Again With The Million Mile Accords

Remember the million mile Accord? How about the other million mile Accord? What about the 1.3 million mile Town Car? Or, most amazingly, the half-million-mile Fiat?

Honda has a new million-mile contender coming up, and this time they are using Facebook to get their fanbase involved. With this arrival of a third well-publicized long distance voyager, however, is Honda unwittingly bringing attention to a very inconvenient truth?

Sometimes it just all comes together. Think of the 1959 Gibson Les Paul, the 1969 Mets, or The Empire Strikes Back. With the announcement of “Joe”, the man who is expected to reach the million-mile mark with his 1990 Accord sedan in September, it is becoming increasingly clear that the fourth-generation Honda Accord was the company’s sunburst ’59. Of the four Internet-documented million-milers out there, three are fourth-generation Accords, while the fouth is a 1994, which is the first year of the fifth generation.

The first million-mile fourth-gen appeared in 2002, which makes one wonder why there were no million-mile third-gens to show up in previous years, or any million-mile sixth-gens starting in 2007. Part of it may simply be that million-mile owners are rare enough to throw any attempt at True-Delta-izing this phenomenon into disarray… but as my dear old mom used to say, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

The fourth-generation Accord also benefited from social forces outside its control. It was still a reasonably-sized car with a relatively unstressed engine, very few oddball electronic features, and a high percentage of stick-shifts sold during its production run. The current Accord makes almost twice the power of the fourth-gen from an engine just 1.3 times the size, has a vastly more complex valvetrain, is loaded to the gills with LCD panels and common bus networks, and is mostly fitted with an automatic transmission which, to put it mildly, is not considered to be a million-mile item.

It’s worth noting, as well, that today’s market is far more price-sensitive. The domestics manufacturers used to do Honda the ridiculous courtesy of pricing garbage like the Citation and Celebrity above the Accord. Today, Hyundai and Kia attack from underneath with 100,000-mile warranties and the very best in psuedo-German styling.

Honda’s use of “Joe” and his 1990 Accord in social media may end up having the same effect as Cadillac’s decision to use a red ’59 convertible a few years ago: reminding the suckers out there how good the product used to be. Or it could help the company regain the high ground among the Consumer Reports set… at least until somebody out there puts a million miles on an ’05 Sonata, right?