The Honda Accord is a well-known car that many people like because it's dependable and has a lot of room inside. The 2026 version has updated features that make it even better.
A CVT transmission is a special kind of automatic transmission that can change gears smoothly without any noticeable shifts. This helps the car use fuel more efficiently and provides a smoother driving experience.
Hypersensitive steering means the steering wheel turns too easily, making it hard to keep the car going straight. You might find yourself constantly adjusting the wheel to stay on track.
Oversteer is when the back of the car slides out while turning, making it feel like you're losing control. You have to steer in the opposite direction to correct it.
Understeer is when the front of the car doesn't turn as much as you want it to, making it feel like you're going straight instead of turning. You have to turn the steering wheel more to get it to turn.
Road noise is the sound you hear inside the car from the tires rolling on the road. If a car has a lot of road noise, it can make the ride less comfortable and more distracting.
A four cylinder engine is a type of car engine that has four separate chambers where fuel and air mix and burn. These engines are usually smaller and can save on gas, but they might not sound as powerful as bigger engines.
The exhaust manifold is a part of the engine that helps direct the gases produced when fuel is burned. It connects to the exhaust system and helps the car run smoothly.
A full inspection is when a mechanic checks all parts of a car to make sure everything is working properly. It's like a health check-up for your vehicle.
Brakes are what help a car slow down or stop. They need to be checked regularly because they can wear out and might need to be replaced to keep the car safe.
An oil leak is when oil escapes from the engine, which can cause problems if not fixed. It's important to keep the engine oil at the right level to avoid damage.
Knocking is a loud noise you might hear from an engine when something is wrong. It usually means that the engine isn't working properly and could be in trouble.
When a car has 200,000 miles on it, it means it has been driven a lot. Cars with this many miles might need more repairs and may not last as long as newer cars.
Term
$11,000 repair cost
If a repair costs $11,000, it means fixing the truck will be very expensive. This amount can make people think about whether it's worth fixing the truck or buying a new one instead.
A used engine is an engine that has been taken from another car and is being sold to replace a broken one. It's usually cheaper than a new engine, but you don't always know how well it works.
A remanufactured engine is an old engine that has been fixed up and made like new again. It's usually cheaper than buying a brand new engine, but it still works well.
Gateway Ford is a place where people can buy Ford cars and get them fixed. They have the right parts and trained workers to help with repairs.
Car
Ford truck
A Ford truck is a type of pickup truck made by the Ford company. They are strong and can be used for many different tasks, like carrying heavy loads or towing.
A warranty is a promise from the company that they'll fix or replace something if it breaks within a certain time. It gives you peace of mind about your purchase.
A remanufactured transmission is an old transmission that has been repaired and rebuilt to work like new. It's a way to save money compared to buying a brand new one.
LIVE
Hey folks, Lenny Lawson, the car guru.
I am back in action.
Oh, you've been gone.
Yes, I have been gone.
Those of you who listened to the radio broadcast have noticed maybe a few reruns.
I hope they didn't rerun to like back to back the same show.
Sometimes I just don't know what they're going to do when I go out of town.
But yeah, I went on a cruise with my wife.
We typically go on a cruise in January and that's what we did.
This one left out of Port Canaveral.
That was kind of cool.
Being beside where they're going to get ready to launch that moon mission.
I could see the, the tower.
It was very small, very far off in the distance, but I could see it.
If I zoomed in with my, my iPhone, but it left out of Port Canaveral and then went
to a private island that's owned, I guess it's owned by the cruise lines,
which is Norwegian cruise lines.
Very happy with that experience.
The ship was phenomenal.
It's not one of the giant ships.
It has just a little under 4,000 passengers.
That's a lot of folks and about 15, 1600 crew.
We parked beside a ship though that dwarfed ours and I looked it up.
I can't remember the name of, oh yeah, it was MSC cruise lines.
And I think the name of the ship was seascape or something like that.
But anyway, it has 7,000 passengers.
And I think 2,000 crew or a little bit more, you believe that?
I just have our time believing that something that big can float.
Of course, I have a hard time believing that 747 can fly.
They can, thank goodness.
But yeah, we went to, let's see that private island.
Then we went to Jamaica, which I didn't even bother to get off the ship there.
I've been to Jamaica several times and just not that impressed.
I know it has some probably really nice parts.
And I talked to a couple of folks who actually got married there.
So, but I wasn't too happy the last couple of times I went.
So I just, we just stayed on the ship.
And then we went to Grand Cayman, Georgetown was the name of the small town there.
But, and that was nice.
We did get off the ship there.
And then we ended up at Cozumel, which is an island off the coast of Mexico.
And really, that was one of the best parts of the trip.
I had been there the previous January and we landed at a different port.
And it was not that impressive when we got off the ship.
But this was a completely different location.
And it was right in the middle of things.
And it was very impressive.
But I'll tell you something that was the most impressive.
I was quite frankly shocked.
I had been taking a nap in our cabin.
I guess you call it a cabin.
And I just wandered out over to the balcony and looked out there and I said,
you know, I don't see any ships because we had been passing a lot of ships.
This was when we're cruising from Cozumel to get back to Port Canaveral,
where we're going to get off the ship the next day.
And we'd seen a lot of cruise ships and tankers and different things go by.
But when I looked out at this point, I didn't see anything till it looked
way over to the right.
And I said, wait a minute, that's no regular ship.
So I scrambled in and got my phone and I zoomed in on it.
And it was an aircraft carrier.
So I Googled it.
Well, to be honest, I use chat GPT.
I said, what aircraft carrier would be somewhere in the Gulf of America,
north of Cuba right now, but South of the United States.
And it immediately came up and said the George H.W.
Bush nuclear aircraft carrier is currently cruising in that space.
And now it was, I don't know how many miles it was away from us,
but it was a long distance, but you could immediately tell that was no ordinary
ship. And I was just amazed that I got to see an aircraft carrier actually at sea.
That's a pretty rare and unexpected sight to see.
And I was really pleased with that.
I'd say something I wasn't pleased with at all, though, is when we landed at
Port Canaveral, we used Uber a lot and that worked really well.
I decided to, we had a lot of time to kill before our plane left.
It was like seven or eight hours, as a matter of fact.
And I didn't want to go to the airport and wait that long.
So I found an Avis rental car place and we rented a 2026 Honda Accord.
Now it was a base car, wasn't loaded.
I had cloth seats.
It did have automatic climate control and power windows and locks and cruise and
all that stuff, but it was just a base accord.
But the minute I got in that car and sat down, I said, OK, this is very plasticky.
There's a lot of plastic in here, and it did not look like high quality plastic.
I was disappointed.
And then I fired it up and drove it and we were going down the road.
And that thing has a CVT transmission.
That's a continuously variable transmission.
And a lot of car companies use those.
One of the reasons is because they are very well, they're more efficient than a
transmission that has actual gears and changes gears.
This works in a completely different way.
Now, many car companies have decided to say, well, people don't like the way CVTs
sound or feel because they don't shift.
You know, most of them just there's no gears, definitive gear shifting from
first to second to third.
You don't feel it.
Now, you may think that that's a good thing, but I don't.
It sounds like I'm driving a four wheeler or a side by side.
It's like stretching a rubber band.
It just goes from low to high.
And it's very disconcerting for for me.
And I don't like it.
I was very disappointed in it.
Now, one thing that Nissan has done, which I'm a Nissan dealer and I'm not bragging,
but they actually have developed a computer system with their CVT that actually
makes it feel like it's shifting gears and it feels more natural the way cars
are supposed to feel.
Does that sound weird?
Well, that's one of the things I want to talk about today is a simple word that
I use to describe cars.
And that's or it's one of the attributes that I use to describe cars.
And that's feel, F E E L.
How does it feel?
I'll be back in just a minute.
Now, when you think about the word feel, most people think about touch, right?
How does it feel?
How does that fabric feel?
My wife is a an aficionado for T shirt fabric.
If a T shirt fabric doesn't have that really, really soft feel, she won't buy it.
I won't either.
She spoiled me too, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
When I'm talking about feel, I'm talking.
Let's just start with the steering.
I'm going down the freeway and well, just outside of what was that town?
Melbourne or Melbourne, Florida.
OK, after I'd picked up the rental car
and I had a really hard time keeping the vehicle going straight down the road.
I was constantly having to correct the steering
because it was so hypersensitive.
I call it oversteer the minute you barely fractionally move it.
The car starts darting one way or the other.
I was constantly fighting that car.
Now, for example, you compare that to BMW, you don't feel any of that.
The steering is there's a little bit more understeer.
And so it takes a little bit more movement of the steering wheel
to get the car to respond, not a lot, but it doesn't take much.
The Honda Accord had a very on-center kind of.
I mean, you could tell where the middle was.
It wanted to always gravitate to that.
And that is not a good feel, especially for somebody who enjoys driving
as much as I do.
So again, I'm just constantly fighting it.
That transmission drove me nuts just the way it felt,
just the way it didn't shift the way it sounded.
Another thing, road noise.
That has always been my pet peeve with Hondas,
is they have so much road noise.
And when I say that, I'm talking about primarily tire noise
or road noise being transmitted through the tires.
And into the cabin.
Now, if you drive a Toyota Camry or a Nissan Altima
or even a Chevy Malibu, you don't get that.
I don't know what Honda's design, philosophy and engineering is
that causes them to have so much road noise.
Are you a Honda driver?
Have you ever noticed that?
I don't even think that change in the tires will fix that.
But it was all these feelings that I was getting
when I was driving that car.
And I'm thinking, why would anybody buy this vehicle
after driving it or driving it in comparison to other vehicles?
But they do.
They sell hundreds of thousands of them
because people don't care about that.
They're not sensitive to the way a car feels
and to how the signals that they get basically through the steering
through the transmission, through the engine.
It's just like a droning four cylinder sound.
You know, that's one of the things that I don't like about four cylinder engines
that if they're not designed right, if they're not isolated correctly,
then you get a lot of engine noise in the cabin.
And it's not a big deal when you're driving around town,
but when you go on a trip and you've got all this tire noise
and you've got all this engine droning, then you can't figure out
why you're so exhausted.
Just drive a car that doesn't have those attributes
and you'll see how much more enjoyable your trip is.
That's why it's so important when you're buying a car,
shopping for a car, that you test drive them and you listen for these things
and you get that car out on a four lane road and drive it
and see how it tracks and see how it responds when you turn your steering wheel.
I mean, I just can't imagine driving that car all the way from Florida back to Tennessee
and having to fight that steering the whole way.
I mean, it was just disconcerting.
I asked my wife, I said, you want to drive?
She said, heck, no, you sound like you don't like it.
And I know I'm not going to like it.
And I said, well, you're right about that.
OK, and another thing this has nothing to do with the Honda Accord
came into the dealership yesterday, my first day back.
And there's a gentleman in the showroom that
I have known for probably 45 years.
He built my house that I live in now.
Wonderful guys, 81 years old now.
And he said, I want to tell you something.
He said, I brought my vehicle into your dealership about, let's see,
six months ago, took it into the service department.
I had some oil leaks that kept smelling oil
or burned oil.
So obviously it was leaking from the top of the engine, probably
dripping down occasionally on the the exhaust manifold or just the hot block
of the engine and, you know, it vaporizes.
And you get that that, well, it's really hard to describe.
It's just an oil smell.
It's not good.
So anyway, he brought it into the dealership.
We did a full inspection.
We do a full inspection on every car we found that his vehicle.
We found that his brakes were worn to the point
where they should probably be replaced.
So he gave him a price.
He said, now I'm just going to I'm going to wait a little bit longer.
I think I can get more life out of these brakes.
And and he said, I just don't want to spend that money money for the to fix an oil leak.
And we noticed also that the engine was ticking just a little bit.
It was a very light ticking noise, which is not a good thing.
If it's something typically it's a valve noise, a valve train noise.
And sometimes you can make some adjustments
or replace a very inexpensive part and make that go away.
He didn't want to do that either.
So about two weeks later, he's driving down road.
It's not too far.
Well, it's about four miles from where we are now, the dealership.
And all of a sudden, it sounds like his engine is going to come out of the vehicle.
It is knocking badly.
He's really close to an independent shop.
So he pulls in.
He knows the guy that runs that independent shop.
He said, I don't know what's wrong with this thing, but it sounds awful.
And so the guy came out, listened to it.
He said, shut it off.
Let us get it in the shop.
Can you get another ride?
Yeah, he arranged for him to to be picked up by somebody.
They left the vehicle there, called him back the next day and said,
you want the good news or the bad news?
Well, give me the bad news.
Well, you need a new engine.
There's a component on the engine.
It's a spring.
Yeah, just a spring.
Doesn't sound like it'd be very serious, but it's in a very crucial place.
There are these devices on on a three five EcoBoost forward engine.
Now, this is a a 2013 Ford F-150
with just under 200,000 miles on it.
And he needs a new engine because this spring broke.
And when it broke, it went through the through the crank and all the bearings
were messed up, and that's why it was knocking so bad.
So he needed a new engine.
What would you do?
You've got a 2013 truck with.
Just under 200,000 miles on it.
And they say you need to spend $11,000 to fix it.
Well, the truck itself is probably worth about 11,000 to maybe 15.
Do you want to spend $11,000 on a truck that's worth 15?
If it's if it's fixed, OK, so basically it was scrap.
He said, fix it.
And they said, well, how do you want to fix it?
We can get a used engine, which would be about $6,000.
We can be a remanufactured engine, and that'll be about $8,000.
He said, no, I want a brand new engine from Ford in a crate.
So he was at this independent shop.
He ordered the engine from us here at Gateway Ford.
We took the engine over to them and they installed a brand new Ford
engine in his truck.
And I said, I won't say his name, but I said, why did you do that?
He said, Lenny, that has been the best truck that I have ever had.
I've had to spend some money on it, but it rides better than anything
else that I've ever had.
Everybody's always wanting to borrow my truck.
My grand's children, my kids, everybody wants to take my truck
when they go on vacation.
I said, well, you need to stop that.
It's probably why you have so many miles on it.
He said, I know, but he just loves the truck.
Now, was that a wise financial decision?
Well, it was for him.
He said that, you know, if I go out here on the lot and buy a new truck,
I would probably have to spend $60,000, $70,000 to get one with equivalent
equipment and features, wouldn't I?
I said, yeah, probably would.
He said, I can invest 11,000 and have a brand new engine.
And I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, but your transmission's got
200,000 miles on it, the rear differential, the transfer case, the air conditioning,
everything else has 200,000 miles on it.
So typically what I recommend that people do in this scenario is first
they have to decide, are they willing to roll the dice?
Because if you put a new engine in a vehicle like that, the engine's fine.
It's under warranty, but nothing else is.
And then if you have other issues, then that could get even more expensive.
And when you get 13 years of life and 200,000 miles out of a vehicle,
I mean, I don't know what more that you can expect.
And so, you know, he can limp along and you could too, if you're in this type
of situation, unless the transmission poops out and then, you know, you're
probably looking to replace it with a remanufactured transmission, you're
probably three, four, $5,000, depending on the source.
And then something happens to the air conditioning.
Something happens to the cooling system.
You just don't know, you keep throwing money at it, and then all of a
sudden you realize, man, I probably should have just bought a new one.
The other alternative is to buy used, you know, maybe find a truck out
there that's got 50,000 miles on it that's five years old.
And it costs half as much as a new one.
Sometimes that's the best option.
You just have to look at your overall need, which includes your initial purchase price.
How does that fit into your budget?
Can you get an extended warranty on it?
And when you consider all the factors and you look at your five years worth
of ownership cost, how does it stack up?
I mean, you're going to have to speculate some.
You're going to have to guess about, okay, so I've got this truck.
It's 13 years old.
It's got a 200,000 miles on it.
It's got a new engine, so at least the engine's good.
What else is going to happen?
What do I need to estimate?
What do I need to budget for this?
I mean, I could easily see somebody spending anywhere from a thousand to
$3,000 a year on a truck that's that old, just trying to keep the other systems going.
And that doesn't count if you lose, like I say, a transmission or a transfer case
or an air compressor, all of this, all of these other expensive components that are old.
So what would I have done?
I wouldn't have fixed the old truck.
I would have called the salvage yard, got the highest bid I could get.
It would probably be in the three to $4,000 range.
And then I would have moved on.
I'd either found a used truck or just go into another new truck.
I mean, heck, this one lasted 13 years and 200,000 miles.
But there are other factors that you have to take into account and budget is
one of the biggest.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
You know, I hadn't thought about this until the break.
But what if you don't have $11,000 to pay for an engine?
He did.
I mean, he could just take it out of his checking account.
And maybe that was a big factor in his decision.
What if you have to borrow money to pay for that engine?
Most people would have to.
Then, you know, I don't know, depending on their credit card limit, you charge
$11,000 on a credit card, though, and unless it's one of those low interest
cards, you're going to be paying 18 to 25% interest on it.
So you have to take that into account as well.
Is it better to scrap that vehicle or trade it as is someplace and buy a new
vehicle and finance it at zero?
I would think so.
But again, you just have to look at the numbers.
You have to analyze those before you can make a good decision.
When you buy a used car, a used vehicle that's out of warranty, or you repair
like he did an older vehicle, you know, he's like I said, he's got an engine
warranty, but nothing else is covered.
You buy a used vehicle, something could happen.
It's out of warranty.
You could be buying a new engine or a new transmission.
Always consider, please, to buy some type of an extended warranty slash service
contract when you buy a used vehicle, because repair costs have just gone
out the roof.
I mean, imagine paying $11,000 for an engine.
It's just something that most people be completely out of their reach.
They'd be lost if they had that type of situation.
When you buy a new vehicle, you don't have to worry about that at least for
three years, or 36,000 miles, which is the warranty on most of them.
It's just like at our dealership, we have a lifetime powertrain warranty
that comes with every new vehicle sold.
So you never have to worry about an engine, a transmission, a rear
differential, or a transfer case as long as you own the vehicle.
But you still have to make sure that you maintain it, because if you don't
maintain it properly and you have a major claim, then they may deny coverage.
So that's on you.
As far as, you know, what decision you make, whether you buy an extended
warranty or not, the only reason you would need it, if they have a lifetime
powertrain warranty that they're offering, a lot of dealerships do that,
you would need something to cover the other components.
And because the engine and the transmission and, you know, the drive
line components are already covered, then you can buy what they call a wrap
policy that covers everything else, like the air conditioning, the cooling system,
all the electronics, which are hugely expensive.
So these are things that you need to think about when making a tough decision
like this. Well, thanks for listening to this edition of my car guru.
Again, if you're interested and you want to have a handy guide when it comes
to buying, selling, trading, servicing your vehicle, just let me know.
Send me your email address to Lenny Lawson 2020 at gmail.com or to my
personal cell phone at 423-552-2020.
And I'll send you a copy of the my car guru guidebook and you can read it or
just keep it in your glove box.
If you have any type of situation like you're getting ready to trade cars,
to sell your car, to get automotive service, to pick a body shop, this guidebook
will help you make the best possible decision other than listening to this program.
Pass this on to your friends and neighbors, and I think they'll find it
very useful. I'll see you next time.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson shares insights from his recent cruise experience while diving into the complexities of car repairs and decisions. He discusses the challenges of driving a 2026 Honda Accord rental, highlighting issues with its CVT transmission and steering feel. A notable story involves a customer facing a costly engine replacement for his 2013 Ford F-150, weighing the financial implications of repair versus replacement. Lenny emphasizes the importance of understanding vehicle feel and making informed decisions when it comes to car ownership and repairs.
