Honda makes fantastic vehicles with fantastic engines. Quality scoring by Consumer Reports and other quality monitoring agencies consistently rates Honda engines high across all vehicle types. If you have a Honda Accord, Civic, Passport, Pilot, or Ridgeline (or any other Honda or vehicle with a Honda Engine) then you have a high quality vehicle with a high quality engine. Accidents can and do happen though, and drivers do find themselves in need of used Honda engines when their motors fail. Many people are leery of buying a used engine because they’ve heard stories of folks having bad luck with the experience. Buying a used Honda engine can either be the best automotive repair you’ve ever made, or the worst. I’ll explain what you need to know to do it right and keep your vehicle on the road for years to come.
If you want to have a good experience putting used engines into vehicles, a good rule of thumb is that you always need to determine what caused your previous engines to fail. Most engines fail because of poor maintenance, but some engines have inherent flaws. These can be internal flaws or flaws in supporting parts like intake manifold gaskets, water pump, timing belts, timing sprockets, or any other part that directly affects engine performance. You don’t want to spend money doing a full breakdown of the engine, but a good cursory look at the motor can reveal information that you can put to use either in your initial installation of your used engine or in the maintenance of your Honda engines. If your timing belt broke, you know to replace it earlier. The same would of course apply to your water pump. The great news is that for many of the parts in engines, there are aftermarket parts available that are of much higher quality than similar OEM parts.
The first thing you need to consider in the purchase of used engines for your Honda is that mileage matters. Mileage matters! It is the key in determining how much life is left on a used engine, and whether the product you’re considering purchasing is even worth putting into your car. It is simply logical that if you take a group of randomized engines with 40,000 miles, they will have more life left on them than a group of randomized engines with 80,000, 120,000, or 160,000 miles. Sellers of engines know this, and that is why many of them lie on mileage, misrepresenting 120,000 as 60,000 miles. When they do this, they are robbing you or years of driving time. You should, after all, get what you pay for, correct?
The second thing you need to know is that since mileage matters, and people lie on mileage, it is important to get mileage verification on your Honda used engines. How do you do this? Well, simply put, with CARFAX. Nine times out of ten, a CARFAX will show you the final mileage on vehicles when they were taken off the road due to the wreck. This is available from police reports and insurance company records, all of which CARFAX pulls information from. Run away, very, very fast when someone says they don’t know the number of miles on an engine. Even if the final mileage of your used engine isn’t recorded on a CARFAX, you will see an indication of the vehicle mileage history which can be used to “connect the dots” on mileage.
Lastly, you need to know that quality used engines come with good, written warranties. If an engine is truly good, and a supplier has confidence in it, why wouldn’t they warranty the engine? Settle for nothing less than 1 year warranties on used engines!
If you follow these criteria, then you can buy many Honda used engines, get a lot of life from them, and save money.