Honda Odyssey

[Andrew Fleck]

Does anybody here own one of these vans? If so, how do you like it? My wife is really starting to put the pressure on me. She seems to have her sights fixed on this model. I can only hold out so long before she inevitably gets her way.

[Stephen Cherry]

Andrew, here is your chance to get your wife one of the Honda Odyssey go karts, as a surprise gift!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvFIeQZERlc

[dennis thompson]

We have a 2009 Odyssey. We like it a lot, no problems so far ,we've gone about 60,000 miles. Use the dealer for oil changes only, their repair prices are sky high, I was quoted $700 for new front brakes/new rotors, I think it had to be a mistake by the person giving me the estimate but I didn't ask, just got out of there fast!. (can also fit several 10'x 2"x8" in it easily)
Dennis

[Rich Engelhardt]

I had a 2004 Odyssey.
Traded it away in 2007 and lost my shirt on the deal.
Next to my wife's Accura, the Odyssey lost more value in the ~ 3 years I owned it than any other two vehicles combined.

The repairs, while fairly minor. were outrageously expensive. The mechanics of the door locks froze up from not being used - it had remote electric locks. Honda wanted $800.00 per lock, to repair them. In less than 36 months I went through 3 batteries. Something about the way they were mounted caused the plates to crack w/no warning. One day it would be fine, the next day the battery was shot.
Speaking of doors - the electric side doors quit working. I had them repaired twice under warranty and when the warranty expired ( mileage - not time), again Honda wanted $1,200 per door to repair them.
If you're keeping track - so far the bill just to repair the 3 locks and two doors is $4,800.00 - on a less than three year old van.

I was really miffed at the dealership the most. I'd bought 8 previous Hondas from the same dealership and in addition, I'd had 100% of my maintenance done there on those vehicles from 1994, through 2007. When I asked them to help me out with Honda over the doors/locks to see if I could get some kind of break, they as much as told me to kiss off.

I paid close to $30,000.00 for the van in 2004, put on nearly 90k miles in a little over three years and the best trade in offer I could get for it was in the $11,000.00 range.
I did manage finally to get $12,000.00 on a trade from the Honda dealer on a 2007 Accord.
I told the salesman and the sales manager that was the lost Honda product I would ever buy.

Right now I'm driving a 2010 Toyota Sienna.
It's just as nice and drives just as well as the Honda - but - it too has issues with the sliding doors.
But, at least Toyota admits there's a problem with the doors and has extended the warranty on them to 12 years/120,000 miles.

Were I to buy a new van tomorrow, it would be a Kia Sedonna.
Every bit as nice as the Japanese products - plus - it has a 5 year/60,000 mile bumper to bumper warranty.

Resale value is less than a Toyota or Honda - but - bear in mind that with a van, mileage is everything.
Any van with over 50,000 miles is going to have zip for resale value.
Plus - Kia has been working hard to improve their image and their resale value is going up.
Honda and Toyota have done nothing but rest on their past and both their resale value and quality have been going down.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Our youngest son just bought a new Honda Odyssey. They are very happy with it.

[Troy Staten]

I had a 99 Odessey for years, I thought it was a very nice van, road nicely and had a ton of room, if you pulled out the back seats you could fit a 4x8 sheet of ply and close the back door. I think the newer ones are very fancy but still lots of room. If your going to get a mini-van, give up now it will hurt less, the Honda is a good choice.

[Jim Matthews]

I bought my second ODY in 2011, a 2003 model which is the end of the second generation of production.

That series has good balance between features and utility. I would avoid any of these that have lots of buttons and actuators -
if you're carrying kids. The nicest feature is the seat height, you can carry a child at chest height and plunk them into the seat through the door,
no bending, contortions or spinning the Twister wheel.

I've had two, and no trouble with transmissions on either (the first was donated at 150,000 currently ticking past 225,000 on the original motor and transmission).

If you can find one second hand that has some measure of warranty remaining, that would be worthwhile.
Consider buying at a distance, if there's a portion of that remaining.

If it's strictly As-Is, find a 10,000/year example at an auction.
You can check CarFax to see if it's a salvage title, while you're reading the offerings.

I'm not a fan of buying new cars, the depreciation is outrageous.

I'll be driving my current ODY 1600 miles, round trip next weekend.
I have no worries about this, as I've kept up the maintenance.

FYI - the 2004/2005 Saturn VUE had the same drive train as my ODY, with about 1000# less weight.


This is the sort of thing (http://www.bransontruckandauto.com/2006-Honda%20-Odyssey-July2013/2006-Honda%20-Odyssey-For-Sale-Springfield-Branson-MO.html) I would be looking for, over in Branson.

[Matt Meiser]

I've got a client in central Ohio who's wife has one. He's told me several times how much she hates it in the winter.

[Lee Schierer]

My daughter had an Odyssey and loved it except for the gas mileage in the city. For my money though I would buy a Honda Pilot. It has nearly the same passenger capacity and has a good towing capacity as well. We get 24-25 mpg on the highway with ours unless there are lots of hills. Around town we get about 19-20. The rear view camera makes hooking up to a trailer a one person one attempt job. You can see the hitch ball and steer it right under the trailer tongue.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Lee,

I bought a used 2005 Honda Pilot. I get 24-25 mpg and I live in a very hilly, mountainous area. The 4WD works well even in deep snow and mud. Around town I get about 16 mpg but I live in town where I change elevations of 700' elevation just going "down town". I have a 3 seater, 8 passenger.

[Tom Fischer]

We have a 2010(?) Honda CRV. Smaller than an Odyssey.
The car is OK, but dealer maintenance/repairs are pretty big.
50K check cost over $600.
They must have changed ever fluid in the car.
We also have a VW CC. Recent 50K check was a little over a $100.

[Jim Matthews]

Does the owner use snow tires?

I find most all-season tires to be useless on ice, let alone the slushy "heart attack in a shovel" stuff we get that passes for snow.
I've never had any trouble with snow, driving an ODY, including 4 years in the Adirondacks.

[Jim Matthews]

We also have a VW CC. Recent 50K check was a little over a $100.

Wait until you change the transmission fluid - if your's is an automatic.
It's not required by the dealer for the TipTronic, but required for the DSG.

At 50k, I would consider it an essential to longterm driving.
If it's a lease, it's an unnecessary expense.

[Andrew Fleck]

My daughter had an Odyssey and loved it except for the gas mileage in the city. For my money though I would buy a Honda Pilot. It has nearly the same passenger capacity and has a good towing capacity as well. We get 24-25 mpg on the highway with ours unless there are lots of hills. Around town we get about 19-20. The rear view camera makes hooking up to a trailer a one person one attempt job. You can see the hitch ball and steer it right under the trailer tongue.

I think Honda changed something on them in 2011. The newer ones get or at least claim to get about the same fuel mileage as that Pilot. That camera sure sounds like it makes things easier.

[Andrew Fleck]

Thanks for all of the replies. It seems repair costs may be a little bit unreasonable. I'm going to swing by a Honda dealership tomorrow and inquire about some of the pricing.

[David Weaver]

Guy I ride the bus with has an older one with about 120k miles. Might be an '04 or something. He spent a week last year without it and I can't remember the repair number, but it was something bonkers, like $4k.

I personally wouldn't get one with electronic doors if you plan on having it for a long time. If they malfunction, they can end up refusing to close, literally closing until they would normally latch and then springing all the way back open over and over and over.

That said, they are super popular here in suburbia, but most people here don't plan well or care much about repair bills until the second they have to pay them.

[David Weaver]

There's an interesting follow up to this, one that eric the car guy mentions (a youtube personality, but one who worked as a mechanic at an acura dealer through what in reality was probably honda's shift in focus from plain jane quality cars to more americanized blingy accessorized and less reliable stuff with lots more plastic junk, etc.

Somewhere around the 1997-2003 range, honda's offerings changed, and I don't know if that's because manufacturing was moved here or what. ECTG mentioned that when he started, 80% of his work was service work (general maintenance work or repairs on cars past their warranty) and 20% was warranty work, and that over the course of his employment period that ratio flip flopped. Not that a honda isn't more reliable in a lot of cases than a domestic equivalent, but to me, a mechanic working at a dealer seeing that kind of change is not a good thing. I believe he summarized it as partly due to the desire to reduce service work (fewer X thousand mile checkups, etc) so you could market a car's lower expected maintenance costs, along with a general decline in quality of the cars from a reliability standpoint (and drains on cash like the asimo robot, etc).

I bought a new accord in 2005. I didn't have it long because it was a stick coupe and I unexpectedly got married after being terminally single. 25k miles on it and I had to switch it out for something the wife could drive and that has four doors. I got absolutely hammered in trade, just as mentioned above. While it was generally OK, there were some things about it that you wouldn't expect on a honda - especially the brakes. Any significant amount of braking (I live in the hills of pittsburgh, and often drive through the mountains to visit my parents on the other side of the state) and there was significant rotor warpage and the hammering that goes along with it when you brake. When you're descending an 8% grade for a couple of miles, that kind of thing is not acceptable.

There were also some unexpectedly stupid engineering things, tons of plastic under the hood and the design of the headlights such that the service manual suggested taking the wheel off to change the headlight bulb (!) which I avoided only through busted knuckles.

I personally wouldn't spend the money on anything honda's made unless it was stripped down and all of the latches, etc, that cost more than a few bucks were manual latches.

The hills here in pittsburgh, which have a stoplight at the bottom (they'd be blind turns at the time) just obliterate mileage, too. We always end up getting around what the city mileage rating is in combination driving, only getting to the top end of the EPA rating or above when we're out of town. That makes the big vans a non-starter. They weren't really core vehicles for honda, toyota, et al in their current forms and it's my opinion that you pay a LOT for them because of the brand reputation, but you don't get all of what you're paying for and you get a nail in the end of the stick when it comes time to make major repairs.

[Jeff Monson]

The Odyssey is a great van IMO, the 2002-2003 models had some transmission problems, so maybe a vintage to stay away from if you are buying used. Otherwise they are laid out very nice, with a very reliable engine. No move expensive to maintain or repair than any other minivan on the market.

[Bob Turkovich]

There were also some unexpectedly stupid engineering things, tons of plastic under the hood and the design of the headlights such that the service manual suggested taking the wheel off to change the headlight bulb (!) which I avoided only through busted knuckles.

.

If "tons of plastic under the hood" is your example of stupid engineering things, I could come up with a quite a few highly regarded engineers who would completely disagree with that.

Regarding the headlight bulb process, I can't speak for Honda directly but one needs to really experience going through the underhood packaging design process from start to finish to understand how these decisions get made. While making the vehicle serviceable for the home mechanic is considered important, it is secondary to many other factors such as impact, weight, etc. Impact is a huge factor as it significantly determines where components are placed. If the space behind the headlight is used for some other critical component, then having to remove a tire (rather than the critical component) - which a dealer could do in 5 minutes - becomes an acceptable compromise.

Back in my days before retirement, these type of decisions were not made lightly and reviewed multiple times before the design was finalized.

[David Weaver]

It's not just the home mechanic that is affected by goofy service routines, but also the mechanic doing a lot of warranty work where book rate isn't provided.

I use the word stupid because all of the plastic vacuum lines, intake parts, etc, have a finite lifetime and they become brittle. You can't just take them off and replace a few lines and clamp them back on as a lot of them aren't that accessible. From an engineering standpoint, anyone designing the systems or the manufacturing side of the system, or the parts profitability side would have a better idea about why plastic is used so heavily, but I would imagine the answers would not be in favor of the consumer.

I'm sure it is easier to design a shape, get it in plastic and not have expensive components. Let the car owner take it to a garage 10 years down the road for some very expensive service work instead.

Honda's decline, though (and yes, they are not the only ones piling up the plastic, I don't know if you'd find much aside from boutique stuff that isn't) is reasonably well documented, even if they have exactly started making ford pintos and even if they do have more money in the car equation in quality materials than GM, etc, where legacy costs have large influence on not just the amount of plastic used interior and exterior but the quality of the plastic that's used as well.

Personally, I don't see $1000 door latches and plastic vaccuum line setups that can cost $1000 to get diagnosed and replaced at a dealer to be anything but decline for someone who is on a budget. (Crossing manufacturers) While 30 year old BMWs with metal parts under the hood are not uncommon and still runing, I can't imagine any of the current heavily plastic oriented high dollar bimmers being around in 30 years, at least not without huge amounts of money spent replacing brittle plastic parts with proprietary parts that have to not just match the shape but also have custom connectors to some other part in a car.

[Bob Turkovich]

David,

The biggest driver in going to plastic underhood components was weight - not cost - and its positive effect on fuel economy. While plastic has a lower piece cost than aluminum, the tooling cost is much higher so the plastic vs. aluminum decision is volume sensitive. A part for a low volume vehicle would be less expensive overall in metal than in plastic.

There is no reason that the parts you cite can't be designed in plastic to live 10yrs./150,000 miles or more.

Regarding serviceability, you underestimate the difficulty in trying to package 20lbs. in a 5 lb. bag. Oh, by the way, that 20 lbs. has to be strategically placed for impact.

At Chrysler, we had engineers whose sole job was to review serviceability. They sat in (or were invited to) every packaging meeting I attended and had to sign off on the vehicle design before it could be tooled up. Difficult decisions were raised to the VP level or higher. To insinuate that serviceability is not important is incorrect.

This is starting to go over the bounds of the OP's original intent (sorry..). I have no bone to pick on the original topic as he expresses no desire to look into a Grand Caravan.

If you want to continue this specific discussion, I'd be more than willing to do it via PM or you can start another off-topic thread.

[David Weaver]

There are a million directions it could go, I think it would make an interesting other thread.

Back to the OP's question, I looked up CR's recent data (which is the only numeric sample that I know of, the best way to get actual reliability information) and they describe overall oddysey reliability as "below average" but either last year or this year, they changed their expected reliability for future models up to "average".

I won't say anything about Chrylser's reliability, it would just add to my overall commentary that the minivans aren't what they could or should be in general (they are overly heavy, overly laden with gadgets, generally unreliable compared to a lot of the bread and butter sedans, and expensive to buy, operate and repair). It doesn't look like there is a "really good one" if someone set the bar based on the 1980s and 1990s golden era of toyota and honda mid-sized sedans.

[Mel Fulks]

Sometimes bad decisions are made even knowing they are bad. The slant 6 engine was great until addition of pollution controls.Then they were lousy. So cold natured they had to be warmed up idling or would cut off. That's the only way they could be sold. Maybe a better decision would have been made with less review and more money and more time from Feds.