rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about the worst Honda's ever made, now
aside from somewhat weak automatic transmissions, Honda's have generally
made pretty good cars, but like any other manufacturer
they've made mistakes, and here's the biggest ones that I've ever seen, now the
first big mistake was the 1994 Honda Passport
now I guess Honda wanted to get into the SUV market, so the passport was just a
rebadged isuzu, it was made by Isuzu in Isuzu factories and it just had Honda
emblems on them, they were not really Honda's but Honda sold them as a Honda
so it's carrying the Honda name, and to me that was a big mistake by Honda
they were gas hogs, my customers with them had all kinds of problems as they
aged, and a lot of them didn't know they thought they were getting a Honda SUV, no
they weren't they were getting an Isuzu, not long after that Isuzu pulled
out of the United States as a car seller, that says something you know, the United
States is a huge market and if you pull your vehicles out, you pretty much say oh
we can't make it in this competitive market where there's lots of profit to
be made, they should have been happy making good cars, back then Honda was
still making some pretty good cars, selling lots them to the people, and not
get into a market like SUVs using somebody else's vehicle not even their
own, now the next mistake was the 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid, now the early Honda
hybrids the small ones, they were pretty much a failure they didn't sell that
many of them, personally I thought they're ugly as can be, they were really ugly
looking car, and when I drove around Houston here I'd see a bunch of them
sitting at the Honda dealers just collecting dust because nobody wanted to
buy the things, but the old five Accord Hybrid was the worst one they ever made
the transmissions slipped and many of them you had to spend a fortune having
the transmission rebuilt, they weren't very well made, now the new 2018 accord
hybrids, hey those things are really interesting technology, they're a far
step away from those old ones, they've got two electric motors to help
drive it, it's a completely redo but 2005 Accord Hybrid stay away from one of
those, now my next pick is the original Honda that was sent to the United States
the Honda 600, now the reason they called it
the Honda six hundreds because it had a five hundred ninety-eight cc engine so
they rounded it up to six hundred, it was a two cylinder air-cooled motorcycle
engine that was stuck in the hood of this tiny little car and an electric fan
inside to blow air to help cool the engine, I actually worked on these things
when I was a young mechanic, if Honda introduced a car like that today,
oh it'd be a massive failure, now we do have to take into consideration the times,
Honda was starting up going from a motorcycle
company to a car company, but those things they rode like washing machines
the automatic transmission, you had to shift it with lever, they did have a
clutch but I mean it wasn't very sophisticated
it can barely get out of its own way, it had a whopping forty seven horsepower and
only thirty-seven foot-pounds of torque, and the funniest thing was, one of my
father's customers that owned one, the guy was like six foot six
he came crawling out of this car and the first time I ever saw it I thought, whoa
this is like something at the Shriners circus where they all come out of these
little cars you know, but he was really a cheap
guy, and it did get phenomenal gas mileage, and he liked saving money when
he was driving because he was an accountant, that was a truly terrible car
to drive around with it hardly any amenities at all, like I say hey that was
the first car they sold in the United States and it was a transitional one, if
you would compare that thing to a modern Honda Accord with a v6 engine, you'd
think they came from completely different planets, but I have to give it
to Honda they certainly evolved from that basic little motorcycle two
cylinder air-cooled engine, they certainly changed their engineering and
went a lot forward, now the next bad vehicle that Honda made
was the Honda Odyssey, throughout history they had problems especially
with automatic transmissions, the 1995 Odyssey was the worst, they had head
gaskets failure, transmission failures they were true clunkers, now they did
refine them over the years, but they've always had automatic transmission
problems, I had quite a few of my own customers have the transmissions go out,
I did a little research on the internet and I'd print it out to them, they went to
Honda and they ended up getting brand-new transmission put in these cars
free, they didn't have to pay anything for it, but the point that the
transmissions broke in the first place and a lot of the engines they had
problems with the v6 cams, that they would wear and then they'd start moving
back and forth a little bit, and you'd have to rebuild the engine, that's uncalled
for in a company like Honda it's known for making strong engines, and when
you're talking about the odyssey's main competition coming from their highly
reliable Toyota Sienna van, you'd be foolhardy to buy a Honda Odyssey van,
when you can get a Toyota van that would run circles around it over time, so if
you ask me here again, Honda they started with motorcycles and small cars when they
got into bigger things, like the passport SUV
or the Honda Odyssey van, maybe big is not the
thing that Honda should get involved in now that's bad vehicle was the 1988
Honda Prelude that's got that four-wheel steering, the idea is when you got a
small space to park into on the road, if your front and your rear wheels can turn,
then the car can go in and park really easy in very small spaces, the rear
steering part was always breaking down on these things, it cost thousands and
thousands of dollars to fix, it was an idea that, okay that sounds like it might
be a good idea, but hey if you're taking something that's normally stationary,
just goes down the road and all of a sudden you're making it so those parts
turn too, it was a recipe for disaster it may have been the first production
vehicle to feature four-wheel steering but hey that's a feature that really was
probably a big mistake, at high speeds it also could engage so you'd have really
crisp steering at higher speeds, they wouldn't go the same way they kind of go
the opposite ways when you're steering it at
really high speeds, so yeah it's a trick to make it go like a racecar
but hey you're driving it on the street, so really stay away from high-tech
things like that that yeah they're not proven, you don't find them in cars now
unless you're into really exotic cars, and let's face it I mean exotic cars
cost exotic money to repair, and their values plummet like a stone going over
Niagara Falls, so stay away from the prelude with the all-wheel steering, now
the last bad Honda design I'm gonna talk about is a 2002 Civic Si, it was pretty
much a poorly designed vehicle, the exhaust manifolds would often crack, the
transmissions would often fail because of engineering designs, the engine blocks
had a tendency to crack, even the headliners over your head were sagging down
they just looked bad as they aged, it was also the first time in 14 years to have
the steering attached to the struts so it didn't work all that well, and it had
the least amount of suspension travel, so it road really bad, the less travel
your shocks have, the worst the rides gonna be, this was really the worst
riding Civic of all time, granted it rode better than that early
Honda 600, the first one they brought that had a two cylinder motorcycle
engine in it, but it didn't fare all that much better driving down the road, those
things were like riding around on a bucket, so now you know a bunch of
Honda's that you should stay away from, they were basically poorly made and
designed vehicles, which is kind of rare for a company like Honda because they're
known for quality engines and cars that can last a really long time, but like
anybody else, hey they made mistakes too, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!