Originally Posted by
avguy
I have to say that the 2 quotes above made me chuckle just a bit (no, actually LOL). Honda's great reputation for quality and customer service is legendary. But it's kind of curious that the wonderful Civic had an interesting thing happen in the early 7 gens. Honda put in a bunch of inferior A/T clutches - actually a whole boatload of them. This was a systemic problem, and you can go to the Civic forums and read numerous reports of early failures, particularly 2001. carcomplaints.com had over 630 complaints on this, last time I looked. And what did Honda do about this for their customers? ZERO. NADA. They never admitted any problem whatsoever, even though they were fully aware of it, and changed over to better clutches in later years. They swept this under the rug and got away with it, with not even any apparent damage to their reputation.
And I also happen to know (don't ask) that these same Civics can be BRUTALLY difficult to burp the air out of the system (very small rad passages). You take short drives and warm-up the engine, and everything seems fine. But later on they overheat because there was air trapped that wasn't obvious at all. And when a Civic overheats, the HG will go in the blink of an eys. There are many discussions on this on the Civic forums as well. And, outside of the Civic, I believe there are a fair number of issues with some of the later Hondas as well. And yet their reputation seems to remain high.
Now I'm not saying all this to defend the Aveo, and have no special regard for Chevy either. I'm mentioning this because I think a great deal of this stuff is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Honda is great and Chevy is garbage. Some car guy says it, and then it gets repeated until it becomes fact. What would be great is if every mechanic entered every repair they make into a central database. That would be about the only way to separate real fact from BS and hype.