The days may be numbered on our 2003 Honda Element that we have owned since 2006 when it was just a pup. This is a picture of my actual car, not a stock photo, on a camping trip in 2007, shortly after we got it. It's about the only picture I have of the whole car. Maybe I need to take some more before it is too late. Rust, the cancer of cars, is ready to send it off the great scrapyard in the sky. Or maybe a farm upstate if you prefer.
You may recall a post from about a year ago where I dealt with an exhaust hole. Well, the patch job with the JB Weld Exhaust Wrap has failed and I can smell exhaust gas getting into the cabin again when stopped at lights. My first thought was to take the easy way out and just quit stopping at lights. I started doing some research and figured I could put in a cheap catalytic converter and take my original one to a welder to have it fixed properly and then put it back on when the cheap one failed. (An OEM Honda Cat costs $1947.71 at an online Honda dealer and is out of stock 😦. I'll quit stopping at lights before I buy one of those!)
Being a glutton for punishment, I figured I might as well replace the heat shields that had rusted out while I was doing this job. So, I jacked the car up and slid under it to take inventory of the parts I would need. As I was taking stock of the exhaust issues, I saw a rusty spot on the rear control arm mount that I hadn't noticed before. It looked pretty bad, and when I pushed on it with my finger, the metal just crumbled away like a saltine cracker! Not good. This looks to be a structural area and is partially responsible for holding the wheel on the car, so it is subjected to road forces and pothole jarring. I poked at it a little more and took some photos, cause I knew you all sickos would want to see the gaping wound.
That bushing isn't looking too hot either...
If you read my
post from the summer, you know I was in the market for a new car already. I had not planned on trading any car in, but with the Element showing worse rust problems, I have to consider getting rid of it. I had been negotiating with a dealership on a 2018 Nissan Pathfinder that met most of my criteria for the past couple months. I was playing hardball. I was waiting them out as they didn't accept my initial low offer. *Note: my offer was low in terms of what the market says the car is worth at this day and time, but it was high compared to what my gut tells me I should have to pay for that vehicle.
The dealer had been dropping the price steadily every few weeks and getting it closer to my offer as time went by and it wasn't selling. I called them up to see if they would be interested in taking the Element in trade. They said, "Sure, bring it in to be checked out." KBB lists trade in value of $4-$6K on it. I'd have been happy with the low end of that. Well, they didn't even look at the car. They ran a carfax on it and apparently there was structural damage reported on it which was a showstopper for them. My jaw hit the floor! I had no idea the car had ever been in an accident. It turns out the original owner must've been in involved in some sort of an accident a few months after getting the car and reported structural damage to the right front. In all my years with the car and all of the work I have done in that area of the car, I never noticed any damage. All the body panels line up nicely. There shouldn't be anything there affecting the value of the car, but because the carfax report has it in it, the dealer won't touch it.
I was a little stuck as I needed a car for taking scouts on a backpacking trip the next weekend and I wouldn't want to risk driving the Element on the highway knowing one of the suspension attachment points was all rusty. I negotiated another $1K off the price of the Pathfinder and bought it that afternoon without trading in the Element. Stay tuned for more on that car in the New Car Files 😀🎉.
Now what? The value of the Element is now probably on par with this:
I started researching this rusted mount problem. A welder would be able to fabricate a replacement mount, but I have no idea what that would cost. I came across a number of threads in the Element Owners Club and on Reddit with people having the same issue. Digging further, it turns out Honda Canada has issued a
recall for this exact problem with the rear control arm mount rusting out for Elements that were sold or registered in cold weather regions that use salt for deicing roads. Digging further, I found that Honda USA has issued a
recall for CR-Vs in road salt states earlier this year for this exact problem. The CR-V and the Element share the same chassis. Why wasn't the Element included in this recall as it has the exact same design flaw?
The Canada Elements and CR-V recall requires inspection and either installation of an additional support bracket if there is no structural rust yet on the vehicle or a buyout of the vehicle. In the online threads, Element owners were urged to contact the NHTSA vehicle safety hotline to report this problem, in the hopes that enough people doing so will get the US Elements added to the recall. I also reported the problem to Honda. We'll see what comes of this.
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