2004 Honda Accord Exec from UK and Ireland - Comments

The car makes a high-pitched whining sound in 5th gear at between 75 and 82 mph.

I returned the car back to the dealer who could not help me. After countless telephone conversations with Honda UK they eventually sent an engineer to test-drive the car.

His report is as follows – ‘the transmission whine described by the customer and experienced by myself is a noise common to this model of Honda Accord. A report was submitted by Honda UK technical support department at the time of model launch. Reply from Honda Japan R&D was noise was caused by helical gears used with the transmission, there is no way of elevating this noise and the noise is not detrimental to the economic life of the transmission so is regarded a trait of the transmission design.’ So in other words I will just have to put up with it, but hopefully if you have read this you won't.

The drivers seat moves sideways when going around corners. The fixings were replaced under warranty.

I guess this Accord was built in Ohio too? I know that there are no bad Hondas or Acuras coming out of Japan. Who make up this crap anyway? A design flaw is a design flaw, regardless of country. Acuras have had bad trannys (manual and automatic) and other problems from rigt from Japan. Yep, hard to believe from a perfect culture, but true.

I think the UK accord is different from the American version, the UK version is very similar to Acura TSX.