My car’s check engine light came on again late last week. This time it was accompanied by the IMA light. IMA means “Integrated Motor Assist” or, translating from Honda to English, “The part that makes is a hybrid.”
I took it to the dealership this morning and they called me around 1:30 or so with the diagnosis. The battery needs to be replaced. Not the run-of-the-mill battery for starting the gas engine (that was replaced last fall). This time it’s the one located in the trunk, right behind the back seat, which provides the extra “oomph” when I’m accelerating.
Then I found out the cost. Around $4,000.
Ouch. (Have I mentioned that the car has 100,000 miles on it and is thus been out of warranty by 20,000?)
I don’t understand the details, but for whatever reason (possibly because they want people to buy their hybrid instead of the better known one from Toyota), Honda is going to give me the battery for half of what they paid for it, but that still comes in at $1,600 plus labor.
It’s not as bad as it might have been, but it was still enough to make me wonder whether getting a hybrid was really worthwhile after all.
Some quick back of the envelope numbers….
Assuming $2/gallon (definitely a lowball figure since Katrina hit in 2005), $1,600 would buy 800 gallons of gas. If a regular Civic gets 30 MPG, that would be enough to move it about 24,000 miles.
My car has been averaging about 46 MPG, so with 100,000 miles, I’ve used a little less than 2,200 gallons of gas over the past 6 years.
Using that same amount of gas, a regular civic would have only gone 66,000 miles. Add in the 24,000 miles worth of gas you could buy for the cost of the new battery and my car’s still ahead by 10,000 miles.
The oil changes cost more, but they’re less frequent than with a conventional engine, so we’ll call that part a wash.
The hybrid did cost more than a regular civic. I don’t recall the exact amount, but I remember that the various tax incentives (no state sales tax, $2,000 federal deduction) made a serious dent in it. (A dent in the cost please, not the car!!)
So I can’t be completely certain, but I think I came out ahead by at least enough to buy a celebratory dinner at McDonald’s.
Plus, I get a fairly huge number of geek points for buying a hybrid back in 2003, long before the gas prices went up.
So yeah, the hybrid wins. 🙂
Tag Archives: car
Just Like Windows
My car’s “Check Engine” light came on last week. Rather than pay through the nose to take it to a dealership, I did some checking and found out that as long as it wasn’t something with the electrical system, the garage where I used to take my pickup could handle the hybrid just fine.
I just heard back from the mechanic. They pulled the diagnostic code from my car’s computer, checked it against Honda’s official list of diagnostic codes and … the code doesn’t exist! They reset the diagnostics, drove the car around a bit, and the service light didn’t come back on.
So the conclusion is that my car had a computer glitch. The solution was to reboot the car!
Dead Battery
My car – a Honda Civic Hybrid – costs more than one with a conventional engine. To help make up for the the extra cost, the manufacturer included a few extras from the nicer trim package as standard items: in-dash CD player, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, and so on.
Tuesday, for the second time in three months, I found myself pondering the irony that despite all those little add-ons, the one feature I personally seem to need is a buzzer to let me know when I’ve left the headlights on again.