My rant to Honda

As you know, we joined the ranks of minivan families two years ago. At that time we were expecting Shannon, and the lease on our Forrester was up, so we decided to bite the bullet and move up to the big leagues - the world of Minivan-dom.

We got a Honda Odyssey, and we really like it. I mean sure it's a minivan, but it does what it does well (meaning it carts around me,the kids and all our crap.... er, stuff). About a week and a half ago I got a notice from Honda saying that we needed to take our two year old van in for servicing because of a "Lock-up clutch judder." Sounds suspicious....

Anyhow, I took the van in for service on Tuesday so they could do a software update to ensure that the van didn't experience a 'transmission judder' due to faulty software. An hour later, I'm out of the service bay with a freshly re-programmed car. It's important to mention that at this point I hadn't noticed anything wrong with the car. (emphasis on at this point)

Can you see where I'm going with this?!?!?!

I was driving the car yesterday (Wednesday) and noticed that there seemed to be some weird vibrations as I accelerated. After the third time I paid more attention to it, and realized it was happening when the car shifted from second to third as I accelerated between 40 and 45 km/h. A bit odd, but I thought that I was imagining things.

Today after I dropped off Aidan at school it happened again. Not just a little vibration, but a full-on "the van's a rockin'" type of vibration. Oh crap.

So I call our local dealership and tell them what's going on. Their response (very politely I might add): "We'll have to call Honda Canada to see if they've heard anything about this."

They called me back and said that due to the software malfunction, there was a good chance that something on the transmission has become faulty. I'm not sure exactly what, because I don't speak Honda-ese and I'm not a mechanic. But the long and short of it is that the programming error has now caused a transmission error, and oh by the way we now need to replace part of your transmission and we've ordered the part.

Did I mention that said part is on back order? And that apparently Honda has discovered that the damage to the transmission as a result of the programming is happening fairly frequently - hence why the part is on BACK ORDER?!?!?!?

So I calmly and politely explain to the nice mechanic that this car is our primary vehicle (because our four kids, and car seats can't all cram into the back of Chris' Altima), and that I'm not really comfortable driving around with a car that's rockin' when I don't want it to rock.

The nice man said "well, Honda Canada has told us that if you bring the car in we can flush the transmission fluid, and for some reason this seems to fix the problem for about 2 weeks to a month."

I'm sorry?!?!

"For some reason?!?!"

For some reason that doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me!!!

ARRRRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!! So now I have to take the van in to have the transmission flushed and hope and pray that this damn part gets in sooner rather than later.

Welcome to the world of minivans....