I'll admit, I haven't been on in a while. Having a kid kind of changes your priorities. However, I've seen several posts in this forum about Honda Civic Hybrids being poor cars.


With 335K on my 2003, that's not been my experience, and I have owned this car since mile 1. This has been the most reliable car I've ever owned. Other than the usual - tires, 12V battery, brakes (and not many at that), and oil changes, the only significant repairs I have had:


- at 160K I replaced the hybrid battery with a Bumblebee battery ($2.1K)
- at 205K I had to replace an electronic valve for the lean-burn air flow ($200, about 10 minutes to replace by myself)


Now my car is the 5-speed, and not the CVT, so that probably plays a role in some of this.


What has been your experience? And how many miles have you had on your Civic Hybrid?

 

My car is at around 140K miles.

It is on its third battery, fortunately I only had to pay for the last one. The heat in Southern California (and other similar hot locations) is not good for the packs.

The CVT had the clutch pack rebuilt once. $3K. Ouch. The transmission is acting a bit odd, it is a bit jerky when slowing and then reaccelerating. Other than changing the fluid a bunch of times I have not tried to repair that. The car is worth maybe $1K now so it would be hard to justify a major repair.

You dodged a bullet on that one.

Other than those two big ticket items (which together cost nearly as much as I paid for the car used) the car has been reliable.

The previous owner did the brakes at one point, but I tend to coast to a stop and they barely show any wear in many tens of thousands of miles.

The headlights fogged over and had to be restored with a Sylvania kit. Then they fogged over again a few years later. The sunlight down here is brutal. (This is hardly a problem specific to the Civic, every car I see that is more than 5 years old shows some signs of it.) Currently the headlights get a wash and a new coat of a silicone oil based product every other month, which keeps them clear enough to be safe.

The headliner fabric is peeling off on both the front and back edges. Not a mechanical problem but it looks awful.

The paint seems to be holding up. The car is white though, and it is hard to see the first stages of clear coat failure on that color.

In short, it is as reliable as any other civic for those components it shares with the other models. The only really unreliable parts are the expensive ones which are all its own!