The Most Reliable Car In The World

If you were to Google “What is the most reliable mid-size saloon car?” it would give you one unequivocal answer, the Honda Accord. This did not come as anything of a surprise to yours truly, for two reasons.

One, the reliability of Japanese cars is legendary. Two, I once worked at a Honda main dealership as a new and used car salesman.

On my first day, I went around the dealership to introduce myself to everybody. In the workshop, there was not a single soul to be seen sporting a spanner in anger. There wasn’t even the oily smell of a car being serviced.

To one side there was a mechanic restroom, which was where I finally found the team of grease monkeys sitting around drinking tea and reading newspapers and car magazines.

The foreman mechanic asked me if I could try to upsell car customers with a tasty offer of a cheap-to-fit towbar, to give the apprentices something to do.

“Honda’s just don’t break down,” he told me.

I got the same story when a Honda owner came in with his old Honda to buy a new one. When I asked him a little about the history of the fifteen-year-old car he wanted to part-exchange, he told me, “Do you know, I have never had a car as reliable as this, it’s uncanny. I have never had to replace so much as a lightbulb.”

This was all a far cry from the Alfa Romeo dealership where I had previously sold cars. My love for Alfas is unabiding, but far too many times it was also an incredibly frustrating mistress to deal with.

Even brand spanking new from the factory, the Alfas were prone to problems. It seemed to be problematic was part of the Alfa DNA, not unlike one or two Latino amantes of the humankind I inadvisably became entangled with.

I lost count of the 156 Selespeeds that left new car customers stranded somewhere in France. The electrical systems were also far too frequently playing up. I often wondered why Alfa didn’t just buy their wiring looms from the same suppliers as Japanese marques like Honda, Toyota and Subaru.

The most bizarre problem I encountered at Alfa was when a customer who had bought a new 156 began to have fuel problems almost as soon as it left the showroom.

It was an intermittent fault that was very difficult to diagnose. In the end, out of sheer frustration, the senior mechanic took the whole fuel system down, from the carburettors all the way back to the tank. He could find nothing amiss until he decided to take a look at the filler tube from the rear wing down into the tank.

What he discovered raised a good deal of laughter and relief in equal measure. Some disgruntled employee at the factory had stuffed a bacon-on-toast sandwich down the tube. Although it left enough space to let fuel from the petrol pump pass, bits of the Italian sarnie were slowly breaking off and tumbling down into the tank and getting caught up in the feed to the fuel line that ran along the car to the engine.

I hear that Alfa’s have come a long way since then, so hopefully owners have an easier time driving them. As for the Honda, it has never been anything less than so ultra-reliable that drivers can bet their grandmother on getting to their destination.