Does anyone else have this problem. When she stops, my wife’s 2010 Civic Hybrid has a flashing green light which reads: stop assist. When this engages, the tachometer goes to zero. When she takes her foot off the brake, the tachometer goes to about 750 RPM. When she steps on the brake again, it goes back to zero (after about two or three seconds).
Sometimes, however, when she takes her foot off the brake, the tachometer doesn’t engage and the car rolls backward. Also, sometimes, when she puts her foot on the brake, the stop assist doesn’t engage and the tachometer stays at about 750 RPM. These things happen only intermittently and Honda (dealer and company headquarters) have been no help. Can anyone tell me what this is and how to have it fixed?
So Honda says this is normal? If that is the case then there is nothing you can do but sell the car if you dislike the condition, or live with it.
They don’t say that it’s normal. They say that, since it’s intermittent, if they can’t find the problem, they can’t fix it.
Try a local INDEPENDENT mechanic, preferably one with Honda experience, and have them take a look at it. If it were mine it would be worth the cost for me. Brakes are one part of your car you don’t want to ignore.
Read up on regenerative braking and how the state of charge of the battery affects it. If the battery is fully charged, there is no place for the energy captured by the regenerative braking to go, so it is not used…The tachometer just reports whether the gas engine is running or not…
According to Honda, this is a function called the Idle-stop. When it is functioning, the green light on the dash will light up and the hybrid system will shut down the engine when stopped. Take your foot off the brake, and the engine will fire back up. The main purpose is to save fuel and emissions during periods of stop in stop-n-go traffic.
This feature is new for the 2010 cars, so the system may not be perfect. When the engine fails to re-fire, will it re-fire when the gas pedal is pressed? You may want to consider this a ‘Great if it works’ feature instead of a ‘Gosh, I’ll use this all the time’ feature. It doesn’t appear to be designed as any safety feature to prevent rolling back, and you may not want to think of it that way.
To get a better response specific to this feature and this car, you may want to locate a Honda discussion forum on-line. I subscribe to a few that are specific for my cars, and I get a much better targeted response for problems like this.