None.
“drive until it breaks down again, then bring it back, do not shut it down”
I brought to their attention it may happen when dealership is closed, what happened was exactly that
It seems like they want to solve it for you. hmmm … has any of the shop staff used your car as their daily driver every day for 2-3 weeks? If I had that problem that’s what I’d suggest as the best path forward. Ask the shop if one of their staff will agree to this. Even better, the shop manager can drive your car for a few weeks between home & work. Meanwhile you’ll drive one of their loaners.
There has to be some form of time limit on this of course. You eventually – in some reasonable amount of time – need to be supplied with a correctly working car. If that means the dealership ponies up a new car to you gratis, so be it. They still have your original car and once they figure out the problem they can sell it to recoup some of their loss. And the manufacturer will probably provide some $$$ help for this problem to the dealership too.
Years ago I worked at a high tech company and one of the machines , sort of a refrigerator size computer, we were supposed to deliver to a customer just wouldn’t pass QA (quality assurance testing). So we couldn’t ship it. After the CEO started to get some heat from the customer, the company assigned 3 design engineers and 3 field service engineers to work in pairs, full time 24 hour a day in 3-shifts effort. It was a big and very expensive project for which there was no budget. It took 4 or 5 days but the three teams eventually figured it out. A tiny bit of 30 gauge wire, about 2 mm long, had somehow lodged underneath a 44 pin circuit board connector, and was intermittently shorting out two of the pins.
at this point, I completely lost confidence in Honda and I want my way out with refund, not with repair
I’m waiting for the 3 separate complaint “threads” to get to fruition:
- direct demand from Honda corporate
- BBB complaint, directed on Honda corporate
- local dealer mediation via State Attorney General / Consumer Protection Division in my county
if I do not get resolution there, I’m looking for consumer protection lawyer, will get reference to some via Consumer Protection Division in my county
I’m quite mad at this point, but not to extent where I’m irrational, so I can wait until I get responses and decide what to do next
My guess is you’ll have better luck by asking for another car rather than asking for a cash refund. Dealerships have cars that aren’t as yet spoken for. But their cash is pretty much already spoken for.
Yes, I know, this is an uphill battle 
Can’t speak for Mr. Dragon but I would not want another vehicle . His loaner even showed the same message .
5 Likes
The BBB isn’t going to help. They exist to get businesses to pay them money, not to help you.
The AG is the better route, and you are probably approaching the point where you might need a lawyer as well. But first, see if one of your local TV stations has a consumer advocate. Even if not, I bet they’d love to tell the story of the dealership that tells its customers that brake failures aren’t a safety issue.
Sometimes all that’s necessary is some media pressure (or social media pressure - feel free to repeat your troubles on any of their social media outlets) to get them to decide it’s better to get you to go away rather than fight you on this.
3 Likes
+1
Several years back, Smart Money magazine did an expose on The BBB, and they summarized their scathing review with the following words:
Few–if any–consumers are helped by The BBB.
I may have missed something, but if the OP has documentation of three failed repair attempts, he should now be solidly in Lemon Law territory, and the filing of a Lemon Law claim does not require the intervention of an attorney.
2 Likes
I have similar opinion, but I have my coworker who made VW to take their lemon back and he said BBB was that last straw breaking camel’s back, so it costed me only minutes to engage that route in addition to the ones I pursue.
Local TV… good idea 
Also, I was witness to the guy standing in the front of dealership with “My VW is a lemon! VW does not care!” sign, and a couple of dealership managers were swarming around trying to get him off… That story was indeed picked up by local TV and resulted in fast resolution.
Not sure I do not want to get some fresh air time too
Lemon Law complaints are processed–and paid for–by the manufacturer/importer of the vehicle. The dealership is not a party in a Lemon Law complaint.
The dealership is, apparently, rejecting his lemon law claim out of hand because “it’s not a safety issue.” And the dealership is a party in the lemon law complaint inasmuch as the manufacturer is going to ask the dealership what happened, and the dealership is going to say “the required number of repair attempts on a safety issue weren’t reached because it’s not a safety issue and we didn’t make more than 1 attempt to repair the non-safety issue anyway.”
Slight correction.
I’m already talking over the head of the dealership, I’m demanding directly from American Honda Motors.
The number of attempted repair (5 as of today) far exceeds the threshold defined in VA law.
Their original defense of “you did not get yet a excessive number of failures under non-safety threshold, and we do not accept your claim it is a safety defect” is already a moot.
I hope I need only a mild “motivation from the back”, by showing I’m not even started on making it really painful in public area and eventually engaging on a legal side.
Well, all I can say is that Toyota was much easier to deal with than Honda apparently is.
After I sent a demand letter to Toyota for my friend, the corporate folks began a series of apologetic phone calls and letters. It was pretty obvious that they were soiling their underwear over the claim, and the fact that they sent both the Regional Service Supervisor and a Japanese engineer to the dealership was evidence that they took the case very seriously. Luckily, those two guys were able to fix the problem w/in a few hours.
Do you have a lawyer involved. A ‘demand letter’ is a powerful thing.
Yeah. There’s a reason I reluctantly went Lexus instead of Acura this last purchase. Honda is having some company-wide quality issues right now. It’s not unusual for a company with a good reputation to try to avoid acknowledging when problems happen, because they don’t want to lose that good reputation despite the bean counters making decisions that directly caused the quality problem. See: Boeing 737-MAX.
I suspect Honda might become difficult in this case particularly because it’s looking more and more like it’s going to be a widespread problem, and Honda isn’t going to want to have to pay through the nose, especially on the heels of the Takata crisis, and also especially since there aren’t many people saying they’re putting out the same level of quality they were in the 90’s through the mid 2k’s.
They’ll stall/avoid if they think they can get away with it. Hopefully they turn it around, because Hyundai is poised to kick the stuffing out of them if they don’t.
2 Likes
Apparently my Demand Letter was a powerful thing, and I’m not an attorney.
That’s a pretty good analogy!
Just curious, what would Honda/dealership say their reasoning or explanation is for saying this isn’t a safety issue? It seems on the surface that would be a difficult claim to make, given the brake system involvement. Have they offered a reason ? One that makes sense, at least to them ???
They totally ignored any my targeted questions and only repeated like robots “it is not a safety issue”.
That reminds me of the time I asked someone who’s work quality wasn’t meeting my expectations, and why their office hadn’t responded to my prior letter. At the time I was pointing to a copy of the actual letter. They looked down at the letter and said “you don’t need my explanation” and walked away … lol …