to have with the kids and the blowing and drifting that happens out here in the winter. Christ the Word may have to upgrade their mini-van fleets. :)

I love you, Eric, but I'll put your automotive expenses up against me any day. (In other words, I'm betting my expenses are more than yours.)

;-)

Eric,

Speaking of of Escorts, I'm sold. I think I may have yours, actually. I bought mine from David Johnson a year and a half ago and at 200,000 miles, it's not only reliable but quite peppy.

David,

I would never argue that they're inexpensive (in terms of gas) to operate, but I have to agree on the suburban. I've been impressed with the reliability of our '99 (150,000 miles). I've often joked that I keep trying to tear it up (pulling 12k pounds of scrap steel or 8k lbs sand, for instance) so I can justify getting a Sequoia, but it just won't quit. Also, it's never given me the slightest problem getting up or down our hill in heavy snow/ice whereas our previous front-wheel-drive Sienna would often spin out in snow/rain.

The company I'm watching closest now is Ford. They didn't take a bailout. ( as far as I know). So I'm rooting for them. I can say that over the years I did things to Ford Crown Vics that ought not be done to a poor car and they (usually) held up..(I caught the brakes on fire on an old '94 Vic!). I'm very hopeful that Ford gets it together and makes some good stuff. Someone also needs to get on the ball and make / import a line of vehicles with 4 cyl diesel engines! Perhaps a nice bare bones van for everyday folk...not a 35k luxo-impress your neighbor- van.

>>For a 2005 Odyssey, 47 cents per mile. For the Chevy Uplander, 38 cents per mile, both vehicles similarly equipped.

Did you not notice that the post was about the cost of driving an Odyssey? Two trannies? Money?

On the other hand, everyone who likes passenger bodies on truck frames, they're dangerous in a way minivans with unibody construction aren't. Read up on it and be forewarned. It's actually not good to be strapped to truck frame when you have an accident.

Concerning cost, go with an old Odyssey (first generation) for cheap if you don't have more than four children.

But for dependable and cheap and small, go with an old Corolla or Civic at $2,500. Then drive it 100K for nothing but gas.

Good idea about the four-banger diesels. For years, Mary Lee and I drove diesel rabbits. As I think I mentioned somewhere else, we pulled a 1,950 lb. trailer behind our car from Madison, Wisconsin to Boulder, Colorado one summer, with the car packed to the gills and two bikes on a roof rack. Most of the trip we were going 55 in third gear and if we touched the brakes, the weight of the trailer made the car speed up. ;-)

We averaged 27 miles per gallon on that trip. True.

Another year we went backpacking in the Canadian Rockies, in Jasper National Park. On the way home, we left Spokane, Washington and drove to Madison, Wisconsin on $23 dollars of fuel. When we got to Madison, we had half a tank left.

Those were the days, my friend...

By the way, here's an excerpt from a New Yorker article on the dangers of truck frames and SUVs mounted on truck frames. And the piece is addressing the safety of the vehicles' driver and riders--not the people in the vehicle they hit.

* * *

The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent. ) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling. Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has. " During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

"Big and Bad" by Malcolm Gladwell; January 12, 2004 New Yorker

I've read the same kinds of things on SUV's and safety, and I have no reason to doubt it. I can't say I sold my Sienna to buy the Suburban for safety reason. 4-wheel drive was really the only issue and since nobody made an AWD minivan except Chrysler (who's tranny is worth less than the Odyssey's), an SUV it was. And there's absolutely no comparing the handling of the Sienna in snow vs. the Suburban.

All that said, I was pretty tickled when, right after we bought the Suburban and a woman in a new Monte Carlo t-boned the side my 2-year-old son was sitting on, it merely dented the door and woke him up from his nap. Her car was completely totalled (but by God's mercy, probably largely through engineering/crumple zones/etc., she was OK).

Also, I do think that the sheer weight and large wheel-base of the suburban probably make it less prone to roll-overs than something smaller like an explorer, but I've got no data to prove that.

Tim, I'll apply my equation to your 50k transmission. When should a transmission break? Here are the miles, and you get to choose: 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150, and I'll stop there. No matter when your transmission broke, your answer will always be that it broke early. I am not picking on you, only pointing out that it is human nature to blame breakage on someone else.

Now I have to admit that I am not a Honda owner (I learned my lesson on Hondas years ago, and it is the same lesson I learned about GM products), but applying what I know about the products I work on, the best way to avoid disappointment with any purchase is to avoid the bad stuff in the first place, and that doesn't mean running to Consumer Reports. I think the best information comes from those who fix products, not those who write about them or sell them. In my industry, Consumer Reports was promoting a particular model up until the bitter end, when it was removed from the market and resulted in certain class action lawsuits. To this day, that model provides nothing but grief to its owners, and so does the model that replaced it.

Sometimes I tell my customers that dollars don't buy quality or durability. What dollars buy is features, and that is exactly what a salesman will sell you on. Some of the best products in my industry are the lowest in price, and while that may benefit my customers, they simply have a hard time wrapping their heads around buying a better product at a lower price.

>>No matter when your transmission broke, your answer will always be that it broke early.

Nope.

But 48,000?

Yup.

>>and that doesn't mean running to Consumer Reports.

Over my lifetime, I've found CR can be wrong. But everyone who smokes doesn't die of lung cancer, either. Fact is, CR collects data from owners, and that data is generally accurate. If they say the Odyssey's tranny is bad and you're an Odyssey owner, you'll soon pay. Unless, that is, you own the year they say the tranny got good. Then you won't pay.

People always want to think they're the one who will beat the odds. Rarely true.

>>dollars don't buy quality or durability. What dollars buy is features, and that is exactly what a salesman will sell you on. Some of the best products in my industry are the lowest in price

Absolutely true. And although it's hard for those of us who have been burned by a CR recommendation to admit it's the exception that proves the rule, CR regularly says the same thing about inexpensive products being more dependable and better values.

Take side-by-side refrigerators and icemakers, for instance...

Eric and Brandon: Sorry we'll miss you once again. Other commitments. Love,

Tim, the Uplander was a minivan with unibody construction, a competitor to the Honda you're complaining about, and with generally very good safety ratings as well. What I'm getting at here is that when one looks at sources that actually provide numbers for comparison (that would exclude "Consumer Reports"), the claim that Japanese label vehicles are cheaper in the long run doesn't hold up as a general rule.

Fewer repairs? Certainly for small cars from Honda and Toyota, not so much for larger ones they don't have as much experience with. And unfortunately, when you buy a large vehicle from them, you still get the reliability assumptions from the Civic and Corolla that simply don't work for the larger vehicles. Hence worse warranty service.

Just ask owners of a T100 with headgasket problems at 80k, or the original Sienna (litany of issues), or early Tundras.....or people with your Odyssey.

Review "AutoBeef" (carcomplaints.com) for information on Honda transmission problems.

http://www.carcomplaints.com/

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Media should focus attention on Honda transmission issues (March 18, 2010)

http://www2.starexponent.com/cse/news/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/article/media_should_focus_attention_on_honda_transmission_issues/54152/

My husband commented above that he has had great success with his old Volvo 240. I also drive a Volvo V40 wagon, and his mother upgraded to the XC70. We love our old Volvos and we love the wagon design, but now our family is growing from four to five, and with three children under three, it will be impossible to fit their car seats (one forward facing and two rear-facing) across the backseat. So, we are now on the market for a minivan or SUV and I remembered this old post about the Odyssey. I am so glad my memory is still good because the information provided here is extremely helpful!

The only reason we'd like a big SUV, other than fitting our growing family, is to get a diesel. If only there were a diesel minivan! I've done some research and Volkswagon makes a diesel Touran in Europe (I believe someone else mentioned that Honda makes a diesel in Europe too?), but their U.S. model, the Routan, is more like a Chrysler Town & Country (apparently a VW/Chrysler alliance was developed when a CEO of Chrysler went to VW?). Anyway, since I will be the primary driver of said vehicle, I am opting for a minivan because like many have mentioned above, I would feel much safer in vehicle with unibody construction than built on a truck-like frame so we will have to forgo our desire for a diesel. Also, I am tired of (almost) slamming my car doors into neighboring vehicles in parking lots as I am trying to load/unload kids from the car. The SUV would only get wider and the minivan's sliding doors are extremely enticing to this mother. ;)

We have been blessed with an extremely generous gift from my in-laws...up to $20K to spend on a minivan. Neither my husband nor I feel the need to spend ALL of the gift, but with that kind of budget, we could afford a more recent generation minivan. With that in mind, should we opt for a newer Sienna (2004+) or a more recent Odyssey (2005+)??

Also, on a side note, I grew up in a Nissan family, but married into a Volvo/BMW one. My parents bought an Altima new in 1995 that my father is still driving (though it is pretty rusty since he's in MN) with almost 400,000 miles. It did get a new motor when my mother was in an accident in the late 90s, but the transmission is original. I also bought a used '99 Altima that lasted me almost 200,000 miles before we sold it when we moved. The Nissan was reliable, but the only beef I had was that the parts, when they broke, were very expensive. Many of the parts were dealer-only and not being able to buy aftermarket parts was annoying. I am happier with the Volvos since more aftermarket parts are available and since my husband loves them, he's more interested in working on the cars himself (with the help of a huge number of Volvo forums and the Haynes manual).

A minivan will be a new (and perhaps exciting) experience for both of us! I am very curious though whether he will decide to keep his '90 240 or my '00 V40 (a much smaller, less dinosaur-like wagon) to drive for himself. Stay tuned.