WTF, Honda
My 2006 Civic 4-door automatic is getting up towards 70k total miles, and while in many ways I'm as happy with it as I was with the 1997 version that preceded it, I've become aware of a few problems. Worse: as far as I can tell these are not problems with my specific vehicle, but inherent design flaws with the model. Feh!
- The corner uprights between the windshield and side windows are wide. Really wide. They're so wide, and raked at such an angle, that they wind up blocking a significant angle of view to the diagonals. The problem is exacerbated by the outside mirrors, and even more by having the sun visors down. The occluded angle happens to be just right to ensure that pedestrians on the left diagonal corner are literally invisible behind the bodywork. Especially at night, I find myself having to move my head around at every crosswalk or intersection to check for people on foot. This is bad.
- Ah yeah, the sun visors. After a couple of years, the driver's sun visor broke. Specifically, the bit that clips into the roof bracket on the free end broke loose within the visor. Fortunately I was due for some maintenance anyway, so didn't have to make a special trip to the dealership. The mechanic there fixed it for free -- he said that they'd seen a lot of these broken visors on this Civic; it's a design problem.
- Water gets into the trunk. I have no idea how this happens but it's pretty bad. I've tried to check the foam gasket around the trunk compartment and it seems to be intact and making a good seal, but after the car is driven in the rain, water collects inside some open-topped pockets built into the inside of the rear trunk face. I'm not sure how to explain that better.
The real joy of this is that it means that when I open the trunk, the tipping of the trunk lid dumps all the collected water directly over the contents of the trunk. Perfect!
Yesterday I opened the trunk and about a cup of water dumped in. It hasn't rained for three days or more here. The water's been sitting there in those "pockets" for that long.
(Yes, it's conceivable that there is something wrong with my specific car here. But it's always done this; i just hadn't been using the trunk in wet weather much until this past month or two.) - The front seats are poorly suited to anyone under about 5 foot 7. The headrests cannot be lowered enough to hit properly against the occipital bone of anyone shorter than that -- which is a safety/injury problem. Worse, they are angled forward a bit, so one can't relax back into the seat without having one's head tipped forward uncomfortably.
- Finally, a couple of slightly-less-inherent problems: the CD player. Yes, it's nice to have a CD player in the car, and even better that the CD player handles data CDs with MP3 files. Unfortunately, the firmware of the player is geb0rken in some stupid ways. The first problem is that it has an arbitrary limitation on the number of tracks it will recognize on a CD (probably 99). That's fine on standard audio CDs, where the format defines a 99-track limit, but less okay on a data CD full of mp3 files that take up 1/10 the space. Second, the mp3 playback screws up when play flows from one track to the next: it winds up omitting the first half-second or so of the new track. This doesn't happen if I manually advance to the next track, only if it advances due to reaching the end of the previous track during normal play. Very irritating.