What about boycotting a company because of their unethical business practices?
I was a loyal Honda/Acura owner for 16 years. My very first was a used '85 Honda CRX back in 1990. I owned/leased a total of seven Hondas and two Acuras over the next 16 years. I never even considered anything else, I was a hard-core Hondaphile and driving anything else in my family would be heresy.
I leased a brand new 2002 Acura TL Type-S in late 2001. It was my dream car and I planned to buy it after the lease expired. But I leased it because there was no way I could afford the payment on a $33,000 loan at the time. I struggled to make the lease payment, but it seemed worth it at the time.
Everything was perfect until the transmission suddenly bit the dust just past the 9,000 mile mark! It was replaced under warranty and I was a bit shaken, but chalked it up to being just a fluke and that was that.
Just after I passed 21k miles, the transmission started slipping intermittently and I eventually raised enough Hell that they replaced it yet again!
Fast forward to 34k miles, and yet again, another transmission failure! I was less than three months from the end of my lease at that point and they agreed to terminate my lease early and without penalty rather than fight with me.
During this ordeal, I discovered that thousands of other Honda and Acura owners were also having premature transmission failures! Anything from '01-'05 with a V6 and 5-speed automatic was a ticking time bomb.
After I turned in my Acura, Iwas very confused. Sort of like a cult member who suddenly realizes that what they’ve always held to be true is just bullshit! I needed a car and my aunt was selling her '92 Accord. It was 12 years old with only 90k miles on it (and it was a 5-speed manual, so no automatic transmission failures to fear), so I bought it to drive until I figured out what I wanted.
I drove it for just over a year when I was side-swiped on I-75 in rush hour traffic and the car was totaled (in November 2005). By then, I had learned that the transmission flaw causing all the failure affected more than ONE MILLION Honda vehicles. More than 200,000 faiures occured after the 3-year/36k warranty expired and, in the vast majoiity of cases, Honda did nothing to help those owners!
Ideally, they should have issued a recall to fix the problem. At the very least, they should have extended warranty coverage for the transmission on the laffected models (which they did only after losing a class action lawsuit)!
When I was faced with buying a new car after the wreck in 11/2005, I decided that I would never own another Honda. Fortunately, I was in no rush to buy a new car because my parents had a spare vehicle that I was driving.
I test drove more cars than I care to remember and did many hours of research online. I found a Volvo S40 demo at the local Volvo dealer that I actually liked. It was last years’ model ('05 and the '06s were out), plain white with black cloth inteior and it was a 5-speed manual. It didn’t have a single option, just the basics. But that’s why it was being sold for $19,999 instead of the $25k sticker price…and $20k was all I could afford.
But thanks to all of my tedious research, I learned that the Volvo S40 and Mazda3 were actually co-developed by engineers from both companies and from Ford. Ford owned Volvo at the time and held controlling interest in Mazda also.
Long story short, I test drove the Mazda3 and fell in love. For $18k, I got a nicer car than the Volvo and I still own almost eight years later. I also added a Mazda CX-9 SUV to the fleet last year. As long as Mazda keeps building cars that I like, I’ll keep buying them. But I’ll never have the sort of blind faith (or ‘sheep mentality’) that I did as a Honda owner…
