I have a 2003 Accord V6 that seems to be having issues with the transmission. The problem is that it is not happening all the time. When I am driving, the car seems to search between second gear and third gear. What I mean is that the car feels like it falls into neutral, and then revs really high, over 5000 rpms, and then after about 10-15 seconds, it falls back into third gear. I have taken it to the dearler twice and they cannot duplicate the issues. There is no pattern as to when this happens, warm, cold, hills, etc. I am worried that I am going to need a new transmission and when I spoke to Honda corporate, they claim there is no known problem like this. I see many people have had this issue, but no one really seems to have an answer as to what I can do.

 

[sm=americanasmiley.gif]Hello New Member...

WheelBrokerAng

 

They fixed the problem sometime in 03 or 04 .... you may very well have the 6th gen plague. Pretty soon, you should expect the car to go into safe mode, flash the D4 light and the check engine light will stay on. Expect a P07** code. In safe mode, the tranny shift solenoids will lock into 3rd gear and VTEC will not engage. It will drive more comfortably than when it is hunting, but if you need your power back, you can throw it in Neutral and cut the ignition then restart it. That will take it out of limp-home mode. My guess is that your tranny is dead. Mine went from good to dead in a week.

 

trans is toast and you will be needing a new one.......when it fails, the limp home mode is 2nd gear and that sucks when you are going 70 and it decides to downshift into 2nd.............

the 03-07 accords (non hybrid) use a variant of the 5spd auto found in the01-03 CL/TL and are prone to the same problems and requre the same fixes as well.

 

The tranny specialist told me that on the 4AT, limp-home locks out the shift solenoid which is 3rd. The lack of VTEC robs all of the power.

 

Is there any update on this? What did you end up doing?

Mine started experiencing the exact same problems and I'm not sure what my next step is. Honda is telling me after they installed the oil jet kit, it is no longer their problem.

Not sure if I should go back to Honda or to a local shop to get a rebuild.

 

I had the same problem and here's the rub. I had 63K miles on the clock of an 03 V6 Coupe. My local Honda dealer said that "Honda will take care of you" (whatever that means) but when they replace the transmission, they send the old one back to Honda. If the tranny they send Honda isn't obviously bad, Hondabecomes less likely to work with them on future warranty repairs.The service managerwas very nice about all of this, but hemay bemore concerned about his relationship with Honda than fixing my car. They couldn't duplicate the problem, andthey told me to just drive it until if fails after charging me $100 to flush the tranny.

Both my wife and daughter had a few "thrill" events waiting for the car to find a gear in traffic and on on-ramps. They bothrefuse to drive it. Several more trips to the shop produced the same results, "just drive it until it fails".

I really liked this car but I finallygave up, it was just too much trouble and I didn't trust it. I'm sad to say that with all the other problems I had with this car in the 6+ months I owned it, the solution turned out to be sucking it up andselling the car.

 

That is pretty much my situation. The dealer said bring it in and if it turns out to be the same recall problem, then we'll talk to corporate to see and go from there. So from what I have been reading, since I am not a customer who gets all their maintenance done at Honda, there is an small chance they will cover a new tranny. They'll probably end up offering to cover part of the total cost, usually parts. Even though I’ve read cases where Honda still covered the whole thing for non-clients, they mostly have also not covered anything at all.

And I've been trying to duplicate the problem myself so I can show Honda the problem. But it only happens here or there and right now I really don't feel like taking it to Honda and after they can not duplicate the problem, try and charge me $150 for diagnosis. Either way, I may look into selling it. Did you sell yours with the tranny problem or is that something you mentioned to the buyer?

 

I told the buyer about the problem and gave him all the paperwork from the dealer so he could have a trail if he wanted to continue towork onthe issue. I think hemay haveactually been buying the car for his teen kid. It was a very nice car and I priced it $3K below KBB --a great deal if he can get Honda to cover the charges and not a bad one if he ended up paying out of pocket. I just had enough with it and didn't trust it any longer. Itsold it in 2 days andI never looked back. No more HondaV6 Auto combinations for me.

 

x2 .... my 3G cr@pped out it's tranny at 90k and that was it. Now I have a much smaller, manual car with a 4 cylinder that is just as fast as the AV6 .... somehow it weighs almost as much too, my doors should be on the Abram's tank!!!