Because of the high cost and long nominal life of CVTs (combined with complaints of people just past the usual warranty), Nissan made the decision to double warranty length on CVTs.
It looks like Honda still has not made such a decision.
I think Honda and Toyota shot their reliability reputation in the foot by going to CVTs. Even if they double the warranty duration, there is a risk of dealing with a hard broken car and dealing with that for maybe weeks. And even if you get it replaced, you need to wonder when it will blow up again. Extending the warranty doesn't make the car magically reliable.
My inspection of the Fit at the used car dealership was comically bad, which disappointed me as this dealership once had a great local reputation for good used cars and honesty (I purchased my current vehicles from them and had absolutely no complaints) and I was quite interested in this car. The car was from VT, and dealer said it had "no accidents".
As I walked up to the car I noticed some significant road rash on the front bumper which she assured me was cosmetic. Pulling on the front bumper showed that half of its fittings were broken. Lifting the hood, things looked superficially OK, but I found that the radiator support brackets were both damaged such that the top of the radiator was about two inches too high and tilted, so the top radiator mounts could not be installed properly, but the radiator looked new. I pointed this out to the dealer, who then got one of their mechanics over to look at it. He said, "Oh yeah, we knew about that. It needs to go to the body shop, already scheduled." I gave the dealer a little questioning look, wondering if they'd drop that information on me if I hadn't said anything. Poking around some more, I found a several-pound piece of dried grass sod jammed on the inside of the bumper along with several large handfuls of railroad grade gravel. Neat. No frame damage, but some significant body parts needed to be replaced.
They had removed the front well liners to get a look at the frame, but looking over the rest of the car I didn't see anything else of note. They gave me the keys and let me take it on a test drive. The alignment was
way off and it had sick shopping cart syndrome, bad shaking on the front end. Lots of road noise that increased with wheel speed.
Got it up to speed on the highway for a short stretch when I suddenly heard the most hellacious metal grinding noise, mostly from the front right of the car, but all of the wheels were making noise. I pulled off the exit and made a few last turns back into the lot, and every turn I heard the pop-pop-pop of bad CV joints, both directions.
Getting back out of the car, the lug nuts on the front right were too hot to touch, and there was molten plastic all over the wheel and side of the car. Turned out that there was a broken piece of wheel well liner or something similar jammed on the inside of the wheel, which got jammed against the caliper causing that to stick. They put it on the lift to inspect, and I shook the back tires back and forth - tons of play, bad bad bearings.
The car came with roof racks, so my mental image of the previous owner was some ski bum kid up in VT who thought you could go four-wheeling in any car with four wheels. I handed the key back to the dealer and noped away as fast as I could. What a terrible vehicle presentation, I can't believe that they expected a sale to come out of that.
