So here we are, one year after I took delivery of a 2014 Accord EX-L V6 six-speed coupe, eleven months after the first update, and five months after hitting the 12k mark. As fate would have it, at the same time the crew at Automobile was enjoying a free year in a car almost exactly like mine, courtesy of Honda. This, incidentally, is where the true nature of the autojourno biz comes into play: I laid out slightly over $9,300 in monthly payments, insurance, and maintenance to do exactly what the Automobile crowd did for free.
Well, not exactly; I also took mine to a racetrack. A few times.
Nominally speaking, the purpose of my March trip to Putnam Park was so I could drive a Lingenfelter-tuned Corvette ZR1 for R&T and coach Josh Condon, the magazine’s bald but brilliant front-of-book-editor, into a measure of competence driving said 750-horsepower creature in temperatures that never cracked the high side of forty degrees Fahrenheit. Since I’d traveled there in my new Accord, though… why not try it, as well? With just 3,000 miles on the V6, the Accord was broken-in enough to absolutely dust a couple of competently-driven Scion FR-S coupes around Putnam Park — for three laps, anyway. That’s all you get out of the amusingly undersized front discs. Keep in mind that the V6 Accords do get a brake upgrade over their four-cylinder siblings, but that’s like saying Attack Of The Clones is an improvement over The Phantom Menace. It’s just different degrees of sucking. If you want to know how Honda provides this much car at this price, looking at the brake hardware will help you understand.
As mentioned in my previous article at the 12,000-mile mark, the Accord did very well around R&T’s “Motown Mile” during the Performance Car Of The Year testing. In October, I took it to the same Southeastern Ohio roads we used for that article and decided that I preferred it to both the VW GTI and the Subaru STi — with the caveat, naturally, of the brakes.
After a full year, however, I’m still using my old Audi S5 as the yardstick by which I judge the big Honda coupe. In the kind of winter we’re having right now, I’d rather have the Audi, and by a long shot. There’s nothing like ten-below temperatures to expose shortcuts in materials quality, and I’m afraid to say that the Accord has some flaws here. The driver’s seat has been creaky since Day One and in cold conditions it makes a crinkly-crackling noise. I’m going to have that looked at, I think. The fuel door is misaligned, and by not much less than the gap that enraged young Derek last year. None of the body panels really line up the way I’d like them to.
I’ve been to my local dealer twice since taking delivery, in both cases to have the Honda-recommended maintenance performed. It’s much cheaper to have basic service intervals done on an Accord than, say, a Porsche Boxster, but I don’t think that really comes as a surprise to anyone. Come March, I’ll go talk to them about the driver’s seat and the fuel-filler door.
What else can I complain about? Well, there’s a bug in the media interface that causes the display to be a bit garbled when playing music from an Android phone. The Acura TLX I drove late last year had an updated version of the same system that didn’t have the problem, so I suspect that 2015 Accords won’t, either. The sunroof is a bit noisy both closed and open. If, like me, you use your car as an office and a restaurant and everything else, you won’t like the way that salt and other tiny particles clog in the perforated leather. In cold weather, the windows stick shut easily and the clutch feels soft. The headlights aren’t brilliant and you’ll have to drive to Canada to get an Accord Coupe with LED headlights. That, or break into the Ohio factory where they are installed. The center console feels delicate and wobbly, although no more so than what you get in a Camry or Altima.
Against that list of annoyances, the Coupe offers: a strong, clear sound system. Great visibility. Sensibly-located LATCH tethers. Plenty of storage space. Comfortable seats with long thigh bolsters, which really matters when you’re carting a taller woman around. (Or dude, I suppose, but I don’t care about that.) Fast defrosting time. Decent A/C. Legible instrumentation. Big side mirrors. A lot of trunk space. A super-cool “EarthDreams” badge on the plastic intake cover. You get the idea.
Since September or so, I’ve been intermittently commuting to a couple of jobs in downtown Columbus via a 15.6-mile route that is mostly freeway driving. In those conditions, I’m seeing a consistent 24-26mpg. That’s not brilliant, but the S5 couldn’t crack 15mpg in the same circumstances, and it wasn’t much faster in real-world use despite the Accord’s best C/D-test showing of 14.0@103 against the Audi’s 13.4@105.
Experienced drag racers will note the 0.6-second gap in ET against the 2mph gap in trap speed and suspect, correctly, that the Accord is traction-challenged. It’s not just that the Honda spins its front wheels from a dig; even a Yugo GV does that. It’s more that you can be rolling down the road at 40 in second gear and spin ’em easily. Pushed hard enough, the coupe will chirp in third like a 440-powered Chrysler. It’s virtually always possible to spin at least one of the front wheels at any time.
This trait, along with some completely unfounded complaints about the steering and suspension, was enough for Automobile to give the Accord EX V6 low marks in their four-season testing. “To me, the standard Accord sedan is a much better-executed vehicle than the coupe, which is trying too hard to be something it’s not,” quoth Joey Capparella in the magazine’s wrap-up review. Joe Lorio noted that the Accord’s “extreme-enthusiast specification” was “disappointing”. I’ll have to admit that my first reaction to both comments was less than respectful, but after looking both of these fellows up I think I understand why they wrote what they did a little better.
If you think of this car as an “extreme enthusiast” Accord, you’re bound to be disappointed. This isn’t a Type-R or even an Si. Nor is it trying to be. It’s just a family car with a big motor. That’s a recipe as old as the flathead Ford, you know. If the Accord sedan is the successor to the everyday-sedan retail-purchase throne once held by the ’74 GM A-body, then this is simply a modern take on my mother’s ’77 Cutlass Supreme, which was (over)powered by a 403-cubic-inch V-8. That car wasn’t sporty, it wasn’t extreme-enthusiast, and it could spin its tires at any time. It was popular, but not enormously so. History shows that most people chose a V-6 or a small-block in the Seventies A-bodies, and that most people choose a four-cylinder Accord today.
Mr. Capparella is simply too young to remember the days when high-powered, soft-suspended coupes ruled the American road, and the odd historical astigmatism that the automotive press applies to any discussion of the pre-OBD-II era cloaks that time in vaguely ironic labels of “Malaise” or “Jimmy Carter telling the country to put on a sweater”. The fact remains, however, that hundreds of thousands of new-car buyers once chose vehicles that were spiritually similar to this Accord. Cars that had plenty of room for Mom and Dad and two kids and the groceries but which sacrificed a tiny bit of practicality for a tiny bit of style. Cars that looked pretty boring but which could match anything short of a Corvette when the view through the windshield showed two lanes merging to one up ahead. Cars that didn’t pretend to be able to win an SCCA race or roost a fire road or carry a ton of dirt or tow the Space Shuttle but which somehow were purchased by normal people in significant numbers regardless of those missing pseudo-qualities.
If you think that a CVT-powered four-cylinder Accord is the best Accord, good news: you’ll be able to buy one ten years from now. If you want a little bit of power, or a bit of two-door flair, or the ability to actually choose your own actual combination of synchromesh gears through moving a lever that is actually connected to those gears by a steel linkage, you’d better move quickly. The Accord Coupe isn’t an M3 wannabe or a Boomer-friendly CUV or a four-wheeled expression of self-flagellating enviro-piety, and since it’s none of those, it’s something else: an endangered species.
The i-MID display truncates the song name, as you can see above — jb
Strangely, an Accord coupe in V6 trim is at the top of my “If I Win The Lottery or Have to Replace My Dart List”.
Glad the Honda’s doing you right.
If I won the lottery it would be a 1977 Olds Cutlass 442 in mint shape with low mileage with a 403 V8 for me!
I get that, but it’s more along the lines of it’s a coupe that my kids can fit in.
I’d love to get another Mustang, but since my toddlers are f-ing giants, I will have to go with something they can fit in. Like an Accord coupe.
The would probably fit in a Challenger. Nothing wrong with the Accord coupe, just throwing it out there if you wanted to stick to RWD.
So, the Accord is a nice car, but nothing more special then a ’77 Cutlass with the 403 V8. I had a Grand Prix of that vintage with the same engine, so I get the analogy. A good car with a little something extra to satisfy the Walter Mitty need in us to think we’re not like the others, we’re carguys
It also shows why the Camry and Accord sell so well here, they are just American cars we all know.
Agree. Being able to chirp the front tires anytime is not a bug, it’s a feature!
Correct, as long as it’s “tires”. Being able to spin one front tire is the bug!
“Being able to spin one front tire is the bug!”
Good point. I wonder what brand / type of OEM tires are mounted on it. Tirerack reports back that it could be Bridgestone, GoodYear, or Michelin.
Either way, I don’t imagine they’re terribly grippy. Buying that first set of replacements for the OE tires is always extremely satisfying.
“There’s nothing like ten-below temperatures to expose shortcuts in materials quality”
Hey Jack, you should hear the cars a creakin on the other end of the state lately. -39F Friday morning. Brrrr.
“-39F Friday morning. Brrrr.”
Off-topic, but you almost made it to the -40F = -40C intersection.
-12 Fahrenheit forecasted for tonight.
I’m sick of this sh!t. Humans weren’t meant to live in these circumstances.
-12 is not all that bad. I was born in Juneau and spent nearly half my life in Anchorage, Kodiak, and along the pipeline. After its been -30-40 for a week, if it gets up to -12 its time to go skiing!
Ha ha, it got into the teens today and felt like sweatshirt weather. The sun was out and it felt dang good.
Replacing the long life h11 headlight bulbs with brighter h9s substantially improved headlight performanc for me.
After 26k under the wheels of my L99-powered 6MT Accord sedan, the only quality issue I’ve had was a set of lightly warped rotors skimmed under warranty. In poverty spec cloth, the seats don’t make noise but the 4 speaker stereo is the enduring penalty. If the car has been outside all day in sub zero weather, the golf cart size battery has trouble turning the thing over and it doesn’t like to engage second gear. Not really anything Honda can do to combat physics though.
I would also humbly submit the smug satisfaction I get when people realize my convertible car-seat conveyance has a DIY transmission is a nice no-cost option.
I’m surprised the Accord Coupe V6 still exists. It is an endangered species indeed. The Altima Coupe didn’t survive and neither did the Solara, although that was aimed at a slightly different demographic.
It’s definitely a pretty car.
Pretty dirty
Not in the snow belt. The glass is clean. That’s the Michigan equivalent of Pebble Beach standards in February.
All cars look nasty in the winter. I don’t think I even notice cars from December to March. They’re just all grey salty messes, ugh!
One thing I do not miss about the snow belt (besides the snow and ice…)…salt on the cars. My Rain Man qualities always came out…
Both press cars that I’ve had recently needed a trip to the car wash before exterior photography. When the temperature dropped to the single digits last week, I paid the extra $1 or so for the drive-thru rather than the self-serve. I’m sure that the detailers at the fleet management companies had to shampoo the carpets to get out the salt after I turned them in.
Winter is hard on cars. From being able to be comfortable in subzero (F) temps, to withstanding the abuse of freeze/thaw cycle fractured roads, to not rusting out from road salt, consumers world wide are fortunate that the auto industry developed in Michigan. Executives like to be comfortable riding in the back seat to work.
In reading what I just wrote, I’m reminded of how reliable the use of electronics, with fuel injection, modern ignition systems and ECUs, has made cars. Yeah, when the temp drops to around 0 F, your car might crank a little slower and need a few more spins to fire, but it starts. Of course, automotive engineers and managers at car companies like their cars to start in the morning too, so I guess climate conditions around Detroit helped spur those improvements too.
The same is true, btw, for air conditioning. Detroit has one of the broadest temperature swings of any major city in the world. The midwest U.S. is where it can go from -10 to 105 with humidity.
The older I get, the less well I am able to tolerate Michigan’s massive temperature envelope divergence (which, as you stated, can range to over 100 degrees – though it’s actually closer to 130 degrees given an extreme winter next to an extreme summer).
I can’t do the Miami 90 degree 90% humidity thing, nor the Las Vegas or Phoenix 118 degree 10% humidity thing, either, so the PNW looks better with each passing year.
It sounds like you are enjoying your latest ride.
I just rolled over 21k on a 2014 CRV purchased on February 15th last year. I have pretty much the same complaints in my Canadian built example. The brakes suck, are lightly warped, and now clicking on first application in the morning as well as squealing when coming to a stop. Next oil change they will be examined by the dealer. I have exorcised a hatch rattle by adjusting the rubber bumpers on the hatch as well as added rubber bumpers to the glove box lid to stop a rattle there. Something else is rattling now, but it has been really cold in upstate SC, so it may go away in warmer weather. Different bulbs helped the headlights a little. Low beams are acceptable, but high beams are not. The AC is on the low end of acceptability by southern US standards and the compressor and fans cycling on and off are loud and annoying. Honda engineers are obviously not targeting quiet operation in much of anything on the vehicle. That being said, I average 29 mpg in routine driving, probably due to lightness from lack of soundproofing.
Overall I don’t feel that I got gyped, but I wouldn’t buy another. I actually preferred the Escape when shopping, but got spooked by the teething problems. If they have been sorted out I would go that way instead.
Over 40K on my 2012 Honda CRV. Still feels solid, despite daily driiving over cratered streets in L.A. (City wants a $3 billion bond issue to fix streets) A/C works well.
I guess that temperature extremes are the main culprit in Honda squeaks and rattles. I sprang for the EX, because the seat fabric on the LX seemed a bit too thin. I don’t know if there is more sound insulation in the EX vs the LX. Mine is a built-in-Japan J car. I still think that the Japanese Hondas have better quality (local parts?? assembley?? inspection??) than the North American products.
My co-worker has a 2013 CRV with leather and roof. He has reported many of the same issues and also found a 3 inch puddle of water on the passenger floor after a rain shower last Summer which turned out to be an improperly manufactured water drain system according to Honda. He made them replace the carpet and professionally clean the seats due to the odor which Honda was reluctant to do. He currently has a rear end rattle that the service department cannot seem to hear or locate and his CEL lamp is on steady indicating an emissions related malfunction. He too indicated he probably wouldn’t buy another.
Using your Audi as a yardstick for the Accord seems unfair to the Honda, don’t you think? Its not as perfectly built as the Audi, sure but that’s why the Audi S5 starts at over $30,000 more than the Accord coupe. Good read though. My Optima’s center console is a bit wobbly as well.
It’s actually either a major compliment to the Accord or a measure of how the marginal benefit of each dollar spent on a car declines precipitously after a certain point. Or, more likely, both.
My best friend has a 2014 Accord 4dr, 4cyl, stick. I’m very impressed with the way it drives. Great steering precision, handling, and snic-snic.
And a very nice place to sit for the drive across the country.
Toyota’s mission is VAAC (volume at all costs), so it’s no surprise that the Solara died, and eventually the Camry stick shift (a stripper model anyway, so meh).
Nissan chose the VAAC route with the Altima, so yes, no coupe, no 6MT. I still have a 2009 3.5SE sedan on my radar for next year when I pass down the 2007. The last of a dead breed.
The existence of the Civic Si and the coupe (6-speed or otherwise) shows that Honda still cares about a certain demographic enough to throw them a bone. If those cars go away, that demographic will just move on to hot hatches and Mustangs. I’m thankful that Honda still wants their business when its main competitors gave them a big F-U.
Thanks Jack, that’s how I feel about the current crop of V6 powered Family Haulers from coupes to sedans to the CUVs based off of them. It is like sliding behind the wheel of those vehicles of the past in which the engine was the most interesting thing about them and mom’s taxi could rattle off a pretty decent 1/4 mile time even if it would have been lost the min the road got twisty.
The 3.6 impala is the same sort of thing. Pretty nice for an unpretentious, everyday car.
I enjoyed the perspective of the car evaluated on both road and track.
My 2015 GTi with 10,000 miles on it has been living through a winter that’s featured extremely frigid weather and lots of snow and ice. So far, no creaks, no squeaks, no untoward sounds whatsoever. And so far as I can tell, no panel gaps or misalignments to see. I’d compare the VW’s build quality the equal of my two past Audis, and it’s hard to even make the case for better material quality in the Audis. Maybe deep within there are differences, but I’ve yet to sense them.
The 2 year old Jetta SEL in my driveway hasn’t been holding up nearly as well as your GTI. Rattles and creaks galore.
Makes one wonder if Jack would not have preferred a GTI at this 18,000 mile point…
Cold weather creaks and frozen windows have been common in every Honda, Nissan and Hyundai product I’ve owned over the past 25 years. Ditti rusty undercarriage hardware and subframes within five years of road salt exposure. Panel fit was an issue on the Japanese brands, especially the later ones which seemed to get worse with every generation.
My Volvo S80 trumps them all, with impeccable construction and a seeming indifference to extreme cold. These cars are also quite corrosion-resistant, along with Audi, VW and BMW. We’ll see how reliability compares, but there’s a lot to like here.
Again that’s not a fair comparison. An S80(which I love BTW) is a much more expensive car than an accord, its not fair to compare the two.
My ’08 Civic (stick) has not had trouble with any of the above, despite much of this month being in single digits, and even lower here in Lexington, slightly west of Boston. I’ve never had a frozen window.
I will say, on the other hand, that the steering is not as precise as my best friend’s Accord, nor the cornering as flat, and the visibility is lousy, what with massive, massively raked A pillars, fat B pillars, and not nearly enough of a back window.
Likewise my 36k mile stick shift 2012 Civic LX has shown indifference to the cold (beyond slow synchros until the gear oil warms up), and a total lack of rattles, to my surprise, frankly. My father’s 2007 Fit had a dash rattle the very first winter that persists to this day.
My 2014 Civic LX 5 speed does the same thing with the slow synchros in the cold, and I’m only talking about temperatures in the mid 40’s in the morning here in Southern California.
My Civic Si 08 coupe did. Creaked weirdly the first two or three winters, then quieted down. Mostly it was at the back around the speakers.
The A and B pillars are a pain. I will avoid anything like this in future.
I drive a 2008 Accord Coupe (K24 5MT) since January 2008.
Frozen windows? Occasionally, but no worse than my previous cars, most of them American branded. Actually, I have yet to experience a frozen door lock or latch. (I live in the Great White North, in Honda City ON, near the HCM factories:-) )
Brakes? YMMV. In my case, I just passed 135 000 km and only now (except for the rear pads changed under warranty @ 36K) is it due for a brake job.
Undercarriage looks good (after 7+ years now), actually much better than the other vehicle in my driveway, a 2012 Mazda 5.
I should mention that I’m in Ottawa, Canada, where it’s been -25 Celsius kind of cold. In 30 years of driving I’ve never known any Honda, Nissan or Hyundai product to have functioning power windows at these temps.
Perhaps the S80 does have a cost-related advantage in some areas, but in others, like corrosion resistance, one finds rust-free 20-year-old European cars all the down to the S40 and VW Jetta price point here in the salt belt. Among other brands, not so much.
My ’15 Sonata has 4400 on the clock and glides with nearly supernatural silence through the -25c temps – and over the cavernous expansion joints and potholes – we’ve been enduring in upstate NY. It takes it about 1.5 seconds instead of 1 second to start of it’s below 0f and it’s been off all night. The windows, door handles, locks, etc, don’t appear to notice the difference; nor do the onboard displays.
My only complaints as far as cold weather performance are that the Sonata’s dual-zone climate control isn’t utterly perfect in the way my Saab 9-5’s was. You can feel a draft once in a while if it’s below zero and you’re in a t-shirt. I found it necessary to manually blip the defrost every once in a while when it hit -5f on a recent road trip.
These complaints would have been nit-picking in the best cars in the world 20 years ago; their being nearly the only ones I can muster now about a $21k car that comes with leather, nav, big audio, BLIS/cross-traffic, prox entry and pushbutton start, and which I can turn on from my freaking cell phone, strikes me as nearly absurd. In my lifetime we’ve gone from “water pools on the floor when it rains and the doors won’t latch” to “I can almost hear the engine while getting 36mpg at 80mph”. It’s kind of crazy.
Slightly off topic…
JB’s last post specifically noted that the Evora’s Toyota V6 came unmodified from the factory. Lotus added the supercharger – no internal engine mods.
Could the Accord V6 handle such duty (without mods)? Nissan’s VQ?
Heck, since many mass market sedans/CUV’s feature ~3.5 V6 animals, whose engine WOULDN’T be up to the task?
My guess (and after some thought I changed my mind) is that almost all would do fine, given today’s advances in machining and quality control.
It really depends is the best answer, chiefly, are the pistons cast or forged and what alloy are they using? Another consideration is how much boost are they running? Other considerations include are the rings up to the increased side loading, how about the heads/valves (don’t want to cook a valve! Is the compression ratio appropriate for forced induction?
Is the motor direct injected? That’s a big one because they usually have special shaped pistons that have cavities specifically for lean burn high compression modes when low demand is needed such as highway cruising, so you have to know how that holds up and works under forced induction.
The final issue, which I’m sure Lotus took care of on their own, would be cooling. Cooling was the major challenge for the hellcat series and the engineers at Chrysler spent more than a year testing the hellcat for cooling issues. For a proper turbo/super charger setup, it is critical that cool air be drawn in from outside the engine bay, the engine bay should have plenty of natural air flow as well, the exhaust headers should be insulated, the air intake tubes should all be insulated, the intercooler should be located somewhere that doesn’t soak heat from the engine, etc.
Are there any U.S. cars that lean burn when cruising? I am on my third Audi 2.0T FSI, and while that same engine in European models lean burns while cruising, the ones in the U.S. are not programed to do so due to U.S. fuel quality and emissions.
I notice the freshly washed cause the wax makes the side panels look soo glossy. Something I don’t seem to notice in summer.
Cold weather cracks are like popping sinuses. I recall reading a 70’s NYC roller dealer had to idle 15 mins to avoid cracking seats.
This car is not my cup of tea, I just couldn’t see buying it over a mustang, WRX, or GTI, but it sounds like its treating you well! You definitely have a good perspective on what the car is and isn’t. I wonder…How much improvement would an upgraded set of brakes, some high performance brake fluid, and a good set of summer/track tires improve the Accord coupe?
Also, is the coupe also front strut now or did it keep the superior double wishbone?
It needs six-piston fixed-caliper brakes to really shine. It weighs more than my Boxster S so the big Brembos on said Boxster S would only be adequate.
Accords have been strut-front cars for a few generations now, sadly.
Is there something in the Acura brake department of the TL, TSX, T**, that will switch right in to the Accord 6MT??
The current generation of those cars is also woefully short on brakes. The old TL Type S had Brembos but I doubt they’d just go on.
“The old TL Type S had Brembos but I doubt they’d just go on.”
A company sells a bracket kit for $150 that lets you bolt on Acura RL four piston calipers along with the larger rotors. It is possible to mount the TL Type S brembos but the mounting holes for the caliper must be enlarged by 2mm and the factory wheels do not have enough backspacing to clear them.
The front brakes from the Acura Legend and NSX can be directly bolted onto the 5th and 6th gens. V6 Accord. Among the current Honda models I would look into the Pilot brake setup.
“Accords have been strut-front cars for a few generations now, sadly.”
This is the first generation of Accords without upper and lower control arms since 1985. I suspect the wishbones are really gone because of the narrow offset barrier crash test. Mazda and Ford just dumped them from their mid-sized sedans with their current generation cars too.
I had one of those “superior double wishbone” Accords, a 1992 LX sedan. I think I preferred my strut cars.
Wishbones are great on a race car but simply unnecessary on a family sedan, let alone coupe.
And even back then the brakes were just barely “okay”, but back then you only got 125hp to play with.
Imo the most recent Accord is superior in every way.
Fragile and weak brakes seem to be a persistent Honda problem in the same way NVH plagues Mazda.
my sister’s Element has gone through more rotors than any car I’ve ever witnessed. That includes lairy project cars.
There’s no free lunch right? We can hope that the money is spent elsewhere besides marketing.
Wishbones of yesteryear were superior to struts of that time, but modern cars have struts that work just as well. And the vertical packaging of struts allows more front interior leg room.
Still, double wishbones would have been appropriate for this particular endangered species of Accord.
I think that better brakes would suit this Accord , what goods handling if you can’t stop?
“I think that better brakes would suit this Accord , what goods handling if you can’t stop?”
Single piston brakes will stop you just fine on a daily drive, but will fail on a track. It’s just that double-wishbones are endangered, and it would be poetic to put them on an endangered Accord.
I have the 2012 TSX Wagon, discontinued, an endangered class, and with double wishbones. But damnit, no stick!
Don’t worry Nissan made the same mistake on my 350Z!!! 11.5 rotors with single piston calipers? On a sports car? One that I assume was designed with track days in mind? Talk about worthless brakes! Holy smoking rotors Batman! Sure there was a Brembo upgrade available on the Track Package, but even those brakes are only 1″ bigger. Under sizing brakes seems to be all too common. I’m guessing its due to unsprung mass. I’m about to drop $2K into getting the ’09 370Z Akebonos onto my ’03 350Z. The newer setup feature 14″ rotors with 4 piston calipers. For more money I could get AP Racing, Willwood or StopTech 6 pistons but they are so big they will not fit under the factory 18″ wheels and I don’t want to move to a 19″ setup for various reason.
I had a first gen 78 280 and 2nd gen 79 280z. They were both modified and turbo charged using parts from the later model turbo Z’s. I ran both at a local road course, talk about fun cars to drive. They are nothing compared to sports cars of today but they were really something in their day. I would like to get a 350 to tinker around with, but I’d have to make room and I don’t think I can part with any of my mistresses at the moment.
Great work Jack.
I liked this piece too.
I also read the Automobile Magazine article and was puzzled by their conclusions. I, having only test drove the 4 cylinder sedan — which was really good — had no clue about the V6 with stick… just that is should be even better. JB’s article filled in the holes for me, and explained Automobile Magazine’s perspective.
Re: dusting FR-Ss, were all parties involved running stock tires?
I was, one Scion was on upgrade street tires and easy to dust, the other was on Hankook Ventus tires and a bit tougher :)
I bow to your mad skillz. Just imagine what the Accord could do with good Michelins, i.e., Pilot SuperSport, instead of the crappy all season MXV or MXM that come stock on it.
I would seriously consider one of these if it wasn’t for the interior design. That and the “traction challenged” part. If it is anything like the 2004 Accord V6 with 240hp/212ft-lbs (vs 278/251), it is not just a problem on drag strips. The car has an awful time putting the power down. In fairness, that 2004 Accord is by far the most powerful FWD car I’ve driven; maybe that’s just how it goes with that layout.
Traction is tires. The 04 Accord wouldn’t put power down because Honda delivered it on 205mm donuts. Which is to say, the same tread that Chevy was putting under 140 horse, 2700 pound Cavaliers.
Hondas have always been light for class. Honda brakes, Honda tires, and Honda sound damping are some of the reasons. Tires, at least, can easily be fixed.
See, reading this review I would think that the TLX would be an awesome car but everyone on the internet seems to dislike it.
Accords get compared to Camrys.
TLXs get compared to the 3-series.
But the TLX’s shouldn’t be. I liked the comments on the DeMuro article which reminded everyone that they really duke it out with Lincoln and Buick (and the odd model from others CC, Maxima, etc..). Even the early 00’s TL was more a naturally aspirated Saab as opposed to top tier sports sedan.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, for my money there’s no better $40k sedan than a SH-AWD V6 TLX Tech. Sure you might get a stripper 328i for that, or one of the new small A3/2-series/CLA, but in terms of passenger space, longevity, and features, I’ll take the TLX and just keep it off the track.
Jack take it from me, it’s time to dump this carp. but don’t forget to vacuum it before you… I am talking about teh first pic in particular… speaking of which Ode to My Ho sounds like a good song title someone should actually write it, no?
So if another automotive journalist does not agree with your opinion that is grounds for trashing both him and his publication. Not very professional Jack. I have endured you slagging my own automotive choices but you are entitled to your opinions just as anyone else. You like your car and that is a good thing.
I don’t think it’s trashing somebody to point out that they are too young to have experienced the Oldsmobile Cutlass era. If you think that’s “trashing” then I cannot recommend that you ever try your hand at “freestyle battle rap”.
Perhaps the rarity of a manual-transmission Accord V-6 will make it the collector prize that a Chevelle SS or Cutlass 442 is today. Weirder things have happened.
One of the rarest Cutlasses out there is also a manual…the late 70s Cutlass “aeroback” with a 5 speed manual transmission and 260 cubic inch V8. I’m not quite sure how long they were made, because I’ve only seen ’76 to ’78 examples…
I almost bought an Accord coupe but the lack of an LSD killed the deal for me, I love the car otherwise and Honda still knows how to make fantastic N/A engines. I’m sad about the impending flood of Honda turbo engines that are about to come over. Ended up getting an Si sedan, I love it but I still wish it had another 20hp and 1000 more revs to play with.
$9300 in payments, insurance, and maintainance for an Accord? Sheesh! My 2010 Challenger R/T, with an excessively high payment(IMHO), insurance (not bad, I’m old), and maintainance (I do not count the damage done from the crater filled roads near my house, but if I did it would be about $500) doesn’t even come close to that. About $7200, $8300 if you include the new tires and road hazard warranty I bought for them. How much is the payment on this thing? How much is your insurance a year? Sounds like you’re in the penalty box. A nicer one, but still..
Your car is four years older. That can make a big difference for insurance (not sure if you are comparing first year or the most recent year). Also possible that Jack took out a shorter loan, or you put more money down. Plenty of variables to influence that number.
Holy crap! A Honda not PERFECT IN EVERY WAY?? Well, waddaya know .. seriously, I’ve ALWAYS liked the looks of the coupe Honda over the sedan, but after seeing some of it’s competitors at the Auto show, (Chicago) not as much. It just ain’t special no mo’. Even worse – checked out the Acura double display dash/entertainment/navigation/phone gizmo at the same time. Slow and clumsy. I hate to say it, but the Chrysler 200 was faster and easier to work .. the best was Audi’s, but the others weren’t that far behind.
Weak brakes and the resulting long stopping distances have been a Honda issue for decades. I wonder if there is an aftermarket supplier of a brake upgrade.
Better tires might help the traction issue.
Love the “four-wheeled expression of self-flagellating enviro-piety”.
I dunno about “better” but I replaced my OEM front discs on my TSX with Centric something or others from Tire Rack and they are still smooth as silk upon stopping, when the OEMs started juttering around 20k. Centrics were cheaper than OEM, too. I haven’t measured stopping distances though, it’s a street car.
Jack can you comment on living with two-doors as a father and occasional adult-hauler? Anecdotes on back pain and struggling to get the kid’s belt fastened?
My left-side brain (my mom) said it was great with young kids, especially in that 4-10 year-old range, because they’re stuck in their own little world back there, and you get a nicer car for it. My right-side brain (my dad) says it’s too inconvenient.
Thanks
There’s one extra step involved every time — pulling the passenger seat lever to get him in and out. But if it’s just the two of us, I don’t bother to slide the seat back in place after I let him in so then there’s no additional step involved.
I wouldn’t trade for a four-door. Most of the time the Coupe is more pleasant because the door opening is larger. And I’ve broken dozens of bones and have pain in every joint so if the process were difficult I’d have already tired of it.
@Scott_314, glad you asked this. I was wondering the same thing, as I would like to consider a coupe for my next car, but I have a 7 and 9 year old, so I’m not sure I want to deal with always having to pull the seat lever (or maybe they’re old enough to do it themselves?). I also like the lighter doors of a 4 door. I’ll have to ask my parents how it was for them when my brothers and I were kids and we had our 76′ Cutlass Supreme.
There’s a pedal for the seat that even my five-year-old can operate to let himself out. The only thing I have to do is to open up one of the two buckles on his TOTAL OVERKILL child seat. Pretty soon he’ll be in a booster and then I’ll never reach back there again.
That’s what you think, buddy. My six-year-old could probably hack buckling himself in to his booster, but the opportunity cost of waiting for him to stop screwing around and get the job done is enough that I usually just lunge around back there and do it for him.
Biggest issue is that after recalibrating my lunge for my surprisingly gigundo 15 Sonata, I performed the same maneuver in Grandma’s Saab 9-3 and brained myself on the rear courtesy light before landing in my kid’s lap.
I’m curious how many more laps the stock FR-S brakes last, since the Scion is about the same price as the Accord but has far more serious sporting pretensions.
Or is it understood if you buy an FR-S and wish to track it, you’ll invest in better brakes than the ones it comes with?
I seem to recall Honda Accords being pretty potent in some sort of ‘showroom stock’ series awhile back, I recall them racing against Dodge/Chrysler Stratus/Sebrings?
It’s very disappointing to hear that a Honda product has body panels that are misaligned. Japanese makes were known for holding very tight tolerances and holding lines/gaps to perfection even at maximum production. Recall the old Lexus ES commercial. I seriously hope Honda retains their reputation for quality. Mr. Soichiro Honda promised all of us that Hondas built in Ohio will be no different from Hondas built in Japan.
Didn’t see the last update (where half the Comments were) about the mats), so I’ll take care of that first: I knew going in that the mats were sucktastic, so I ordered a set of WeatherTechs long before I took delivery (as my car (in the avatar), one of the rare Touring Sedans, was a factory-order) along with a regular Honda trunk mat (since as nice as the W/T one is, it’s not worth the extra $$$, IMHO). My Dad’s first Accord was a 4th-Gen 1991 Hampshire Green EX Sedan, and that little sucker became a benchmark for me! Not a creak or peep after 70,000 miles, and the carpet was like the Wilton (??) wool in a Rolls-Royce in comparison to the 9th-Gen Accords. IMHO, Honda started the co$t-cutting with the 5th-Gens in 1994, and I could tell just by feeling the carpet, which wasn’t as thick! (The 9th-Gen carpeting IS a little better than the current Civic’s, especially M/Y 2012, but only just. Best to get WeatherTechs, Huskys, whatever your preference, but the Honda all-season mats are nice, too (and could be used as a bargaining chip, much like carpeted mats of old), particularly if you live in a more temperate area that isn’t getting another Ohio Siberian winter!)
As to Jack’s notes, Sunday (March 1st) is the two-year anniversary of the day I took delivery, and my car is mostly equaling that benchmark 4th-Gen in many areas! The main rattle in the interior is from the passenger headrest moving around a bit; removing the headrest from the seat and bending the prongs outward a bit usually helps — every Accord I’ve had has done this! (Sunglasses in the overhead holder also will make noise.) My seat’s bolster rubs against the bottom cushion when I sit down–not a creak–though I may have to start actually doing something active and stop worshipping at the Mc Of D altar so much to address that! ;-) (I’ve had two full-boat Accord Sedan with power seats, and the seats usually needed some sort of shims by this point to address a wobble, or feeling that the seat would “move” during turns, but these chairs are solid as a rock, though maybe a touch less comfortable than my 2006 (7th-Gen) Accord–I think the lumbar support was better; I remember a “Motor Trend” scribe mentioning a Honda PR flak saying “I’ll sell you the entire car with this seat” at the long-lead press preview for the first year of that generation for 2003.) That 7th-Gen was probably the last “best handling” Accord, only because all Accords now have MacPherson struts (although they’re pretty good, considering that Honda had teething problems with the 2001 Civic, the first year of struts in mainstream Hondas, and when Honda really lost the plot), and have electric power steering, both of which dull the handling just a hair. The car likes twisty bits, rather than relishes them. Unlike past Accords, there’s a learning curve involved with the car to get all handling benefits! (The 8th-Gen Accord, 2008-2012, was just too damn big and porky for a driver to make use of the multilink front suspension to it’s advantage in the handling department.)
Lighting couldn’t be better — I will never own another car without LED headlights! They have all the benefits of the Xenons without the glare, and Honda’s cutoff is perfect! (If you look closely at my avatar, you’ll note that there’s two elements on the low-beam, but surprisingly, I’ve only been “flashed” once!) There’s a Honda dealer in the Cleveland area who sells a retrofit for these lights for non-Touring Sedans, but surprisingly, nobody’s come up with a retrofit for the Honda LED headlights from Canadian Accord V6 Coupes to the US Accord Coupe. I suspect that more widespread use of LED lights will come this fall with the Accord mid model-cycle change. I liked the headlights so much that I upgraded my fog lights to a set of LED plug-‘n-play units sold by College Hills Honda in Wooster, OH, which took the “emphasis” of the stock units off the ground in front of the car and projects light forward along with the headlights; not as effective an upgrade as I thought they’d be, but they match the color temperature of the headlights. I might upgrade the high-beams with a halogen bulb with a matching color temperature, just to complete the look. (I’ve also had a set of 8th-Gen Honda horns from College Hills installed, which have an “American” sound, and not the tinny Japanese sound of the 9th-Gens.)
The brakes are a definite step up from my previous Accords! I could probably get several good stops from high speeds out of these, or even track the car, without too much worry — let ’em cool, drive car home! (Jack, do you know anyone at TRC? I’d love to take a hot lap or three on that track, and I suspect the CAR would, as well!)
I knew about thin Honda paint enough that I spent ~$1,200 on xPel Ultimate self-healing Paint Protection Film–hood, mirror caps, back bumper, front fenders, door edges, rockers. Between that and carefully choosing parking spaces, I’ve had NO door dings and two minor scratches, one on either side of the car, from rocks. (The windshield glass is a little thinner, as seems to be the trend — I had a chip filled in March, 2014, and a shallower chip in the driver’s line of sight couldn’t be filled, so it’s a bit of a distraction driving into the sun.) I did bump the concrete stanchion of a “Stop” sign in a parking lot, but the damage and R&R of the rocker-panel PPF totaled-out to less than $1,000 damage.
My hope and PRAYER is that the Honda V6 is always around and available with a stick in some form, even if I can’t drive it; I TRIED to learn stick in an Integra, and if you can’t learn in one of them, fuhgettaboutit! (I can start up from a stop, maybe even on an incline, and get into second gear and up to speed, but I cannot coordinate my left foot and right hand in traffic!) If Honda can’t do that, for the love of God, improve the Hybrid system such that the battery pack can be resized to allow the seats to flip down and not impact trunk space, for venting for the hybrid pieces to be placed such that factory fogs can be had, and most importantly, that I can get V6 torque and performance in short bursts, as I do now. I don’t care how long it’s been since the 80s — I still have memories have turbocharged K-cars blowing up in the ’80s, and I know that Honda can do better than giving in to the CAFE crap by taking away my choice to have INSTANT weapons-grade torque! (Oh, and did I mention that, while the variable-displacement system is a little intrusive occasionally, particularly when the car has been sitting out in the cold weather, high-30s mpgs running on summer-grade gas with the cruise set to 80+ with two pax on board and the A/C at full-blast is pretty impressive; notably, this car doesn’t yet have direct-injection, which I would presume would take place with the aforementioned MMC this coming fall! I would think this would eke out another mpg or two!! I did get 41 indicated last summer — at 70mph, “ECON” mode, no A/C; DI could probably get that four-oh number at Vmax with A/C blasting away at meat-locker temps!)
Would I buy this car, a first year of a new model, again? Hells-to-the-yeah!!!