1992 Honda Civic VX review from North America

I bought the car for blue book value of about $3400 and had no problems aside from regular maintenance of tires and brakes for the first few years, from 170,000 through about 270,000. Spectacular car. It hit a real "sweet spot" of reliability for that period.

At 270,000, I changed the timing belt, gambling that I could get to 300,000. I did, but it cost me. Things started to go wrong about once a month. I had to replace a few engine parts, including a fuel related thing that gave the car a gas smell for a while.

At some point, around 290,000, I bought a set of 4 new tires and found them bald in a few weeks. The wheels had gotten loose because I needed to replace the control arms and some other stuff underneath. Those had kept the wheels from wobbling. But that's a wear and tear issue that people seldom hear about because almost no one drives their car to 300,000 these days.

In the end, after $3K worth of work over about 17 months - including a stretch where the car was in the shop about once a month - the engine was losing compression because of a cracked cylinder or something inside the block. I was looking at $1,500 and upward, so I finally bailed.

Never replaced the clutch, and I drive in a lot of traffic here in the northeast. Honda must make great clutches.

The car got better mileage the longer I drove it. On the highway, I was getting about 49-51 mpg. I could go for 390 to 400 miles per tank on the highway. Amazing car. Plenty of space. I'm a gigging musician and it was able to load two speakers, stands, recording equipment, three guitars, a bag of cables, and a stool, among other odds and ends. Once, I left Burlington, VT heading south after a show with my tank on empty, and passed by a gas station thinking there was one more up ahead. There wasn't. I drove about 50 mph all the way to White River Junction, and actually got off the highway, downhill, looking for an open gas station a few times, before driving back up onto the highway again to continue onward through the mountains, seemingly without the help of that gas stuff. After a while, I came to the realization that the car actually doesn't really need gas. It's a secret hybrid or something. I guess the VX engine design was the trick. You'll notice there are very few of this model available on the used car market. People just don't want to give them up.