Design Shortcut

Last Thursday my wife and I left the house to go see the Dallas String Quartet at a local theater. It was supposed to be our “get in the spirit” holiday date night. We were supposed to have a great time but that isn’t what happened at all. You see we were impacted by a lousy cost cutting design shortcut made by Honda. You’d think Honda would be above this sort of thing but I guess every profit center eventually makes a greedy decision that eventually transfers the weight of that decision on to someone else. In this case the good old resilient consumer.

Our story begins with our decision to purchase a new hybrid during the peak of inflation during the covid years. I suddenly had a need to buy a new car at the worse possible time in my life. I was desperate and not only was the inventory crappy but every dealership was adding a huge surcharge to their vehicles. Used cars were unavailable, trust me I shopped them too because my daughter also needed a vehicle solution (read about her 2013 Ford Focus to learn more). We decided on buying a Honda hybrid CR-V. They sold something other than white vehicles and the published price was decent. Of course when I got there to start the purchase price I was informed that Honda added about $12k to the price tag. I negotiated well but still it was a hurdle.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good things to say about the hybrid CR-V. First off the gas milage is amazing. I can fill up from 1/2 tank for about $8 depending on gas prices. There is sufficient room for a guy my size to drive the car comfortably. The interior is really nice and the leather seats are comfortable. We’ve driven this car for 32,000 miles now including long distant road trips to New Mexico. This is our daily driver and what get’s us to our very distant grocery store. We live in rural America and we happen to be in a food dessert. Our closest grocery store is 24 mi away.

What I don’t like about the car is a frustrating list of points. Most of these irritants on there own wouldn’t change the purchase decision but my last point should. It’s a doozy (in case you don’t recognize the slag).

1. The passenger fog light wiggles while driving. Upon closer inspection the light was not installed correctly at the factory. 1/2 of the light’s plastic is disconnected from it’s frame, allowing it to wiggle when the car is moving. There isn’t a direct path to the back side of the light and fixing this would require removing other parts of the car to create an access point.
2. When opening the driver’s door while carrying the key fob the car will automatically unlock the driver’s door but none of the other doors. Instead I have to open the door and then reach for the interior lock control or use the remote unlock.
3. When opening the rear hatch the car does not automatically unlock the other doors. This is very frustrating when loading groceries.
4. The interior of the car struggles to adjust to people inside on a cold day. The front window fogs very easily. For some reason there is no middle ground between a foggy interior and the surface of the sun heater. Ideally we could regulate the temperature accordingly.
5. A secretive Tire Pressure Sensor. The TPS on the car is very sensitive. We have had several occurrences of the TPS system sending us a low pressure warning. The problem is that it doesn’t tell you which tire is the problem. It doesn’t even tell how how much pressure is off. Instead you have to manually check the tires with a pressure tool. Of those occurrences all but 1 have been false alarms.
6. Adaptive Cruise Control – Skip this feature if you can. It is designed so that you can continue to use your cruise control in traffic situations. The car automatically slows down when it detects a slower moving vehicle in front of you. When driving up on a car and expecting that you’ll be able to pass them you won’t. The car just slows down. In order to make the pass the driver must override the cruise control.
7. Automatic brakes – Also skip this feature if you can. It is designed to take over braking if you are too slow and the car detects an obstacle. I don’t need that kind of help. My reflexes are sufficient for managing a car in traffic. When this type of work is offloaded to a computer you get sudden braking when the sensors get confused. It happens when attempting a pass or another car is passing me. All of the sudden the car will brake. I wish I could disable it.
8. My favorite “safety feature” of all is the Lane Keep Assist. Someone must have checked in bad code. This feature is terrible. You can’t disable the feature either. You can only set it to warning mode. This feature attempts to keep the car in the driving lane. As it detects the car is leaving the lane, the computer will automatically move the steering wheel to correct the car’s position. The problem is that the computer doesn’t really know where the lane is at times. It has a terrible problem of interpreting skid marks, tar marks, cracks, water pools, basically anything as the lane markings. It’s especially bad during rain or on wet roads. Imaging tying to pass a semi in rain condition and the computer thinks your out of your land an starts fighting you with the steering wheel position. Very scary. The warning mode also wiggles the steering wheel, just not a forceful.
9. So what is the top of the list irritant? Honda decided to reuse the chassis of their ICE model of CRV and put the hybrid battery pack where the spare should have been. That’s right folks, the Honda CRV doesn’t have a spare tire. Not even a little donut tire.

Our story now has come full circle. While we are on our date night and I’m driving into town. About half was we get the tire pressure alarm. This has happened several times before, so I ignore it. We make it into town but after sitting a light there was enough time for the tire to completely deflate. I hear the noise and pull over. The tire is flat. No worries, let’s just put on the spare tire. Instead of a spare tire, what is available is a battery powered air compressor and effectively a bottle of fix-a-flat. WTF? I had no choice but to try to reinflate the tire. During the reinflation process I see the fix-a-flat goo coming out of a hole in the tire (circled below).

I ended up walking a few blocks to a nearby auto parts store and picked up a tire plug kit. In about 10 minutes I had the hole plugged and the tire reinflated. I thought, hey date night might still be possible. During the 2 minutes it took to ask my wife if we still wanted to go to our restaurant the tire exploded. The pictures below show the plug circled with all the white goo that spilled out along with the exploded tire.

Keep in mind at this point it is close to 7pm and we are 24 miles away from home. It’s cold and I have way of getting home. I tried calling for an Uber but like I said we live in rural America, those aspects of life don’t exist out here. We ended up call our neighbors and thankfully they were more than gracious and rescued us from our situation. There aren’t even any tools provided in the car to get the tire off. How in the heck does Honda expect that I could even take the tire off to get it fixed.

Shame on you Honda

Honda made a short sited decision to exclude critical road hazard tools from the car in order to shorten the time it would take to get the CRV Hybrid product to the market. In doing so they put our wellbeing in jeopardy. Had the situation been slightly different we could have been in a dangerous area and stranded. I am not upset with what happened to the tire, only that Honda’s flaky technology and lack of road hazard equipment impacted me and my wife. There are hundreds of people complaining about this decision. Honda should make it right.