Useless facts about gas & my 98 Accord

Kudos to your long suffering wife :-)

Wisconsin weather except for two years in Vegas.

$13,422. Avg mpg of 32.26 over 230,000 miles and

wife thinks I'm nuts, so I gave in and let her stop

Pretty good gas mileage for an accord.

Lynn

Cool!

I got a buddy at work with a 2004 Accord with 280k miles on it! Nothing but routine maintenance and he says its a little noisier than it used to be but that's it.

Pretty much the same story with my '94 Accord. 303 K miles.

Pretty much the same story with my '94 Accord. 303 K miles.

I guess there is no reason not to keep my 06 Accord coupe with 90k on it for a lot longer.

Not as long as you still like it. Manufacturing variances can occur on any car make (just in lower quantities on good Japanese brands as a general rule), and of course environmental factors and your maintenance diligence can affect what you are actually able to achieve with the car if you're going for top miles, but if you like the car then as they say if it ain't broke don't fix it. When fixing it starts to cost more than the car is worth in resale value, personally I start to go "hmmm" but then again I am a bit of a technology maven so I tend to get a new car every 7 years on average. I can no longer live with a car without satellite radio for example.

Thus spake "Joe J" :

Tell American Honda. They may give you some sort of reward. A sparkplug?

We sold my wife's 96 Accord after only 158K miles. New owner is a friend of ours, he says that now (5 years later) he's put another 65K on it (longer commute) and has been told he might want to change the timing belt. We gave him the shop manual, but he doesn't have a torque wrench and I do. He did have to change the pan gasket, but he's pretty certain he did it by overtightening the drain plug

Neither can I, but it's so incredibly easy to add the functionality, it doesn't matter.

Same with sat-nav. In fact, I strongly prefer my Garmin over any overpriced factory model. It's portable, has my favorites in it, and I can move those favorites to a new Garmin as I move up. And moving up is only a hundred bucks a shot, and gets new maps along with the new functionality.

Give me a 12v outlet and a way to plug an audio signal into the onboard amp, and I'm set for technology.

Not as long as you still like it. Manufacturing variances can occur on any car make (just in lower quantities on good Japanese brands as a general rule), and of course environmental factors and your maintenance diligence can affect what you are actually able to achieve with the car if you're going for top miles, but if you like the car then as they say if it ain't broke don't fix it. When fixing it starts to cost more than the car is worth in resale value, personally I start to go "hmmm" but then again I am a bit of a technology maven so I tend to get a new car every 7 years on average. I can no longer live with a car without satellite radio for example.

Frankly, I can't see anything in the current Honda line-up that does anything for me. I would like to have satellite radio and have toyed with the idea of buying an add-on. As far as Hyundai and Kia goes I am rather uncertain about their long-term reliability -- and service in my local area is problematic at best. Most of the driving in my Accord has been on I 75 running 75-80, and even the in-town driving is not stop and go like Atlanta.

Neither can I, but it's so incredibly easy to add the functionality, it doesn't matter.

Same with sat-nav. In fact, I strongly prefer my Garmin over any overpriced factory model. It's portable, has my favorites in it, and I can move those favorites to a new Garmin as I move up. And moving up is only a hundred bucks a shot, and gets new maps along with the new functionality.

Give me a 12v outlet and a way to plug an audio signal into the onboard amp, and I'm set for technology.

Agree -- I have taken that approach myself.

I share your thoughts when it comes to nav systems and love my Garmin, but that's more of a cost-driven choice than anything. Not only the cost of the unit itself and the lifetime maps on the Garmin versus updates for factory systems (we are already talking a difference of thousands of dollars), but the fact that built-in nav systems tend to be integrated with other things like climate control and such, which means if I decide to keep the car a long time and the nav fails outside of warranty, the cost can be (and usually is) thousands of dollars. However, I only need to bring out the Garmin occasionally, as I'm usually driving in a city I'm already very familiar with. The Garmin comes out on rare occasion. If I drove in unfamiliar territory every day I might go for something a bit more integrated just so I don't have to deal with too many cables. I already have a radar detector going into one plug, if I run the "Escort Live" iPhone app along with it (which shares alert info like laser with others), it quickly drains the battery of the phone so that's something else I have to have plugged in. Having 2 or 3 cables running gets to be too much sometimes, so I'm glad I don't have to add satellite radio to the mix.

I could easily run the Sirius XM app on my phone and wirelessly transmit to my car stereo via bluetooth audio, but I would be back to juggling battery life of the phone, and either giving up or juggling other uses like the radar app and...oh yeah... being able to make a phone call. Maybe its old school but I hate cables in the car and I'm just one of those that believes the music component of the car should be completely integrated. I wouldn't move to a bolt-on satellite radio solution for anything, particularly since the cost consideration isn't there as it is with the nav system. It is nice to have the option of the Sirius XM app and I do use that functionaly (parking my phone on a boombox device at home for charging).