Prospective buyer here - would welcome advice

[MrM83]

Prospective buyer here looking to get into an e. Ran an S2000 for 15 years and loved it. I'm in need of a family run around and love the look of the e and excited about potentially getting back into a Honda.

Family life means Im pressed for time to look and travel to see cars. Looking for any tips and pointers to look for when looking for a used car. Any particular warning signs to be aware of?

Trying to weigh up benefit of looking for a '21 that has some warranty to address anything, versus buying a 20 and extended warranty, speaking of which, Id be curious to know if anyone has an extended warranty and how much it is/was?

Im not too concerned about range, just looking for a smaller car than an XC90 to ferry kids to activities around town.

Many thanks in advance.

[EEEE]

A few warning signs:

1) front external door handles. They pop out, but do they pop back in fully and completely? If they don't it will annoy you , and they are £350+ each outside of warranty + labour. It may be that this failure leads to flat 12v battery issues. The internal door latch mechanism may also have trouble, leading to issues with the window drop/raise function which can also burn out the window motor or just constantly try and close the window every 2 seconds.

2) check the bonnet where the wipers are - the wipers cannot be lifted when not in park mode, paint will be chipped most likely where someone lifted them without knowing this.

3) Check the A pillar external trim on the drivers door. If you see white scrapes where the window corner is (where the upright meets the curved top part) , then the 12v battery has gone flat in the past and the door was opened/closed without the window auto-dropping. Enquire as to why, perhaps use it to haggle £100 quid off for a new 12v battery. Once the 12v battery goes flat due to the unknown drain, they don't hold even half the charge they should, meaning your more likely to get stranded again.

4) Honda official extended warranty does cover door handles - another user kindly posted the details.

I would say if you are coming from Honda's heyday of the 2000s with an s2000, you will end up disappointed with the E. I owned 2 preludes over 10years+ and I feel the E is a disappointment. It is too complex and fragile. You just have to look at it wrong for it to misbehave. Others might think I'm being a bit harsh, but if you want a car to turn in 100% reliability and give you a sense of reliability, the E sadly doesn't deliver.

In just over 2 years of ownership I have had:

1) flat 12v battery 2 times, technically 3 times. Both times unable to use the vehicle (I now keep a jump pack in the car). I replaced the 12v battery at my expense.
2) both front door external handle mechs got weak and failed to retract. Done under warranty.
3) Lots of annoyances with the tech. occasionally spurious warnings. Lane assist advising/assisting me into oncoming traffic. Steamed up rear view camera, poor side mirror view after parked up in rain, cabin steam up with pre-heating, obnoxiously loud door handles, auto unlock with key not unlocking the back doors. Just loads and loads of niggles.

There are lots of day to day annoyances that you will only pick up on if you own one. Others will comment that theirs have been faultless, but I find there are just too many niggles to recommend it to anyone. If you are busy/hectic lifestyle people, the last thing you need is a mystery/conundrum 'this month: why did my honda e do this'.

If the car is not for you , but maybe for a spouse to drive around in, then I would advise against it.

[MrM83]

Thank you for the advice, some great tips there. Funnily enough the only thing I had to replace on my S2000 was 2 batteries, mechanically was faultless.

If you excuse my ignorance, is the handle issue something I can easily tell whether its an issue. Some cars advertised on AT seem to have pics with doors shut and handles protruding slightly. Should this ring alarm bells, or is this normal? Are there preventative measures to stop this happening as I cant lie, £750 + labour to fit some new door handles every year isnt appealing!

Thanks for the tip re the a pillar trim and window. How do you prevent this from happening should the batter go flat? Is freezing cold weather an issue for the window dropping? Or does preconditioning the car sort this issue out?

I have a hybrid XC90 and the experience has been somewhat blighted by software and from your experience it sounds like you have suffered similar. Do you feel you have been unlucky or is this a "feature" of the car? Frankly I could do without more of this.

The car is for me.... for times when the XC90 is too big. I doubt my wife would want to drive it. Replacing the 12v battery would be on my list for prudence.

[EEEE]

The handle issue, I expect everyone will get it sooner or later. The mechanism is electrically actuated in and out. When you approach the car, the handles ping out. When you get in and drive off, they are supposed to go in. Over time they get stiff and the mechanism feels a bit notchy and horrible. This stops them retracting fully. This also happens in very cold weather if there is frost or has been rain. you can push the handle over the pivot to manually make it pop out, but in frost this might feel uncomfortable. The handles themselves also feel week/flimsy, certainly something to keep in mind if you have excitable children, I imagine they could be broken in a blink of an eye (Especially since the keyless entry double check thing is a pain and especially impacts the passenger side since it awaits the drivers door first).

The window may fail to drop in cold weather. If you preheat enough to melt the frost, the window should drop OK. If the frost is bad and the window jammed solid, you can still open the door but upon closing the door, the window probably will not go into the rubber seal and it will catch the A pillar trim.

If the battery goes flat - you just need to be well versed in unlocking and jump starting and remembering not to close the door (or you will scratch the expensive a pillar trim). Its not hard, but its not something id like to talk the wife through doing.

Using your words, blighted by software, is almost an accurate description. The car is just blighted by lots of small niggles that add up to distractions that detract from the otherwise very positive aspects of the car. However 2 years in I'd say it wasn't worth the money. Your paying for a lot of tech that no one ever really wanted and isn't very useful and isn't terribly decent or reliable. For example, 50% of the time the lane assist on the country roads back from work, will have 3 moments and then turn itself off, leaving an orange warning on the dash. Its only temporary, but its annoying. It also mistakes a white metal gate as the road edge, and politely turns the wheel to put the car in the middle of the road into oncoming traffic. Its not a strong force, but its annoying. It would be annoying also to turn it off every journey.

I guess because its a 1st generation vehicle, there has been no chance to work out all the problems. I did a 1 hour journey in heavy rain yesterday, and the rear view camera was just useless. In the dark, the rear tint makes the mirror useless, so your kind of stuck. Using the rear wiper clears it, but it seams the spray from the road accumulated under the rear spoiler, and then drips onto the rear view mirror camera area. immediately. If your doing 70mph I don't think that occurs, but if your going across country, I noticed it particularly sucked.

Even reversing out of my driveway this morning, the other rear reversing camera on the tailgate was completely dirtied up from the previous drive. I don't reverse into my drive way so you don't remember until the next day when you go to reverse out. The cameras aren't heated at all, and the interior one used for the rear view mirror will always be fogged up if you have used the preheat.

I try not to hate on it too much , but it is what it is. My usage is 2x 15mile journeys a day on a mixture of town and country roads, and then weekend usage of varying types. I've done 15k in 2 years and bought the car at 4months old.

Another example I use is the 'would you lend it to someone' test. I probably wouldn't lend the car to anyone, because it would take so long to explain all its foibles.

[MrM83]

Thanks again. I do have excitable children. I am now concerned about handles and it would be helpful to know what normal behaviour is to distinguish it from a problematic one.

Thanks for the other tips.

[londiniumperson]

@EEEE Has summed up the Honda e perfectly, I have had mine over 3 years and agree 100% with the comments made.
The issues experienced are not one off's, they are inherent to the design and made worse by the appalling customer experience provide by the Honda dealer as well as Honda UK when trying to get faults fixed under warranty.

One thing to add is that every single one of my passengers has commented about the difficulty in opening the doors to enter, whether the front, even when I pop out the handle using the button, or the rear which are 'hidden' like some other cars such as the Seat Leon.

I don't think that I saw any comment about the 'App', this also falls short of the mark, being un-reliable and in all reality useless, with some options in hard to find menus, like it was designed by several committees that didn't communicate.

In summary & with hindsight I should never have bought this new, but waited until now to buy it a bargain price that they now are in relation to the new cost, but be aware you still need to be EV & Honda fanboy to look past all of it's failings.

[londiniumperson]

4) Honda official extended warranty does cover door handles - another user kindly posted the details.

Please could you provide a link to this post because the extended warranty actually states that the door handles are NOT covered, neither is any damage caused by water ingress, which is believed to be the cause for the failure.

[EEEE]

4) Honda official extended warranty does cover door handles - another user kindly posted the details.

Please could you provide a link to this post because the extended warranty actually states that the door handles are NOT covered, neither is any damage caused by water ingress, which is believed to be the cause for the failure.

You know when you write does instead of doesn't?

It doesn't cover handles (as you have posted before).

[MrM83]

Never had a thread had so much chat about handles! How prevalent is this issue and after how long do they tend to go wrong?

As a prospective buyer, a handle should be for life so I’d be pretty peeved if not covered by extended warranty!

Edit - just seen post above. That’s pretty shocking.

[londiniumperson]

Never had a thread had so much chat about handles! How prevalent is this issue and after how long do they tend to go wrong?

As a prospective buyer, a handle should be for life so I’d be pretty peeved if not covered by extended warranty!

Edit - just seen post above. That’s pretty shocking.

I've had 3 replacements in the 3 years that I have had mine and Honda will NOT replace them outside of the 3 year warranty.
The first door handle started playing up within 3 months and it took a further 9 months of communication with various photos & videos showing the issue before the Honda dealer finally replaced it the 1st time.

After my experience I would advise against purchasing any car from a Honda dealer, whether new or used.

You might think that this is extreme for 'just' a door handle issue, but the knock on effect is that it means the window does not always fully close or repeatedly opens & closes a couple of cm every few seconds whilst driving and this happened almost constantly on an 80 mile trip at night - I was not happy.