I know this is getting sidetracked from the original purpose of this thread..but...
I dealt with a problematic Honda a while back. When I first bought my Camaro some years ago, it had been sitting on the lot for a while, and the dealership didn't have time to detail it before I bought it. When I bought the car, they couldn't fit me in for detailing for another week, and rather than leave the car on the lot until then, they said that I could take the Camaro, and when I dropped it off for detailing, they would let me take one of their other for-sale cars as a loaner. (This was a used car lot, and they did not have regular loaner cars as they were really never in a situation where ones were needed--this was a special case).
When I dropped my Camaro off, I was handed the keys to an 01 Accord. This was in 03, so the car was only 2 years old. It had 31,000 miles on it and one previous owner (a woman with kids).
After having heard so much over time how Accords were, and this being my first time of driving a recent model Accord (I'd driven some 80's Accords before), I was expecting it to be a Point A to Point B family car, maybe slightly peppy for one, with a good ride, quiet operation, and decent feel.
Instead of being bored while driving it, however, I was disappointed and made nervous.
To summarize all the things I ran into on the one day of Accord driving:
1) I found amazingly that the farthest right climate control nob was not reachable by me, unless I leaned forward and to the right. As a driver, I do not want to be actually leaning my body to reach a control. Reaching my arm, I expect, but not leaning my body. I had never sat in a car where I could't reach a control without leaning previously.
2) The steering was terrible in the car. To make a left hand turn from a turn lane onto a side road, I had to flip the steering wheel around so much that I had to lift and reposition my arms on the wheel to keep them from crossing.
3) The brakes were terrible. I do not know if they needed maintenance in this particular Accord, or were just cheaper/smaller/crappier brakes compared to other cars I've driven. I was trying to stop the car the same distance from lights/signs as I do with heavier cars, and found the Accord would barely stop, and I would get a vibration feedback through the brake pedal pretty heavily while stopping. I suspect this was probably just something particular to this car and do not fault the Accord for that.
4) Acceleration--I guess I'm spoiled by V8s or something, because getting onto the highway in the 4cyl Accord caused me to say some mental prayers. From a total stop, the Accord took off at an OK rate, but when trying to do anything that a torquier engine helps with (like accelerating rapidly when the car had been cruising at a set speed for a while, such as you do on a highway), it was enough to cause gray hairs.
5) (The main thing here). The car, on several occasions, threatened to stall on me. This was particularly when I was sitting stopped at a light, and would just start to go. I can't remember all the symptoms, but this was the case, and I think the engine would also surge sometimes when I was cruising at a set speed. Anyway, this issue caused me to try researching it online, and I found out it was likely the Accord automatic transmission problem.
Which brings me to the point of posting this--I often hear things about problems that particular car models have for certain years, wen it is a reasonably frequent problem, and not a 1 in a million type things. What I was surprised to find is that Honda has a weakpoint with automatic transmissions, and the ATs in some early 00's Hondas in particular were prone to failure. Not to say they were all going to fail, but that they have a higher than normal chance of failure. I read horror stories of people having transmissions replaced every 15,000 miles or so. What shocked me the most though, was not that an auto manufacturer can have a weak spot show up in some models, but that this issue seemed to not be circulating, but instead, I would always hear how Hondas--even their ATs--were "bulletproof".
Argh, sorry if this is long--I really wanted to just point out the issue with automatic transmissions--and somehow it turned into a mini-review.
