Are Hondas and Toyotas Still Reliable?

The Car Chick (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to The Straight Shift. When you think of reliability in the automotive industry, two brands immediately come to mind for most people, Honda and Toyota. And I’ve certainly had both in my life. I had an 85 Supra when I was in high school that I inherited from my dad. That car was amazing and probably got me into a lot of trouble, but we won’t talk about that.

My mom still has a 2003 Corolla that’s going strong. And we have a 92 Toyota sort of Tercel sitting in the driveway. It’s not remotely stock, but it is still all Toyota parts. And it runs like a champ. But people are asking me, are Honda Toyota still reliable?

Because they’ve seen a lot in the news lately about problems with both of those brands. Well, Honda’s actually had some issues off and on over the decades, but they are really good at keeping it out of the mainstream media in order to protect their brand reputation. the The reliability of Honda is kind of like a smoke screen that they use that reputation to hide a lot of their problems.

The 98 to 2005 Accords were known for transmission problems. The 07 to 2011 CRVs had faulty AC compressors due to a design flaw in a heat shield. And they had more AC compressor problems in the 2016 to 2021 Civics. And more recently, Honda has been plagued with recalls and stop sales from everything to defective fuel pumps, excessive oil consumption, faulty gearboxes.

And of course, a huge, huge class action lawsuit over their faulty infotainment system. Even Toyota, the king of reliability, has garnered some attention over the past couple of years for engine failures in their new Tundras and the GR86 sports cars. They’ve had transmission and axle failures in the Tacomas. They’ve even had brake problems in the little Corolla Cross.

So what the hell, what is going on? Are Honda and Toyota really going to crap? Or is it being overblown by the media and the social influencers with all their clickbait? And if they’re not the most reliable brands anymore, who is? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today on The Straight Shift.

Before we talk about whether Honda and Toyota are still reliable, we have to talk about what reliability really means in the automotive industry. Those of us who are big researchers tend to look to Consumer Reports as one of our key resources. And Consumer Reports said for 2024 that Toyota Lexus no longer held the top spot for the most reliable brands in the industry. Honda and Acura weren’t up there either.

We have to take the Consumer Reports data with a grain of salt because they based it on average predicted reliability based on surveys from their members as well as their own testing. And don’t get me wrong, they do a phenomenal job. Their total score in the brand reliability report is determined by averaging results over multiple criteria.

including problems that owners have had, owner satisfaction, safety readings, their expected reliability based on historical data, and their own road test results. So I don’t go just by the Consumer Reports ratings alone. You need to dig into the details down to very specific models from year to year when you’re doing your car shopping research, because there’s a lot of variability.

But again, Consumer Reports is one of the main tools that I do use in my research when I’m shopping for my clients. And I talk about how I use it and how you can use it in my online car buying course. Another piece of data that we need to consider when we’re looking at reliability of vehicles are recalls. We can look at the total number of recalls for any given make and model because this data is public. You can go to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website and look it up,

and I’ll put a link to that website in the description for you. Just for example, the 2022 Mercedes GLS has 10 recalls for that model year alone. And the Tesla Cybertruck is up to seven so far, which I find amusing. Unfortunately, they don’t issue recalls for being ugly. But even Honda, this past October, they had to recall nearly two million units of their Civic, HR-V, and CR-V, as well as the Acura Integra

for sticky steering caused by a defective gearbox. fuel pump that can cause a fuel leak and oh, a fire. And that was an expansion of a previous fuel pump recall for 2023 that involved 2.6 million vehicles across 23 different Honda and Acura models.

Needless to say, that has left owners concerned that their cars may not be safe to drive. And it has certainly frustrated dealers who’ve gotten stuck with a bunch of cars sitting on their lot that they’re not allowed to sell until there’s a fix. And it took Honda months to roll out a solution to some of those problems and lift the stop sale. Toyota hasn’t been immune either. In early 2024,

Toyota recalled over 100,000 of their brand new redesigned Tundras and the Lexus LX SUV after over 800 warranty claims of total engine failure. Three words you would never think would be associated with the brand Toyota. Then in June of 24, Toyota had to issue a recall and a full stop sale on their brand new Grand Highlanders and its cousin, the Lexus TX SUV, along with their hybrid versions.

due to a front curtain airbag not deploying correctly in the event that the car was hit while the window was down.

This was a technical violation of the federal motor vehicle safety standards that was discovered during crash tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. And the recall caused all the new Grand Highlanders and TXs to be grounded. Production came to a full stop and the dealers couldn’t sell any of the cars until Toyota could re-engineer the way those airbags deployed and implement a fix. That took almost six months,

and it cost Toyota hundreds of millions of dollars, not just in implementing the fix, but in all of those lost sales. Not to mention another ding to their reputation for reliability. Now keep in mind, every single vehicle ever made in the U.S. has had some sort of recall at some point. Recalls are for safety issues, and not all those safety issues relate to a mechanical or electrical problem that could cause the car itself to fail.

For example, Toyota had to recall 30,000 vehicles last year due to a misprint on a door sticker. One of Tesla’s big recalls was because they didn’t use the correct font size on their warning lights on their digital dashboards. I am serious, there was a recall over a font size. that’s why you have to really look at the details of every single recall that comes out for a particular vehicle. The recalls are important and they are safety issues,

but they’re not necessarily an accurate gauge of the reliability of the vehicle. Unfortunately, in the case of Honda and Toyota, a lot of their recent recalls have been due to significant build quality issues. Those fuel pump failures that Honda has experienced have been due to an improperly molded propeller and another manufacturing defect that led to cracks forming on the solenoid component of the fuel pump.

These two things can cause the fuel pump to warp and fail. The steering problem was caused by improperly set springs and an insufficient layer of grease between two key parts of the gearbox. Again, these are manufacturing mistakes. Toyota’s engine problem is even more extreme. The Tundra engines have been failing due to machining issues at the factory that left behind excessive metal shavings and debris

that can get stuck in critical places like your bearings, your oil passages, and that causes the engines to seize and go blooey The only way to fix that problem was to replace all of those engines. A hundred thousand brand new engines, plus the cost of all the labor hours, which is about 12 hours a pop to replace an engine in one of those things. So this was a very, very costly recall for Toyota, both in terms of cash and in terms of the hit to their reputation.

On the other hand, some of the reliability problems have been blown out of proportion. That’s not to say they aren’t still problems, but they garnered more media attention than the numbers of actual occurrences really said. You may remember many years ago, there was an unintended acceleration problem with the Toyota Prius that the media just jumped on. And that’s because you just didn’t hear about problems with Toyota.

And some people were complaining that they had unintended acceleration when they were driving their Prius. I argued that any amount of acceleration in a Prius is unexpected, but you know, that’s beside the point. But it was simply a fact that the floor mats were getting caught on the accelerator pedal. Granted, the mats had been slightly improperly cut at the factory, but it was totally blown out of proportion. There were very few incidents of it actually happening.

there’s a similar issue, and this is more due to how the Toyota manufacturer and their dealers have handled warranty claims on the Toyota

The Toyota GR86 is their two-seater sports car that they developed in collaboration with Subaru, which has the BRZ. They’re essentially the same car. Unfortunately, that engine has an oil starvation problem that can cause the engines to fail, particularly in sustained right-hand turns. That’s actually how we blew up the engine in our race car a number of years ago. Not a Toyota engine, but it blew due to an oil starvation problem. You can actually hear about that story if you want at lessonsfromtheracetrack.

pretty entertaining. Toyota sold less than 10,000 of these cars in 2024 because it’s such a niche overall new car sales. And only a handful of these cars actually experienced the engine failure issue. But it has garnered the attention of the media, especially YouTubers.

Because one, when the engine fails while driving, it can be pretty spectacular. And that car tends to be purchased by car enthusiasts. And a lot of them have dash cams built into the cars to capture their driving footage. So when the engine blows, they have footage of it. And it does look really spectacular on YouTube and tends to go viral and get a lot of hits. But one of the reasons they would post these videos is because Toyota was denying so many of their warranty claims.

Instead, they were blaming the owners and the drivers for driving their car too hard. is not what you tell to car enthusiasts who buy your car because it’s a sports car to be driven for fun. And much of the dash cam footage proved that it wasn’t being driven hard. You could see the RPMs, you could see the speed they were going, you could see what they were doing. So it was not from driving the car too hard.

There was a problem, but Toyota decided that they didn’t want to deal with it. And car enthusiasts get really pissed and they post their stuff on YouTube. It was really partly Toyota’s fault because they just didn’t handle the warranty claim correctly, especially because they were offering an incentive of a free track day with the purchase of a GR 86. Then they’re going to bitch that you drove your car too hard? No.

there actually is an oil starvation issue. And as they have dug into it, part of it seems to be due to excessive gasket sealant blocking the oil pickup tube, but there may be some other problems that are still under investigation. So why are we seeing these types of quality problems at companies like Honda and Toyota, which have been synonymous with reliability for decades? Number one, simply more

complexity in the cars due to the march of time and meeting the demands of a rapidly changing market that wants more fancy technology, more features, and of course, electric vehicle technology. They’re having to compete with the Chinese who go to market very, very quickly with these things because they don’t care about problems. And I talked about that in a previous episode. So it’s a challenge for Honda and Toyota, especially Toyota.

that has a reputation for taking their time when they design and perfect a solution for a vehicle. That makes them very slow to market and being slow to market is just no longer competitive. You also have smaller turbocharged engines being put in vehicles that traditionally had larger naturally aspirated engines. And the reason is because we’re trying to eke out every

scrap of fuel economy out of every vehicle. So for example, in the Tundra, that Tundra had a V8 engine and the Tundra had not been redesigned in over 15 years. Toyota literally had almost two decades to perfect the old V8 engine that was in that car. It was a 5.7 liter and it was known for going a million miles. Toyota actually bought back

one of the million mile Tundras and tore down that engine, did an autopsy to see how did it manage to do this so that they could learn from that and then try to implement some of that when they were designing the new twin turbo V6 that now powers the Tundra. Yep, that’s the one that’s been blowing up. So I’m not sure they actually learned anything, but hopefully they will.

Ford has had similar issues with their turbo V6 and they actually had to replace over 90,000 engines in F-150s and Broncos for similar problems. Just the more complicated the engines get, the less reliable they’re going to be until the manufacturers can perfect those engines. But by the time they get around to perfecting it, they’ll have needed to move on to something else because technology is just changing more rapidly.

than these conservative car companies would really like it to do. Another problem is just the technology parts of the car. As I have said, cars have more computers in them than the first space shuttle. And computers and software, that is all so much more complicated than just basic mechanical components. So this has been a problem for all the manufacturers. We started seeing reliability go downhill for everybody between 2016 and 2018,

because that’s when they started implementing all the safety tech, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, all this technology. And a part of the problem with that is that they don’t have control over that technology. They don’t actually manufacture that software that is outsourced to other technology companies. And so they don’t have direct control over that development and testing. And that’s true of a lot of parts, even the mechanical ones. While a lot of automakers do produce

certain parts in-house, more and more they’re relying very heavily on a network of specialized suppliers and outsourcing the manufacture of those components. So what they’re doing in their plants is they’re just assembling the cars. They’re putting them together. And that’s, course, the model that Tesla uses. It’s the model that the Chinese manufacturers use. And it is a more efficient manufacturing model that gets you to production faster.

But the trade-off is you don’t have control over the quality of those parts. You can set your standards and your expectations and your requirements, but you don’t have direct control over those separate manufacturers of those parts. And so when we see parts fail, it’s very often a part that was not built in-house.

Not only are they not manufacturing parts in-house, they’re not manufacturing the cars solely in Japan anymore. They just can’t. Japan’s just not that big. So in order to have the manufacturing and production capabilities that Honda and Toyota need, they’ve had to go global like everybody else. It also helps them lower their costs and be able to customize the cars for markets. And it can also help get around whatever tariff issues various countries may have.

So Honda’s and Toyota’s, some of them are still made in Japan. And a lot of people will argue that the cars built in Japan are better. But Honda also makes cars in the United States and Mexico. Toyota has manufacturing plants on nearly every continent. So they just don’t have as direct control. Yes, they are still owned by Honda and Toyota. They are still managed by Honda and Toyota. But you have…

the local cultural differences. You have communication barriers. I saw this years ago when I was in my consulting days, I was working at the Yokohama Tire Plant down in Roanoke, Virginia. you know, American workers, unionized workers in the heart of the South. Needless to say, that was a little bit of a different culture than the traditional Japanese managers at Yokohama. And so

We had some quality control issues, which is why the consulting firm I worked for was brought in. And they had a lot of friction just not understanding each other. It’s just such a cultural difference. And they have that problems at the plants that Honda and Toyota have that are not in Japan. So it’s just additional challenges. And some of the vehicles that they are having problems with, those engines, those transmissions, those gearboxes were not manufactured in Japan.

The Japanese just have such a culture of tradition and perfection. They’re not known for being innovators. They look at what everybody else has done. They take a step back and they watch everybody else make the mistakes. They learn from them and then they implement it. That makes them later to market. But when they do implement, their stuff is more likely to work. But they are having to change their culture in order to keep up with the rest of the market. And the reliability problems we are seeing are the results of that.

So since Honda and Toyota are no longer at the top of the Consumer Reports most reliable brands list, who is? Subaru. So what has made Subaru so reliable? they have been reliable for years. Yes, they’ve had their issues here and there. They had the old head gasket problem a long time ago that’s been fixed for a long time. And like every other brand, they have had their issues. One of the things I respect though is that when they have them,

They jump on them, they address them and they take care of their customers. But why did they win the most reliable brand for 2024? Was it the integration of all the new technology and the advancements in their designs? Nope, exactly the opposite. It’s because Subaru didn’t redesign a lot of models for 2024. They carried over a lot of things. They carried over a lot of parts over multiple model years. And again,

When things don’t change, that’s when they become more reliable. So Subaru is still, if you look at their lineup, it’s still mostly regular old internal combustion engines. They only have one electric vehicle and that’s a Toyota in disguise. And so they are more reliable because it’s old technology. Now it’s gonna be interesting to see how that changes for 2025 because Subaru is bringing out

some brand new redesigned models. They are redesigning the Forester and they’re redesigning the Crosstrek. And both of those will have hybrid versions that while they use Toyota’s hybrid technology, they are marrying that with Subaru’s new Boxer engines. So because there’s a new engine design from Subaru and they’re trying to make it work with Toyota, there’s probably going to be some kinks to be worked out. And maybe they’ll get knocked off of that top slot in 2025.

This is why you can only take so much stock in all the rankings, whether it be from Consumer Reports or JD Powers. You have to look under the covers and really do your homework to see why they have those rankings. What problems does the specific year make a model that you are looking for potentially have? That’s why I always say don’t buy the first year of anything new or radically redesigned.

Let’s let them work out the kinks at least for the first year, maybe the first two years. So which brands do I still trust? Do I still think Toyota is reliable? Yes, I do. I have a lot of faith in Toyota. Yes, they’ve had their problems. They’re going to have more problems. Are they as reliable as they used to be? No, none of the cars are. But because Toyota does have that culture of taking their time,

and prioritizing quality and reliability over profit margins, especially short-term profit margins. That is why I trust them. They will work out the kinks. Yes, they tick me off when they tell sports car drivers that they’re driving their cars too hard. That’s just stupid. But they’re getting slapped for that. And I think they will learn their lesson. I have confidence that just because of their corporate culture, that they will find a way to balance advanced technology

with the reliability of their brand. So again, haven’t been recommending new Tundras to people lately, but I do look at Toyota as a brand, as generally being still very reliable, and I will continue to recommend them for my clients. Along with Subaru, also along with Hyundai and Kia, I really love what they have been doing. And again, they have to develop reliability because they have that extra long warranty that they have committed to standing by.

And they’ve done a good job of doing that. Honda is going to take a little bit longer to regain my trust because they have a slightly different culture. They hide behind their lawyers a lot. So when they have a problem, they tend to say, what problem? We don’t know about a problem. And they wait until it reaches a critical mass,

and a law firm in California files a class action lawsuit and only then do they address it. And they only address it as much as they’re required to by however that class action lawsuit shakes out. So that has kind of hurt my personal trust with the Honda brand. I very much want them to go back to being reliable cars, but part of that trust that I have depends on how as a brand they handle when they do have problems. If they don’t fess up to it,

You’re like, yep, you know what? We’re sorry, we have a problem. Toyota did that. The Grand Highlander, granted they got busted by the safety test. They should have discovered that in their own safety testing and they have gotten slapped for that. But they’re like, okay, we’re gonna fix this. And they halted production. They did what they needed to do. So that’s one thing to really look for is how has a manufacturer addressed problems in the past and how quickly have they had resolutions to their problems. that is…

why Honda and Toyota have not been as reliable lately. And so if you’ve been hearing that in the media, yes, there is definitely a grain of truth to it, but it’s not across every single make and model. Honda’s had a lot more problems than Toyota has. So if you’re still like, should I buy that Toyota RAV4? Yes. Yes, you should. If that’s the right car for you, it’s still a reliable vehicle. Nothing’s perfect. We do grade on a curve these days, but don’t worry. Toyota is still overall a very reliable.

brand. I hope this has been helpful to you guys. You know, I put the information on how I do my research, how I research reliability, and how I especially shop for used cars looking for the reliability of older models. All of that is in my online car buying course, the No BS Guide to Buying a Car, Your Inside Track to Getting the Best Deal. And you can find that on my website, thecarchick.com or directly at carbuyingcourse.com.

Thanks so much for joining me everybody. Until next week, I hope everyone drives safely. I’m out of here.