We had what we thought was the perfect mustachian mobile, a hand-me-down 2007 Honda Civic that for the first half of its life was driven 1000 miles a year to target and back for grandma. The car now has dutifully handled our 20 mile highway commute and the ripe old age of 13 years has just shy of 68,000 miles. We love its cracked bumper, delaminated headliner and other slight battle wounds, but really love that it's been a rock-solid commuter car with nothing more than needing a new battery and tires.
That changed this week when at the end of the morning commute, steam was coming out of the hood and after finding a nearby mechanic, we saw coolant pressurized by a test kit spraying out of a crack in the engine block. A Honda Civic crapping out after 68,000 miles?!?! WTF! The mechanic in his 27 years had never seen one fail that quickly.
Looking into it, Honda manufactured the engines poorly from 2006-2009, and to appease most extended the engine warranty to 10 years beyond the standard 60,000 mile warranty. Having been purchased in late 2006, we are out of warranty by a number of years, but mechanically speaking...come on, that's a pretty obvious fault of Honda.
We have been presented with the following options-
Try to weld the crack closed
try a block seal fluid
try JB Weld
Spend $3K on a replacement old engine with around 100K miles on it
Spend $140 at the Honda dealer having them identify the crack, write a report and we have a case manager contemplate giving us some partial assistance (they said they do this about 10% of the time on egregious failures like this) to offset the $6K it would cost to have the Honda dealer put in a new Honda engine
Honda has refused to admit that 68,000 miles is absurd for a cracked engine block that has never seen off-road, snow, inclement weather or other atrocities. We own another Honda, which they said factors into their determination over whether to give us anything, but they feel they have no need to correct this for us, so we'd be gambling on $140.
I would assume the car, if it was fixed, would be worth around $6-7K. As soured as we are on Honda, we did like the car until this happened. Any advice? Thanks for letting me vent as well and let this be a warning lest you think Hondas imply durability or reliability.
Spend $3K to get