Honda's miles whizzed by too fast

The shady used-car salesman's trick is to roll back the odometer to make a car appear newer. Honda Motor Co.'s odometers moved faster for the opposite effect.

How's that?

"I never noticed anything was amiss," said Agoura Hills resident Dick Hansen, who bought a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid last year and thought he had put 18,000 miles on it -- but may have driven only 17,600.

Hansen, a sound mixer for a TV production company, recently received a letter about a class-action lawsuit settlement agreement that might put some money in his pocket.

Notices began going out to 6 million Honda and Acura drivers after the agreement was reached four months ago, but some are only now landing in mailboxes.

Many recipients, like Hansen, had no idea the instruments in their dashboards weren't telling the truth.

In fact, many Honda odometers were awry for years, the lawsuit claimed, adding 2.5 miles to every 100 miles actually traveled -- ending customers' auto leases and service warranties too soon, in many cases costing them hundreds of dollars in excess mileage charges or repair costs.

James Holmes, the lead attorney in the suit against Honda and one of two similar complaints against Nissan Motor Co., said his team tested odometers in scores of other vehicles from most other major automakers and found none to be so far out of whack.

Although there is an industrywide allowance for small errors, most automakers' odometers "are pretty near perfect," Holmes said, and Toyota Motor Corp.'s odometers actually tend to err in favor of the customer by often showing fewer miles than they should.

Honda said the agreement could cost it at least $20 million, including at least $6 million for refunds of lease mileage overage charges and an unknown amount for refunds on repair bills that should have been covered under warranty.

There was "no nefarious intent" on the company's part, said Chris Martin, a spokesman for American Honda Motor Co. in Torrance. But he said Honda had calibrated its odometers to show, on average, more miles than the vehicles actually traveled.

Martin said Honda was following a voluntary industry standard instituted in the early 1970s that permitted a tolerance of "from minus 1% to plus 3.75%" in odometer readings -- meaning they could read anywhere from 99 miles to 103.75 miles for each 100 miles actually traveled. The guideline was changed in the 1980s to minus 4% to plus 4% but Honda continued to abide by the old standard.