2024 Honda Odyssey: What to check before buying

Engines fail to restart after Auto Idle Stop shuts them off at lights and stop signs. Sometimes the whole van, electronics included, goes dead, and drivers have to shift to Park and press the start button several times while traffic swerves around them. Reports point to hot weather and longer drives as triggers, and some mention a battery warning light. Dealers often cannot reproduce the problem, and new batteries have not fixed it. Other reports describe frozen infotainment screens, unexpected shifts into Park, repeated jump starts, and brief power loss on the freeway.

Automatic emergency braking slams on the brakes with nothing ahead, including while merging onto highways. It has also failed to react to vehicles crossing from the side, and one of those reports involves a crash with 2 injuries. A "Radar Obstructed" warning can switch off emergency braking, adaptive cruise, and collision warning even when the sensor area is clean. One owner was quoted $800 for each recalibration. Camera and radar failures appear at low mileage. The speed-limit display sometimes reads highway route numbers as posted limits.

Most of these reports describe the same Auto Idle Stop restart failure. The engine stays off when the light turns green, leaving families stuck in middle lanes of busy roads. Dealer resets have not fixed it, and some dealers could not reproduce it. A second pattern is a rough, hesitant idle at stops, which dealers have diagnosed as a misfire. Honda's response in these reports is that the misfire is a normal characteristic of the vehicle, so it goes unrepaired. No warning lights come on with either problem.

The van brakes hard on its own with no car or obstacle ahead. It has happened while accelerating and at 60 mph, nearly causing rear-end and multi-car collisions. One report includes an injury, a head strike from the sudden stop. No warning light comes on, and one van went through several dealers with no diagnosis or repair. The complaints tie this to the collision mitigation braking system, not to a failure of the brakes themselves. One case appeared at about 2,997 miles.

The transmission shifts hard in the lower gears, and the van jumps or jerks. Owners worry this could cause a loss of control on wet roads. Restart failures from Auto Idle Stop show up here too, mainly after drives of an hour or more, and switching the van fully off and on again gets it running. Related reports describe slow starts, a refusal to engage reverse, and radio faults that a dealer blamed on a battery that would not hold a full charge.

Sudden jerks while driving make it feel as if the van is taking over the wheel. In that case the dealer pointed to the automatic gearbox. Another van showed several warnings at startup, covering ABS, electric steering, emergency braking, and adaptive cruise. The cause was a severed and cut wiring harness for the right rear ABS sensor, found at about 4,000 miles on a van with no prior damage. Losing that sensor hurt the van's handling and braking.