Dozens of Honda and Acura owners filed NHTSA complaints over failing engines.
Honda’s J-Series V6 engine has been a mainstay throughout its lineup for nearly three decades, but a new government investigation homes in on more than 1.4 million vehicles to determine if there’s a widespread problem with engine failures.
Specifically, the decision comes after 173 incidents, including one crash, were reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about connecting rod bearing failure, leading to catastrophic and complete failure of the engines. While Honda did issue a recall last year (NHTSA recall 23V-751), evaluators with the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) are working to determine if the 248,999-vehicle scale of that recall was insufficient to cover all potentially impacted owners.
The ODI’s investigation covers a wide range of vehicles with the 3.5-liter J35Y6 V6 engine across Honda and Acura brands, including:
- 2016-2020 Acura MDX
- 2018-2020 Acura TLX
- 2016-2020 Honda Pilot
- 2017-2019 Honda Ridgeline
- 2018-2019 Honda Odyssey
Recall 23V-751 covers a narrower model year band, so this probe may determine a wider-scale recall to be necessary to get any vehicles that slipped through the cracks. The problem, laid out in the initial recall report on November 8, 2023, is that a manufacturing defect with the engines’ crankshafts could cause the connecting rod bearings to wear prematurely and seize. “During production of the crankshaft,” Honda says in its filing, “due to improper settings of equipment used to manufacture the engine crankshaft, the crank pin was improperly ground, resulting in crank pins with a crown or convex shape that are out of specification.”
The automaker says it originally became aware of the issue back in 2020, and issued the voluntary recall after three years of internal investigation and 1,450 warranty claims for engine failures.
In its opening resume, the ODI says that the 173 Vehicle Owner Questionnaires it received “display failures that have characteristics consistent with those addressed in recall 23V-751 but are out of scope of the recall.”
In total, approximately 1,410,806 vehicles could be impacted, though we’ll have to wait on the results of the ODI’s investigation to know for sure. Alternatively, as Ford Motor Company recently did with EcoBoost V6 failures in its vehicles, it could expand the recall on its own to cover more vehicles than the 2023 campaign did. However, considering this sort of failure requires full-on replacement of each 3.5-liter V6 engine, that will be a tremendously expensive option.
Existing recall 23V-751 doesn’t include any vehicles built after July 28, 2020, nor does it include any models from model year 2021 onward. Honda says it improved its manufacturing equipment setup and inspection processes in 2020, suggesting that newer vehicles using the J35Y6 including the current-generation Honda Odyssey, Passport and Ridgeline as well as the updated J35Y8 engine in the new Pilot and upcoming Passport, are unaffected by this crankshaft manufacturing defect.
