I can cite 3 instances:
1972 Ford Pinto, at a stoplight (my car 95,000 miles)1984 Honda Accord, at a stoplight (friend, 28,000 miles)
1985 Honda Hatchback, at a stop sign at the end of a highway off ramp after 60 miles at 60mph. (father, 61,000 miles)I never understood before why all three of these failed while at idle. I don't know of any that failed while moving.
Whoa, what a cynical view!
"Cynical"?
Not at all. The facts in evidence support either conclusion, frankly.
one technical thing we know for sure - there's no reason for a decrease in specification because belt quality has improved over time, not degraded.
another technical thing we know for sure - detroit [and the germans] consider transmission life limitation as "fair game". it doesn't affect the vehicle's appearance, its failure doesn't typically kill the driver, and it comes as a prohibitively expensive repair item at a time when a vehicle has lost a lot of value thus making it "uneconomic to repair" thus improving new car sales. i know this for fact because one of my profs was a consultant that helped a certain big name design failure /in/ to their transmissions for this reason. for honda to have major failures happen across multiple transmission families with no parts commonality, all in exactly the same time frame is not coincidence but a business decision in the detroit tradition at a time when they have "ex" detroit management.
one business thing we know for sure - frod have specifically mentioned honda in the business press as their target for domestic competition.
now, you may call my conclusion cynical, but it's also logical given the above.
And the *real* conclusion is a massive exodus of customers.
In typical American management fashion, Honda chose this route at
*exactly* the wrong time: when Hyundai (and its sister Kia) was in a position to, and chose to, attack the market heavily with decent products at decent prices and great styling.Honda lobbed a softball to Hyundai, who went after it with gusto and is hitting it out of the park.
it was the late 90's when honda decided to get rid of the macpherson civics and jump on the detroit design life limitation bandwagon. hyundai/kia wasn't a serious consideration on anyone's horizon at that time. i agree that hyundai/kia have made a great interception, but i think the intended recipient was detroit. and to a large extent it's worked. look at frod's current customer approval ratings. it's certainly not because frod have improved technically, but the goal posts have moved to make frod look a good deal better just standing still.
True, but inertia carried Honda's reputation long enough to allow Hyundai to form an attack plan. By the time their plan was ready, the chinks in Honda's armor were becoming more and more apparent.
I'm reading Car and Driver's review of the Acura ILX; when I see that, I immediately think of the Cadillac Cimarron. C&D is too sensitive to ad dollars to say that directly, and even tries to drive the reader away from that conclusion with things like "it doesn't share any body panels with the Civic". If THAT'S the best you can come up with, you've damned with faint praise indeed.
Personally, I've been waiting for Honda to put an auto trans in the Civic Si platform. That Acura launched the "all-new" ILX-dressed Civic Si with the same manual-trans-only configuration, and no auto trans option, tells us that they managed to get that car out the door
*without* much (if any) govt-mandated testing (crash, EPA, etc). If that is indeed the case, then the cars are so similar as to be indistinguishable and the ILX is nothing but Acura doing its own Cadillac Cimarron play with the Civic.Honda didn't spend the R&D dollars to put the auto trans into the "all new, completely different" ILX with the hot motor? Cheap bastards. Especially when Honda several years ago was among the first to show that they could achieve *higher* mileage with an auto trans vs a row-your-own.
If the intended recipient of Hyundai's efforts was detroit, then it's no wonder Honda suffered from that effort as well.
I thought you would understand without a smiley that it was a tongue-in-cheek comment.
ouch indeed.
damned right. you can get the "new" manual/auto transmissions, d.s.g. or otherwise, on bmw, vw, audi, subaru, frod, toyota... it's frankly ridiculous that in this day and age of electronic throttle, that honda's /still/ throwing the ball to the competition by neglecting this stuff. is this just incompetence? or is it trojan horse management?
"hot" motor??? wrx sti hot? mitsu evo hot? vw gti turbo hot? after they've dropped the nsx, the prelude, the s2000? and made the crz a gutless macpherson hybrid? and a civic hybrid that has lower mpg's than than civic hx or crx hf?
after a long and amazingly accurately targeted series of fouls against the old and loyal honda customer base, i just can't believe it's merely cheapness. particularly when you look at the civic hf vs civic hybrid.
indeed. see above.
no, i think the intended recipient of honda's downgrade "throws" [thanks to honda's "ex" frod usa management] was detroit, not hyundai.
OK Al, I found my Accord's Owner Manual online in PDF format that you can only download one page at a time but you can navigate through the whole thing online by clicking on the page numbers. The maintenance schedule table is on pg 133 and 134.
As you see, the timing belt and timing balancer belt replacement is called for at 90K miles or 72 months. So your info must have been for Canadian or other non-US version. It would be fun to rub these two schedules into the faces of some Honda officials and ask for explanation.
I will go so far as to say that some of this is the same mentality that kept Honda using vinyl seats for so long, avoiding cloth, and that kept Honda from putting any kind of as sound system into their cars that was worth a damn until 2005.
The same mentality that said even in 2009, we won't use keyless start/entry on even the $50K Acura MDX.
The same mentality that has kept Honda from putting memory seats tied to the remote entry transmitter on anything other than the most expensive Odyssey, and even at that it took them until 2011.
Honda has a long and solid history of resisting to the end doing things the rest of the world considers mainstream.
They were able to do this because, for example, I would suffer the sound system problem (fix it myself) in order to get the Honda goodness of that 92 Civic Si. As just one example.
But now, all they have is "me-too" engineering that falls apart on cue--and they STILL expect me to suffer not having the goodies? Really?
Hot for Honda. Everything's relative. But "hot" on an absolute scale? See above.
OTOH, I know a guy who overall knows his stuff, who swears by his V6 Accord 6 speed. Dunno, never drove one.
I also know another guy who *really* knows his stuff (particularly Honda stuff from way back) who swears by the TL 6 speed SH-AWD. The AWD makes the difference. Apparently some good design accidentally slipped by the censors.
honda had the rt4wd civic way back. it was an awesome system, cheap and reliable, and you got a great car for your money*. then honda usa switched on to the crx being "too cheap", the 4wd civic being "too cheap", so they came out with the massively overpriced del sol and sold the 4wd civic in the shape of the crv with a radically different price tag, even though it's essentially the same car.
so the only reason you're getting the 4wd tl is because of the crazy price tag on it. compare that tag with the wrx sti or the evo and you'll understand that the tl is still not enough car for way too much money. and that they could sell it for way less and still make money like they did with the civic.
Had one. Absolutely agreed.
hmmmmmm, maybe you're right. I was never in the market, so I never looked into it.
TrueCar shows the manual trans TL AWD w/Tech pkg to be a $39,000 car. The 'Rex STI Limited (I figure that must compared with the TL Tech) is $37,500.
But, they're different cars for different markets. I can see that price difference buying more luxury in the TL, and--frankly--a significantly larger car (whatever that might mean to you).
Edmunds shows that a 2010 highest end TL AWD w/36K should be in the $30K-$32K range. But AutoTrader doesn't even show any available in this area. I'd have to go 300 miles to find one.
indeed. honda/acura have axed everything that put them on the map:
the crx si/sir the civic si/sir that actually handled well and had a decent power/weight ratio. the prelude the s2000 the nsx
subaru have the wrx mitsubishi have the evo vw have the gti's.
i don't understand the intended market. lexus have eaten acura's lunch with much superior vehicles. the nissan super-car is in a different league. the only thing the tl can take aim at is audi or volvo. both those have the wagons as well as sedans, and wagons are a significant proportion of their market. and audi have the s4 and r8. so acura, again, is left standing with nothing competitive on any level, luxury or performance, and there's nothing on their horizon.
honda need to have a [genuinely competitively] fast version of the civic or fit. not on the basis that it'll sell in quantity, but on the basis that it helps the marque. and they need a prelude. and they need an nsx. again, genuinely competitive ones. they will define the low middle and high end ranges.
"win on sunday, sell on monday". it's an ancient motor sales maxim, but it's as true today as it ever was. and honda are doing exactly the opposite.
I've been waiting for a Fit Si for a long time. It's an old formula, one that's ripe for the picking: put the big motor in the small car. Stick that 201hp motor inside, and let's go.
Shoot, even Lexus--the scaredy cat nanny car company--did that with the IS.
My thought has been for a long time that in Honda's mind, they *do* have a modern Prelude: the 6 speed V6 Accord coupe. I don't think we'll shake them of that opinion.
that accord coupe is a purely usa creation. we're the only country in the world that allows narrow angle rear light lenses - so that carp like cadillac can retain its "styling".
every time honda panders to usa "input" on design and styling, they end up with garbage. the usa-only civics, the ridgeline [omg, what a pile!], and with the exception of the tl, maybe, all the acura lineup.
And when Steve Jobs refused to do "focus groups" and instead dictated what was right by his standards, it came out right. People bought in droves.
I agree--quit giving me crap that idiots think I should have.
I have to laugh--after 30 years, Ford finally has a global Focus while Honda is busy with the US-only Civic.
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