2000 Honda Odyssey review from North America

- Transmission needed replacement at 95000 miles.

- Engine light came on and code indicates catalytic converter is faulty.

- Side sliding doors (manual) have always been sticky to shut, hard to open.

- Driver's seat adjustment device broke.

- Dealer installed roof rack is very noisy (wind noise).

This van was a good one for the most part. The doors and driver's seat problems were somewhat tolerable for us. But the transmission was replaced with a "reconditioned trans." recently (10,000 miles ago) and now slips upon start up. This is evidently a problem for Odyssey based on all the comments from other owners, and the fact that our dealer did give us a break on the cost of the 2nd "reconditioned" transmission even though it was out of warranty. BUT, we did not realize that the 2nd transmission would only last 10,000 miles. Now the dealer is trying to relate the catalytic converter problem with the transmission problem. He says if we must have the catalytic converter replaced then we'll see about the transmission.

We had another reputable repair shop look at the c. converter. They used a "sniffer" device to analyze the exhaust gases at the tail pipe. This indicated the catalytic was funcioning fine (perfectly). They suggested that the tolerances of error programed into the vehicle's computor were the problem, and that resetting these values within the computer would probably resolve the engine light, while controlling emissions as well. They thought that only Honda could do this.

Naturally Honda is not touching this - they prefer $850 from me to replace the catalytic converter.

We bought this van because other Honda vehicles have the reputation of running for years & years and high miles without these kinds of major problems.

We stood transmission costs w/ our previous Chrysler vans. We tried to avoid that with a "reliable" Honda which we paid quite a bit more to purchase, and now we are having transmission problems anyway. We are very disappointed in that and it is a common problem with the Honda Odyssey.