Tire Update

For everyone that's following my blog and I know it's in the millions by now, I thought I would post an update regarding my tires. If you remember from my previous blog, when I got home from my trip I noticed that the tread on my rear-tires was non-existent, this was very troubling to me since I had been driving my car at freeway speeds on mountain roads, if I would have hit a slick spot or had a blow out it could have caused serious injury or death to me and my family.

Well after extensive discussions (some at high volume) with two dealers and several Acura employees, Acura decided to admit this was their responsibility and that they would purchase me new tires. This was caused by a design defect with the toe-in of the rear-tire, it seems that when the car has a heavy weight in the back seat (in my case my 100lbs daughter and suitcases for our trip). They fixed this by stiffening the rear-end of my car, this is something I felt as soon as I started driving the car and something I'm going to have to get used to now. To apply this fix took them 2-3 hours and they had to remove the back seat of my car, this is probably why Acura isn't fixing all 2004 TLs.

Careful with the dealers also, one of the dealers here in Northern Virginia actually said this was my fault for not bringing the car in for their free oil change (this was the place I had purchased the car), they said if I would have brought it in, they would have applied any open TSBs, after speaking with a second dealer (Pohanka) and Acrua, who both told me TSBs only get applied if the car is in warranty and the customer is exhibiting the specified issue, that I realized the service manager for the first dealer was lying to me. Pohanka handled this very well, they let me get angry, they didn't lie and they communicated with Acura what the issue was (they even offered me a free donut and soda), I'll definitely be going back to Pohanka for future business.

In the TSB Acura links this to the tire, but it has nothing to do with the tire, I'm sure they do this in order to make it look like the tire is bad and so that they won't have to replace more expensive tires like I had on my car. If you have a 2004 Acrua TL I would suggest you force Acura to apply this fix ASAP, I'm sure if I would have gone another 200-300 miles on my tires, they would have blown, and that could have easily been tragic given that I was driving at highway speeds on curvy mountain roads.

Here is the TSB for this issue, hopefully the link stays. Hopefully no one gets injured from this.

http://www.in.honda.com/Rjanisis/pubs/SB/B05-050.PDF