This is novel. A woman who is upset with Honda over lack of promised gas mileage on her HondaCivic Hybrid. It seems as the battery aged, the mileage went from the EPA sanctioned 51mpg highway sticker value to about 30. Honda ignored her complaint, and now she has a real chance of winning a landmark case in small claims court and Honda is taking a PR hit as the issue goes viral. A video report follows below.
Civic Hybrid owner sues Honda in small-claims court for poor gas mileage
By Linda Deutsch, Associated Press
TORRANCE — A woman who expected her Civic Hybrid to be her dream car wants Honda to pay for not delivering the 50 mpg it promised.
But rather than joining other owners in a class-action lawsuit, Heather Peters is going solo against the automaker in small-claims court, an unusual move that could offer a bigger payout. And if successful, it could open the door to a flood of similar lawsuits.
…
Peters, a former lawyer, says that as her vehicle’s battery deteriorated, it got only 30 mpg.
When Honda ignored her complaints, she filed legal papers seeking reimbursement for her trouble and the extra money she spent on gas. The suit could cost the company up to $10,000.
If other Civic owners follow her lead, she estimates Honda could be forced to pay as much as $2 billion in damages. No high-priced lawyers are involved, and the process is streamlined.
“I would not be surprised if she won,” said Richard Cupp Jr., who teaches product-liability law at Pepperdine University. “The judge will have a lot of discretion, and the evidentiary standards are relaxed in small-claims court.”
…
Peters opted out of a series of class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of Honda hybrid owners when she saw a proposed settlement would give plaintiffs no more than $200 cash and a rebate of $500 or $1,000 to purchase a new Honda.
The settlement would give trial lawyers $8.5 million, Peters said.
“I was shocked,” she said. “I wrote to Honda and said I would take $7,500, which was then the limit on small-claims in California. It is going up to $10,000 in 2012.”
…
She said she also offered to trade her hybrid for a comparable car with a manual transmission, the only thing she trusted at that point.
“I wrote the letter and I said, ‘If you don’t respond, I will file a suit in small-claims court.’ I gave them my phone number,” she said. “They never called.”
Here’s the video new report from AP:
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Bumper sticker seen on a mid 70’s 4×4 3/4 ton pickup (pre airbags) with heavy steel push bars, skid plates, over sized axles, tires, and bumpers:
“May I borrow your crumple zone”
Henry chance says:
January 5, 2012 at 10:56 am
When I was a rich college kid, I purchased a new Kharman Ghia convertible to do spring break. It did nearly 40. My son had a couple of older Civics that also did near 40. Why so good? No pollution control apparatus. We are not making progress. Maybe that is why they call them “progressives”.
_______________________
My first car was a brand new 1992 Pontiac Sunbird with 4 cyl. engine and AC, ABS, frontwheel drive. That car got 42 mpg on the highway. And that was even using gasohol. And I didn’t have to carry a ton of fire-prone LiPo batteries in the trunk.
And to beat that, my girlfriend had a VW Rabbit Diesel. That got about 50mpg on a bad day.
Just thought I would add that my 12 year old 220BHP petrol driven car (0-60mph in 6.3 seconds) can get better than 30mpg! Its light weight (around 1050kg’s) and manual which helps with the fuel and cost me far less than a new hybrid car and its way more fun to drive! There a sucker born every minute. Then again, I am not American, and I know the Americans like to drive big heavy cars with big fuel guzzling engines – go to the UK – 30mpg is considered a fuel guzzler!
In less than five years the hybrid loses 40% of its capability. What a great technology!
I imagine in Canada’sa cold climate that the POS would lose more like 80% of its stated mileage.
One more decline for the greenies to hide, eh mizimi?
EPA made the estimates, not Honda. There are so many variables involved in actual attained MPG, that this woman’s small claims action seems frivolous to this non-lawyer.
From Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/resource-center/fuel-economy/epa-mileage-figures/overview/0709_mpg_ov.htm
I drive an old Civic, and my mileage will vary between about 25 and about 40, depending on numerous variables, including wind.
Who would have thought that batteries would deteriorate over time? (Hint – almost anyone who has ever used a battery powered anything).
I used to own a 2000 VW Jetta TDI – 48-52 MPG for 5 years as advertised.
Henry Chance – no, emission controls don’t account for the difference. Modern engine controls are enormously more efficient than old carburetors.
What does? Simple. That Ghia, and those early Civics, weighed maybe 1800lb.
A present-day Civic is around two feet longer, almost a foot wider, and a bunch taller than a ’75 Civic, and weighs over 3000lb. You’ve got a fair bit more interior room – but also air conditioning, automatic transmission, massively more structure, a truckload of seatbelts and airbags and stereo speakers and sound insulation and so on and so forth.
There are few if any big, cheap cars anymore, and what we think of as a ‘big’ car now is not particularly large by ’70s standards…but small cars have gotten much, much, much bigger. You could put a 1965 Mustang completely inside a 2011 Mustang, the new one is just a bit longer – but much wider, much taller, and a thousand pounds heavier.
A Ford Escape is quite a small SUV, yet I saw one yesterday next to a ’62 Corvair at a traffic light and it might as well have been my Suburban.
I have a 1994 Honda Civic VX. It got 54mpg on the highway when it was new (better if I drove extremely conservatively.) It is now 17 years old and gets 42mpg on the highway (on which it rarely goes due to a few mechanical issues my 200,000+ mile 17 year old car.) In the city it still gets about 40mpg.
I plan to do a complete tear down and rebuild on it next year and see if I can get back near 50 again. This was on a standard fuel injected 1.5L I4 VTEC-E motor and 5 speed transmission. Too bad the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration upped the crash rating requirements so high you could not build this car today. It is a great drive to work car but definitely not a family sedan. Honda built these from 1993-1995 in very low numbers.
Even if Honda won most or all of these cases, it will be *incredibly* expensive. This is kind of a novel tactic (it’s been done before but I’m not sure on this scale). She can create an awful lot of leverage by encouraging others to follow. Honda may end up wishing this was a class action. Defending against hundreds or thousands of court cases, even in small claims, is at least as expensive as paying them off.
Honda seems to be relearning the fact that customer service is a lot less expensive than the alternative. That is not to say that all the demands are reasonable, but they chose to offer a product without compensating for significant downsides, and it looks like it’s going to hurt.
Ralph – diesels are fine, but…
1) diesel engines and their fuel systems are typically more expensive to build, which has mostly kept them out of the cheap-car end of the market,
2) fuel taxation in the US penalizes diesel,
3) meeting recent particulate requirements in California and other similarly-regulated states means very complex and maintenance-intensive emission control systems.
(Second try; first went bye-bye)
EPA made the mileage estimate, not Honda. Driving skill, traffic, local conditions, average length of trips, weather, etc. all affect achieved average MPG.
From Consumer Reports:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/resource-center/fuel-economy/epa-mileage-figures/overview/0709_mpg_ov.htm
My older Civic returns between about 25 and as much as 44 MPG, depending on numerous variables, including the weather. Honda makes great cars. This frivolous action will only serve to increase costs for all of us.
Class action suits are usually designed to benefit the lawyers, and nobody else.
I looked at the Civic Hybrid when it first came out and the dealer could not answer two very important questions: How do you replace the battery in 5 years (and how much will it cost)? and Why doesn’t this get as good mileage as my 94 Civic VX? They had no idea what I was talking about on the battery and denied there was such a thing as a Honda with a 54mpg EPA rating. Do I need to add that I walked out of there before he even finished talking?
mizimi says:
January 5, 2012 at 10:25 am
My 90,000 mile Saturn is still getting within a mile or two per gallon, the same gas mileage it did when it was new. My last Saturn did the same.
While mileage will drop slightly as the car ages, this woman saw a 40% decline in mileage.
As long as we are comparing vehicles, we need to keep in mind the overall cost to keep it on the road.
I drive a 1999 Ford F-150 4×4 pickup, standard bed. Now have about 240,000 miles on it, with minimal problems. And, it gets 15 mpg. According to the Obama administration and the progressive Congress of 2009, a “clunker.”
I’m happy as heck. Why?
My truck has been paid for for more than 9 years. No vehicle payments, zip, zero, nada, other than insurance and regular maintenance costs.
Why, you may ask, did I not take “advantage” of the “Cash for Clunkers” program?
I’m not an idiot, and plan to retire early.
Justa Joe says:
January 5, 2012 at 11:39 am
[AP Source: GM to call back 8,000 Chevy Volts]
—
GM said the Volt’s battery should have been drained after the crash, but it never told NHTSA to do that. Later, two GM executives said the company had no formal procedure to drain the batteries until after the June fire. GM has said that the liquid solution used to cool the Volt’s battery leaked and crystallized, causing an electrical short that touched off the fire.
The company now sends out a team to drain the batteries after being notified of a crash by GM’s OnStar safety system.
—
Draining batteries after a crash is a Green Job.
I would expect that the cost of the ‘clean up’ will exceed the profit on the vehicle.
Team + Team Transport + Hazmat Gear + Hazardous waste transport + Hazardous waste disposal + Site scrubbing (and potentially resurfacing) + Really bad press.
Traffic Report: The accident has been pulled over to the side but it will be a few hours before CARB finishes the environmental assessment and lets the the GM Hazmat team get to work, so 101 Northbound at Amphitheater Parkway is closed for until further notice. Your best choice would be to exit at Old Middlefield Way and re-enter from San Antonio Road.
Batteries, even the highly vaunted lithium ion rechargeables have a relatively short active lifetime. Big, heavy, lead-acid deep-cycle batteries, if properly serviced have a longer lifespan than the fanciest lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries are analogous to PV panels – they start to degrade as soon as they’re put into use. Hybrid buyers are suckers. Those who buy used hybrids are even bigger suckers.
This is just the tip of an iceberg which has been allowed by government to grow in magnitude over the past 30+ years.
Bare faced lying by purveyors of various things. In this case rightly caught but in a way it is not fair on Honda, are merely one. They have little choice when others lie and the level playing field of honesty is not pro actively enforced.
The claimed performance must be the limit worst case and somewhere fully specified.
Same thing as food purity laws, cellphone promoters only stating maximum battery last (an utterly useless figure), politics is full of it… as is the media, academia and well, you know.
I haven’t seen this degradation in mpg with our Prius. It is used to deliver mail. It gets about 30-32 during winter and 38-40 during summer. Compare that to 8-10 with the truck. Very few 4 cylinder cars have lasted long; the Prius so far has been very reliable and cost effective for this application. Everything about it has been better than straight gas vehicle.
Normal driving (not delivering mail) during warm months it still gets 50-55 quite easily @55 mph.
The car has over 90k on it.
I’m not sure, it sounds like something else is wrong with that Honda other than the battery. It should be noted that Toyota and Honda use two completely different systems, so maybe her issue is unique to Honda. That large of a drop seems excessive.
When hybrids first came out the EPA estimates were over optimistic, but they changed the way they do the calculation and now hybrids do better than the EPA numbers.
By US law, automakers are only allowed to advertise one set of numbers for the fuel economy of their vehicles; those numbers computed or discovered on the standard drive cycle. If Honda had given any numbers OTHER than the numbers they gave, they would have been breaking the law.
The numbers are a useful basis for comparison, they are not a guarantee. If she wins this case it will be a) a travesty of justice and b) the end of EVERY automaker.
It’s tempting to gloat, but this case is really just more insufferable nonsense from sue-crazy America.
What’s next? I should sue Budweiser in the small parasite’s court after having seen the advertising which grandiously claims Budweiser to be ‘the king of beers’, buying a carton with correspondingly high expectations but finding that drinking such panther’s urine is actually rather like copulating in a canoe, and then going on to prove that I could have acheived enebriation more rapidly and subsequently been hung over more powerfully by drinking real ale (like Spitfire Ale); thus concluding that clearly Bud is in no way the ‘king of beers’, thus that the advertising is misleading and thence demanding Budweiser pay me compensation for my own stupidity in taking Budweiser’s advertising so anally retentively literally.
Maybe I can also sue Levis for selling me jeans that the advertising implies are tough once they inevitably wear out (and I claim to be too retarded to see it coming).
No, this case is nothing good at all, it is a shameful WOfTAM and should be thrown out of court by any judge with two neurons to rub together.
All honda has to do is point out that the vulture in question doesn’t drive the car under the exact laboratory ideal conditions in which the efficiency figures were recorded (no doubt there is small print beneath the published efficiency figures to this effect) and they should probably also manange to demonstrate that the car wasn’t maintained exactly as the manufacturer recommended; did she inflate the tyres every day so that they were always at the recommended pressure?, did she carry the weight of bags and any of the other crap that accumulates in a typical car? Did she use the manufacturer’s recommended POL? Was the battery treated exactly as per the manual? (smallprint about temperature affects on performance and so on).
I seriously hope the daft oxygen theif loses the case and has to stump up for exaggerated legal costs. In addition to being cautioned for wasting the court’s time and for being indecently smug in the first place (she did buy a bloody hybrid after all!).
That would send a useful message to at least some of the childish morons out there and would be poetic justice since this particular parasite is a lawyer herself.
It’s times like this I’m very happy not to live in the land of the litigous and the home of the sued.
re: the comments regarding mileage estimates based on straight gasoline as opposed to gas-anol.
I find it humouous that the stickers on my neighborhood gas pumps proudly exclaim “ Enhanced with ethanol!”
Since ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline, shouldn’t the sticker read “Diluted with ethanol?
GoodCheer says: January 5, 2012 at 12:32 pm
[If she wins this case it will be a) a travesty of justice]
The models say we should be seeing the mileage and it’s a travesty that we’re not.
🙂
Drove 120 miles today in my Golf Plus 2.0 TDI (diesel turbo) – averaged 57mph on 2 lane road (dual carriageway). MPG 73.3 !!! I love that car. Over 3,000 miles since I last reset the trip computer I have an average MPG of 62.8 . Can someone tell me what that is in MPG per US gallon.