Jerry Perez Honda is issuing a recall on 245 Ridgeline trucks and Passport SUVs for a rather quaint reason: somebody on the assembly line messed up with a torque wrench. According to the NHTSA report, it all has to do with an “inner ball joint housing may not have been fastened to the correct torque specification, resulting in a loose inner ball joint housing that can detach from the steering rack.” Of course, a ball joint detaching from the steering rack is definitely not something you want happening, hence the recall. All Ridgelines and Passports affected come from the 2023 model year, and ..read more

Robert Cantina. YouTube. Over the past five months, YouTuber and automotive Dr. Frankenstein Robert Cantina has been working on a Kubota diesel-powered Honda Insight. Cantina specializes in oddball engine swaps, like putting Harbor Freight 670cc “Predator” engines in old Renaults. However, this Kubota-propelled Insight is among his more interesting projects, because it originally involved a different car. Oh, and, did I mention the thing’s supercharged? Cantina first started by putting the Kubota three-cylinder diesel in a Saturn coupe. However, the rest of the Saturn was in such bad shape th ..read more

Getty Images Talk about a fourth manufacturer joining NASCAR is nothing new. Dodge has typically been the fan favorite to join Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota, though we’ve been burned by those rumors enough over the last few years. Likewise, there have long been discussions about Honda potentially entering the top-flight Cup Series, but I’ve always considered that as likely as a snowstorm in Daytona on the Fourth of July. Maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive, though, because multiple recent reports point to Honda seriously weighing its decision to go stock car racing. These rumblings were given mo ..read more

Chris Tsui. In case you haven’t heard, Sony (yes, that Sony) is teaming up with Honda to build electric cars under the brand name Afeela. We already knew about the electric sedan due out in 2025, but a new report says the company will have two additional vehicles before the decade ends. Per Nikkei, there will be an Afeela SUV in 2027 followed by an “affordable” compact car sometime between 2028 and 2030. The report also says Sony Honda Mobility has plans to double its headcount to about 500 employees. Chris Tsui All three vehicles are said to be built on the same chassis, which is a tweaked v ..read more

Honda Adding features to a car with software upgrades is something typically associated with only the most cutting-edge vehicles. But that’s not the case if you own a last-generation Honda Accord. If you bought one without wireless Apple CarPlay or Android Auto but want the feature now, you’re in luck, because Honda is now offering retrofits for a reasonable price. As announced earlier this month, Honda will sell the upgrade for Accords from model years 2018 through 2022. The upgrade is available for cars that were shipped only with the wired versions of Apple and Google’s phone projection in ..read more

Honda. Letting your car warm up before driving off on a cold winter’s morning is a common practice even if it’s sometimes frowned upon. So you can imagine the frustration for many 2023 Honda HR-V owners who found their rear windows spontaneously shattering after activating the window defroster. There are currently hundreds of such reports from HR-V owners, but it was Consumer Reports who brought the issue to national attention when the rear window of their HR-V test car shattered in one of its editors’ driveways. Honda claims that the issue is a manufacturing defect, in which the rear defrost ..read more

image credit: @joshua_opheim on Instagram, edited by Andrew Collins. Where some people see a wrecked car as trash, others may see it as treasure. In the case of car builder Joshua Opheim, he saw a wrecked Honda S2000 as the latter and an opportunity to make something interesting. Since it was smashed both front and rear, Opheim started cutting into it and replacing its body parts with those from a Ferrari, Audi, and even a McLaren. So it’s like an exotic Frankenstein. It looks nothing like an S2000 anymore. Instead, it looks like something Bruce Wayne would drive in a Batman cartoon. The back ..read more

Honda In a rare move, Honda announced at a media briefing earlier this week that it will bring wireless Apple CarPlay to older Accord sedans from model years 2018 up to and including 2022 later this year. A software update is all that’s needed for the feature; however, because prior-gen Accords lack mobile data connections, a service appointment will be required for Honda dealers to perform the upgrade. Honda told The Drive that it plans to have a web portal set up by the end of January that customers can visit to schedule appointments for the necessary service. Accord owners can expect more ..read more

Chris Tsui. Back in September, the new FL5-generation Honda Civic Type R was added to Gran Turismo 7. As a big fan of the real thing, I was eager to jump into Honda’s hot hatch in the virtual world. But excitement quickly turned into bewildered annoyance because GT‘s rendition of the world’s greatest sport compact includes one extremely irritating function: a loud beeping noise at redline. Gran Turismo prides itself on its ability to replicate how a car looks, sounds, and drives down the very last detail so, to be clear, this isn’t a game-only addition, but something that also exists in the r ..read more

Honda, edited by the author The Honda Civic Si is a great practical performance car. I just wish you could get the current model in a hatchback body as well as a sedan. Somebody at Honda, at least in Japan, agrees. Meet the Civic RS prototype—it’s a six-speed Civic hatch like the Type R but looks less hardcore. Honda has not published many details on this thing at all, but it is part of the automaker’s showing at the 2024 Tokyo Auto Salon (also known as the Tokyo Auto Show). Here’s what Google Translate did with the Japanese elevator pitch: “Adding more polish to the “Joy of Dancing” and work ..read more