Over the years, I’ve managed to show more than my share of brand loyalty to automobile manufacturers.

Let’s look at the vehicles I’ve owned (with a couple of my wife’s thrown in):

• 65 Ford Mustang
  My first ever car, (I wrote about it the other day) and chock full of maintenance problems starting at day 1. But pretty cool.
• Yamaha motorcycle
  I traded the Mustang for this. Fun to get in touch with the elements, but after I sobered up I was too paranoid to ride it in Dallas traffic. Finally sold it.
• 81 Pontiac Phoenix
  At first glance a fine automobile. Till things started breaking. Like the fuel gauge sitting at 1/4 tank all. the. time. (woops!) Like the power steering locking up, while you were driving (watch out for that tree!). Like the throttle chain (this was carbureted) getting stuck wide open while driving in city traffic (turned off engine and shifted to Park to save car and others). Like GM claiming that none of these things were under warranty. I’ll let you know I’ve never owned another GM product since (and won’t, if I have anything to say about it)
• 80 Datsun 210 hatchback
  For you young folks, this is what they called Nissan when they started selling them here in America. They thought the name sounded less Japanese. I bought the car (okay, you caught me, my dad let me have it) with only 80,000 miles on it. Before that I learned how to drive in it when it was new. I had 195,000 miles on it when I sold it, and last I heard they put another 30K on it before the man died and it was sold again. Probably still going somewhere. This car pulled me through college and a LOT of road trips. And more than a few footprints on the back window (wink wink)
• 87 Honda Civic
  Damn fine automobile. One problem? It flipped repeately while I was driving down the highway to work one morning (and going about 80 when some guy ran me off the road on purpose). I walked away. I had only made one payment. Liked it so much and made enough on the insurance settlement that I went out and bought an
• 88 Honda Civic
  which was the same except it had a trunk release inside. Then I put 80,000 miles on it and bought a
• 90 Honda Civic
  but this one had power windows and shit on it. Meanwhile, my wife had traded the Subaru she had in college for a
• 89 Jeep Wrangler
  Which tried really hard to make my Pontiac Phoenix look pretty damn good. You name it, it broke on this monstrosity. The door fell off. The seat belts broke. The engine wouldn’t start if it was humid (or not humid) first thing in the morning. The top started falling apart. We had to rake it out after the leaves fell in the fall, and hose it out in the summer. If it rained, no matter how carefully you applied the brakes, it would frequently spin out of control (usually worse on city streets, which have a little grease on them).
  But what fun it was! After a couple years, the “not starting” thing and “almost wrecking in the rain” thing got a little old, so we traded it on a
• 91 Honda Civic Hatchback
  which was new and which I still drive to work every day. So yeah, for a number of years we had two Hondas, and when we had kids we realized pretty quickly that we needed a bigger car for “things” so we traded my civic (the 90) since it had 139,000 miles at that point for a
• 99 Honda Odyssey
  Are you seeing a trend here yet? Lotsa Hondas. Anyway, this van was great, except it had some “van” issues, like the sliding doors really liked the rubber seal so sometimes they would stick and not open right away, which is kinda a problem if you have little kids in car seats. We broke three door handles. We had a serious brake problem, but I can’t figure out if it was Honda (maybe) or Midas (most likely) that had the bigger problem. We spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on brakes and had Midas messing with them over and over again and they never were really fixed.
  But the kicker was the transmission, which died when we had 108,000 miles or so. I know, I know, some of y’all are thinking that is a lot of miles and so what if the tranny went – well, all the cars I have already listed (and a couple I didn’t) – never had any transmission problem. Except the Mustang (I think I had that worked on, at least the clutch) and the Jeep (due to a manufacturing flaw that gave us a warped flywheel that they tried to convince us was “normal.” yeah, I’m not too fond of Jeep). Anyway, the tranny went on our Honda, and it turns out that LOTS of Hondas had tranny’s going out (at least the 99 and 00 and 01 models of the Odyssey) and it also turns out that Honda was paying for a lot of transmissions but THEY WOULD NOT COVER OURS SINCE IT HAD TOO MANY MILES ON IT.
  I’ll let that sink in – I have put almost half a million miles on my Hondas (combined) and since we were 8,000 miles over their cutoff of 100,000 miles, Honda refused to pay for our transmission.
  So when the tranny started acting up again fourteen months later (wouldn’t you know it had a 12 month warranty on it) we got a little nervous.
  Owner loyalty to a fault, but this time it was too much.
  We even tried. We went to the honda place (there’s only one in town). We had read that the tranny problem had been corrected by the famed Honda engineers, and were thinking of buying a used one (we can’t afford one of their new $32,000 luxury touring models, which is all they had in stock for the new ones. C’mon, my kids want Pokemon and fruit snacks, not loaded touring). So we went to look at the used cars.
  The salesman, and I mean this in the nicest way, was a moron. He had no idea if the one were standing there looking at had a split fold down rear seat. He had no idea if it had a theft deterrant system. He couldn’t tell us anything about the car. After a while he agreed to actually unlock it so we could look inside (gee, thanks!) but did not encourage us to drive it or point out anything on it. It was five years newer than the model we owned, but looked very similar. I wanted to know if anything was better (brakes, maybe? Transmission?) but didn’t feel I’d get any useful info from him.
  It turned out Honda never had a chance. This moron lost it for them. Because we drove two miles to the Toyota place, and found a
• 05 Toyota Sienna
  We drove it, and bought it. It has almost no miles on it (but used so we saved many thousands of dollars) and it has a certified warranty for 100,000 miles, no deductable. And the sales guy knew what he was talking about, and they gave us plenty for our old Honda, and the doors don’t stick (not yet, anyway) and the transmission is sweet (five speed, instead of four) and it came with a nicer stereo and everything!

I still drive my Civic, and proudly. I hope Honda can still build a great car (the van, as much as we loved it, was only “very good,” never “great.”) And in another 100,000 miles I might give Honda a chance when I need to get my next car. Or, I might start at Toyota…