When the “Good” Family Car Breaks

I’ve practically made a career out of talking about “The Big Seven” things most likely to strand a car. Once more for those of you in the nosebleed seats, they are: Ignition issues, fuel delivery issues, cooling system issues, charging system issues, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints. I developed this list and wrote about it mostly from the standpoint of vintage cars on a road trip, and ball joints are really on there not because they frequently fail but because you can’t afford to be wrong about them, as if they break, you lose control of the car. However, other than clutch hydraulics, the list also applies surprisingly well to modern cars, although once you get out of the points-and-condenser automotive Pleistocene epoch and into modern ignition systems, individual stick coils may throw misfire codes but complete ignition failure is pretty rare. That is, until the crankshaft position sensor that provides the timing fiducial for the whole ignition system messes the bed and strands the car.

But the point is that, even on a 50-year-old car, the things that cause it to go from driving to dead usually aren’t catastrophic metal failure but are instead common and somewhat pedestrian. And on modern cars, especially those from manufacturers whose carefully constructed marketing image is one of reliability, bolt-from-the-blue things like metal fatigue causing a crucial drivetrain part to snap are virtually unheard of.

So, funny story.

Our 2013 Honda Fit—my wife’s daily driver and the car we take when we want to arrive somewhere without any stories—has been spectacular. We bought the little 5-speed Sport package car as a low-mileage repaired salvage vehicle in the spring of 2015. The seller, a Russian guy in South Carolina with a business repairing lightly totaled vehicles, had the car on eBay with photos of the before-repair damage. It looked like one corner of the car had slid into a curb. When I messaged him, he was very transparent about what he’d replaced (lower control arm, strut, knuckle, knee, wheel, and tire). I was surprised that that was enough to total a 9,450-mile car. I carefully looked into the whole issue of factory warranties on repaired salvage vehicles, and learned that the short answer appeared to be that recalls and anything emissions-related was federally-mandated and thus would be covered, but any other warranty work could be denied by a dealer. I then looked at what a similar-mileage Fit had the 3-year / 36,000 mile basic and 5-year / 60,000-mile powertrain warranty would cost, and saw that the math clearly favored buying the salvage car. I decided that the odds of anything going catastrophically and expensively wrong with the drivetrain on a Honda product were slim, and pulled the trigger. While I was under the car on its first oil change, I saw that there was a drag mark on the floor pan and thought “A-HA! That’s what probably totaled it,” but I didn’t really care. The Fit’s configuration of being a little four-door hatchback with fold-down rear seats makes it incredibly versatile for Maire Anne and me, as it holds both of us and a surprising amount of stuff, and parks easily in the tightest of Boston parking spaces and garages. It’s needed nothing other than consumables. It’s been everything you’d expect a Honda product to be. If something happened to it, we’d likely look for another low-mileage Fit.

So imagine my surprise when my oldest son called me one morning and said that the Fit died on his way to the gym. After making sure he was someplace safe, I asked him to define “died,” which he did very adroitly (I have my family well-trained regarding automotive applications of the terms “dead” and “died”):

“I was waiting at an intersection. The traffic light turned green, I put the car in gear and tried to pull out of the intersection. The engine revved, but the car didn’t move.”

“Was it accompanied by a loud bang?” I asked. “Does it make a rhythmic banging noise when you try to drive it?”

“Not really.”

Fortunately, he was only a mile from the house, so I was there in a flash. I found that his description was accurate. The clutch pedal felt perfectly normal. The shift lever felt absolutely fine. There was every indication that the car was going into gear. But when the clutch was let out, there wasn’t even a hint of forward motion, only a faint noise somewhere between a whine and a light grind.

I once had loaned my VW Vanagon to my sister after I’d had the engine out to replace the clutch, and had forgotten to torque down the half-axle nuts on one side. The amount of banging when I tried to drive it—as well as, according to my sister, when it let go—was pretty memorable. So having experienced this, I didn’t think that was the problem. The entire Vanagon incident has now passed into family lore. “Only my brother would forget to tighten the axles and loan his sister the car,” she’ll still needle me. “Hey,” I’ll retort with tongue firmly in cheek, “I showed up in 20 minutes, fixed it curbside in Cleveland Circle, and sent you on your way. I don’t really see the problem.”

I was aware that the clutch on the Fit was showing wear. That, combined with a slightly leaking engine rear main seal, was causing the clutch to begin to chirp and chatter if you pulled away too quickly. With that in mind, I thought that the most likely diagnosis was that the lining on the clutch disc had spectacularly failed. I had this happen once, decades ago, on a BMW E30 3 Series, with similar symptoms of the clutch falling right over the binary edge from slipping to completely non-functional, and, when I pulled its transmission, I found all the pieces of the clutch lining laying at the bottom of the bell housing.

The only other possibility I could think of with the Fit was that something had failed in the transaxle itself, like the splines on the output shaft shearing off. That seemed highly unlikely.

When I arrived, I was pleased to find that my son had rolled the car backward out of the intersection and into a parking space at the curb. I hadn’t brought a floor jack with me—and really, if the problem was the clutch, there wouldn’t be anything visible anyway—but I dutifully skooched down and tried to look under the nose of the car. It’s low and has a factory air dam, so I couldn’t see much. I think I may have peered in through the fender wells just to verify that the CV joints weren’t ripped apart, though I couldn’t imagine that that was the problem, as the experience with the Vanagon showed that they’d make a hell of a racket banging around if you tried to drive it, and they didn’t.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I hadn’t yet sold the Winnebago Rialta RV, so my driveway was completely packed with cars. And it was trash day, so I couldn’t even have the Fit towed home and leave it in front of the house. Besides, I’d already looked into replacing the car’s chattering clutch and decided that if I could count on one hand the number of times in the past 40 years I’ve paid someone to work on a car, I’d be willing to press a sixth digit into service to count getting the clutch replaced. Doing a clutch on a car I’m familiar with like a vintage rear-wheel drive BMW these days takes me a week of punctuated repair sessions. Having the mid-rise lift in my garage is better than nothing, but not nearly as good as a full-height lift and a real transmission carrier. I’d looked at videos of pulling the Fit’s transaxle, and while I could do it, I’d already decided that it was probably worth the $1200 quotes I’d gotten. And even if I wanted to fix it myself, the Lotus Europa was partially disassembled on the mid-rise lift in my garage.

So I called the two places I’d gotten clutch quotes from. The first was the brother of someone I record music with. He’s a guy who, like me, fixes cars out of his house, but does it full-time and has a full-height lift. Unfortunately, he didn’t answer his phone. I then called a local service station that some of my neighbors use, but the owner said there was a two-week wait.

So suddenly, Mr. I-fix-everything-myself was in the same situation as anyone else whose car had broken down. I looked at Google and Yelp reviews on my phone, and settled on Pleasant Car Care just a few miles east. I called them, described the problem, and they said they could take the car immediately. When I scheduled the AAA pick up on my phone, Pleasant popped right up as one of the AAA-recommended destinations. I appeared to have set myself on a well-trodden path.

My son and I rolled the Honda into the next-to-last space on the curb. I parked my car in the space behind it to block out access for the tow truck, whose driver was pleased at my maneuver when he arrived. He then winched the Fit up, did The Tow Of Shame, and dropped the hobbled Honda off at Pleasant Car Care.

I followed the truck to the repair shop, explained the symptoms to the service advisor, and described my theory of either clutch lining failure or something horrific and rare inside the transaxle.

When I got home, I posted The Tow Of Shame to my Facebook page and described what had happened. There were numerous comments joking about “It’s all the burnouts your wife does from the MASSIVE TORQUE of that engine.” One Facebook friend said something about a possible broken front axle, but I didn’t take it seriously, as I knew the car had a worn clutch and that fit the symptoms. Besides, the car has only 73,000 miles on it, and the burnout jokes notwithstanding, the car is driven pretty sedately.

Maybe an hour later, the phone rang. It was the service advisor at Pleasant saying that the car had a broken right front axle.

Wait, what? Only my 1970 Triumph GT6 ever exhibited that kind of metal fatigue, and that was a British beast built from recycled WWII parts and with an engine bigger than the rest of the drivetrain behind it. A broken front axle on an 11-year-old 73k 117-hp Honda Fit? What parallel universe had I just transported into?

My first thought was to wonder whether this was the ten-year-later consequence of the curb strike that totaled the car, but it turns out that this is a known problem. Certain Honda vehicles used a rubber harmonic balancing ring on the front half-axles (driveshafts), and in states where road salt is used, corrosion can form under it and eventually cause the driveshaft to rust to the point where, combined with twisting under engine load, it breaks. In 2022, Honda issued a recall on about 430,000 vehicles sold in 22 states. As repair shops often do nowadays, Pleasant texted me a video clearly showing the evidence of the diagnosis. The little grinding sound I heard was almost certainly the end nearest the transaxle spinning while lying on top of the front subframe. I’m really surprised it didn’t make more noise. Had I given more than a cursory look, it would’ve been completely obvious. And yes, had I taken it to the dealer, it probably would’ve been done for free under the recall, but I didn’t know about either the problem or the recall.

The total bill was $720, including alignment. So I’d know how hard I should kick myself, I searched online and saw that the part was between $60 and $120 depending on brand and vendor, and watched a video to judge how difficult replacement was (for a first-timer, more than half an hour, probably less than a day, likely two repair sessions for aging me). But really, although the bill was higher than I thought a half-axle replacement would be, it was less than I expected the clutch replacement to cost, and I was happy to, just this once, pay someone else to do it. And my wife had her car back the following morning.

I may need to go through all this again, as the left half-axle (the non-drive side) still needs to be replaced. Since this is a recall issue, I think I’ll give a call to my local Honda dealer to find out about replacing that one. We’ve gotten recall notices about other things (there was an airbag recall a while back). I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks. And then there’s still the issue of the worn clutch to look forward to.

So, yeah, when a Honda—a Honda!—can break a front axle pulling out of a stop light, it kind of lets the air out of the whole “Big Seven” thing. I need to recalibrate my inner automotive compass and accept that any of these cars can die at any moment, and that the cause could be anything. Hell, a chassis itself breaking in half used to be the exclusive province of Fiat 850s. Now some media outlets are breathlessly intoning that it could happen on any heavy-duty pickup truck because it happened on one. Maybe that’s what’s next—maybe the Fit will spontaneously cleave itself in two.

But for stranding, I’d still lay my money on ignition, fuel delivery, charging, cooling, and belts. Once I get that other half-axle replaced.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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