Bought a very high miles 2019 Honda Accord Hybrid

[brages]

Kind of rolling the dice on this one. Just picked up a 2019 Accord Hybrid with over 250k miles.

Previous owner had it for two years, put on 100,000 miles for work, got reimbursed at 67 cents per mile... do the math, lol.

Anyway, looks a lot nicer than my typical beaters. Interior in good shape, new tires. Had a horrible grinding wheel bearing that the owner was oblivious to, weird. Knocked off a bit in the price for that. Also he ended up getting the head gasket replaced, which is one of the few weak spots with this car, as far as I can tell.

Gas milage on the drive home was disappointing, mid 30s. Hope a new wheel bearing gives a mileage bump, but we'll see. PO claimed 40ish mpg, which is typical on Fuelly.

Touring model, so lots of options. Ventilated seat seemed weak. Hope the traffic jam assist is a benefit to my daily commute.

I've had pretty good results with high miles cars in the past. Will this be the one where my luck runs out?

 

[Cujet]

How far can you drive on the hybrid battery? Hybrids tend to lose MPG when the main battery has very low capacity. I know people get awesome mpg with Accord hybrids, but I can't get 40 out of them with my driving style. The one's I have rented seem to return 36MPG on the highway, the very same as I get from the previous generation Altima. I can get 40mpg with a Prius on the highway.

 

[ripcord]

My co-worker had one of these except several years older. He had nothing good to say about it. He had to buy a new battery pack and it never got close to the advertised fuel economy.

 

[ripcord]

How far can you drive on the hybrid battery? Hybrids tend to lose MPG when the main battery has very low capacity. I know people get awesome mpg with Accord hybrids, but I can't get 40 out of them with my driving style. The one's I have rented seem to return 36MPG on the highway, the very same as I get from the previous generation Altima. I can get 40mpg with a Prius on the highway.

Sounds like you need a thicker throttle spring, LOL.

 

[brages]

How far can you drive on the hybrid battery?

I don't know... It's a little different hybrid system than the Prius. Our Prius doesn't do much strictly-battery driving... you have to really baby it to keep the gas engine from kicking in on a modest hill or acceleration. The Accord doesn't have the planetary "eCVT" of the Prius, so low-speed driving in the HAH uses the electric motor more heavily, more like a series hybrid. I guess the Volt works with a similar system, although the Volt has a really big battery.

We get about 45 in the Prius... that's with an original 2010 battery. On Fuelly, the 2010 Prius averages 44 and the 2019 HAH gets 41. So my expectation is that I should be able to hit 41 or 42 on the Accord if I drive the same as our Prius.

 

[fantastic]

Just keep an eye on the oil burning and keep up on it. Fix what is worn..Keep it fueled up and run it till something major happens then decide what to do.

 

[Boomer]

Every time I read about the mileage folks get on hybrids, I have to smile. My 2019 Passat with the Budack engine will get between 42-45 mpg highway on a trip on mid-grade gas. I bought this car new, give it 5000 mile oil changes with VW 508 oil (0W-20) and it runs like a top. You can get this kind of mileage without all the complexity of batteries!!!

 

[joekingcorvette]

Hybrids really shine around town when they run on about half battery or more. When driving on the highway you are running on all motor and it wouldn't be much different than a non-hybrid. The Touring model is really nice and with the high miles I am assuming you acquired it at a decent price. Those Honda's run a long time and the high miles wouldn't scare me if it's in nice condition. I do not know much about how long the batteries last but I know on the Toyota's you can buy rebuilt batteries for a decent price. All of the high mileage cars I ever owned just seemed to keep on running great without any major problems. Keeping the oil and transmissions serviced is half the key to long life in any vehicle. You have a Honda and they are very reliable and the vented seats in most vehicles are a lot better than nothing. Good luck!

 

[Oillover]

Every time I read about the mileage folks get on hybrids, I have to smile. My 2019 Passat with the Budack engine will get between 42-45 mpg highway on a trip on mid-grade gas. I bought this car new, give it 5000 mile oil changes with VW 508 oil (0W-20) and it runs like a top. You can get this kind of mileage without all the complexity of batteries!!!

Gobbeldygook!
Everyone knows EVs and hybrids are the most efficient means of transportation!

 

[brages]

Got the wheel bearing replaced. Put in an SKF from Rockauto. Made in China. Not impressed. The old bearing was a very tight fit in the "socket" it sets in, took a lot of hammering. New one is super sloppy, probably a 1/4" of clearance around the bearing. Just held in place by its bolts.

I got it together and it was quiet, except I had a bad scraping noise on hard right turns. Took it back apart and hit the rotor with a sanding pad. Thought I might have bent it getting it off. I was putting it all back together when I noticed I had left my magnetic light on the swing arm. Guess that was the noise!

The rotor had a wear pattern that I had seen on my Prius: on the inner surface, the rotor is not worn smooth all across; it only has a smooth wear area in the middle with roughness at the inner and outer edges on the pad.

 

[brages]

One "interesting" thing about the car is it has 17" wheels, not the 19s that should be on a Touring. Which is just fine with me, 17s give better fuel economy and a quieter ride!

 

[The Critic]

Got the wheel bearing replaced. Put in an SKF from Rockauto. Made in China. Not impressed. The old bearing was a very tight fit in the "socket" it sets in, took a lot of hammering. New one is super sloppy, probably a 1/4" of clearance around the bearing. Just held in place by its bolts.

Not surprised. Installed one on a Forester a while back and the splines for the axle shaft were not well-machined; there is an audible "click" when you go to torque down a lug nut.

 

[ryster]

One "interesting" thing about the car is it has 17" wheels, not the 19s that should be on a Touring. Which is just fine with me, 17s give better fuel economy and a quieter ride!

Accord Hybrid Touring in 2019 came standard with 17" wheels and 225/50R17 tires.

https://autocatalogarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Honda-Accord-Hybrid-2019-CA.pdf

 

[Brons2]

Kind of rolling the dice on this one. Just picked up a 2019 Accord Hybrid with over 250k miles.

Previous owner had it for two years, put on 100,000 miles for work, got reimbursed at 67 cents per mile... do the math, lol.

Anyway, looks a lot nicer than my typical beaters. Interior in good shape, new tires. Had a horrible grinding wheel bearing that the owner was oblivious to, weird. Knocked off a bit in the price for that. Also he ended up getting the head gasket replaced, which is one of the few weak spots with this car, as far as I can tell.

Gas milage on the drive home was disappointing, mid 30s. Hope a new wheel bearing gives a mileage bump, but we'll see. PO claimed 40ish mpg, which is typical on Fuelly.

Touring model, so lots of options. Ventilated seat seemed weak. Hope the traffic jam assist is a benefit to my daily commute.

I've had pretty good results with high miles cars in the past. Will this be the one where my luck runs out?

I got 44mpg indicated on a 2022 Accord Hybrid rented in March 2023 in San Diego, CA. I'm an obsessive BITOGer, so I reset all the computer parameters as soon as I got in the car. Anything I could find, got reset.

I loved the way the car drove, among other things, we took it up in the mountains east of San Diego and the car really felt like it was willing to go faster on pretty much any corner I took. I often found myself well in excess of the speed limit on the freeways and had to back it down. It was surprisingly sporty feeling for a hybrid sedan. It really reminded me of the legendary Hondas of old.

But ingress and egress was too tight for me at 6'7", I jammed my knee pretty bad one time getting in the car and it hurt for a few days. I don't think I could live with it on an everyday basis. For the 98% of the population that doesn't have these considerations, I think it's an excellent vehicle.

 

[brages]

It's been cold (teens and 20s) lately, and the mileage not too good, 33 or 34 mpg in a tank. This is my first car with remote start, which is of course an mpg killer.

I've been getting more regular commutes in, and spending way more time stuck in traffic. I am not sure I like the ACC low-speed follow for traffic jams. I guess it's nice to be able to give your feet a little time off, but it's just more jerky than driving manually. I guess my years of dailing stick-shifts has made me smooth. I really like hybrids in traffic jams, and this one is smoother and nicer to drive than our 2010 Prius.

The lane-keep is OK I guess - doesn't really stick you right in the middle of the lane.

The way that the Honda hybrid works is interesting in comparison to our Prius. In our Prius, there are eight bars in the state-of-charge gauge. The car will work to get the SOC indicator to six bars. It will run battery-only only at very low pedal inputs - cruising a flat 45 mph, for example. For highway driving, the engine is on, except for downhills, and on the highway the SOC just sits at six bars out of eight. Around town, the battery can get depleted, running A/C at a stop or from slow flat cruising.

The Honda is quite a bit different. It has a SOC indicator with 10 segments. When the engine is warm, it will go into "EV mode" when SOC is at 5 segments, and continue until SOC drops to 2 segments. So the battery is generally living at a lower state of charge.

EV mode is powerful enough for mild acceleration and even climbing shallow grades. For highway driving, the car will cycle between engine-on charging and engine-off EV mode. In the cold weather, I can see the EV cycles getting cut short.

Of course, the transmission is different between the two cars. I'm starting to think that Honda's i-MMD is actually a better overall system than Toyota's planetary "eCVT". But I think it Honda's design has a weakness in steeper hills, where it becomes more of a serial hybrid because the required power is too much for direct drive.

 

[brages]

Last night, I put some new brakes on the front. I went with some cheap parts - white box Amazon warehouse rotors and closeout "Famous Brand" (Carquest Gold) pads from Rockauto. I kind of felt like a jerk when I found that the car had Genuine Honda rotors and pads - very little wear on the pads, too. Interestingly, to me at least, the hats of the rotors had very little rust.

But the inboard side of the rotor was beginning to develop the unusual wear pattern that I've seen on my Prius pads. The rear rotors have this pattern more distinctly, as well. I guess what happens is corrosion starts to set in at the edges of the path where the pads contact and then ends up wearing down the pad faster than the pad cleans up the rotor.

Anyway, it's very nice to have smooth braking again. Hybrids are kind of weird in that if you have "warped" rotors, you will still get smooth regen braking until you have to stop hard enough to engage the friction brakes, and then the vibrations start.

In other news, I've had a few 40-mpg trips on warm days, but I'm still seeing pretty much low-to-mid 30s mpg. We had a couple of really cold weeks. I still think I'll be getting 40 mpgs on a tank by summertime. One fun thing is that my hand-calculated mpg (miles/gallons per fillup) is consistently about 1.2 mpg higher than what the mileage monitor is showing. Most cars I've had are overly optimistic.

 

[brages]

Also - these rotors are probably not original (at 255k miles), as the rotor retaining screws had been removed. I suppose someone could have removed them, turned them, and reinstalled or pulled them to replace wheel bearings or whatever, but I doubt it.

For whatever reason, I have had pretty bad luck with Honda brakes. Always seems like I get rotor vibration long before the pads wear out. I think I'm doing everything right. And my brake jobs seem to do OK on my other cars.

 

[zzyzzx]

Kind of rolling the dice on this one. Just picked up a 2019 Accord Hybrid with over 250k miles.

How much did you pay for it?

 

[brages]

How much did you pay for it?

I hate to say because I'm sure I'll have people thinking I'm a moron. It was about 1/3 what most of them with reasonable miles are selling for though, maybe a little more.

Price was actually about in the middle of kbb.com price for "Fair" condition with this many miles. Although the car IMO is between "Good" and "Very Good" on their condition scale. So I guess it was a bargain? Time will tell!

 

[brages]

Warmer weather brought my first 40+ mpg tank. 42.3 calculated, 40.7 indicated. You can see the previous fill-ups weren't so good!

If I can average 40mpg, I'll be happy.