I am retired from the USAF and on disability. I do not work. I do not drive much. I bought this car with auto transmission thinking it would be cheap to have and Honda has a good reputation. It is a 2009 Fit Sport with auto transmission.

I've had the evil car 17 months, driven it 6,000 miles, kept it in a garage and the battery does not stay charged. Other than that I actually like it. This is the 1st new car I have ever owned and I can't say I like new car ownership.

The 1st time this happened, the dealer tested the car for 2 days, found nothing wrong and gave me a new battery to get rid of me. The second time, I was in a hurry and had backed into the garage and managed to jumpstart it myself. The 3rd time I lost my cool and told them I was reading the lemon law, so they wrote on the invoice that I had left the dome light on, which was a complete fiction. But since I invoke the lemon law that would cost them money, they had to do something to get rid of me without parting with huge amounts of money.

Also, who's idea was it to build a car that can't be put in N and pushed out of a garage when the battery is dead? Is that really needed?

Yesterday a friend told me that Honda has even told some people that this car needs to be driven 20 miles a day to keep it charged and it can never be left sitting like I do. I only drive a couple times a week. I've told the dealership this several times. In fact they routinely panic because I haven't had the oil changed yet, but when they look at it, they decide its not ready. The car itself says its not ready. I don't think the oil looks like it wants changed. Is that the final answer? I'm hosed because I don't drive the car as much as HOnda would like me to and I can't trade it in either? Except for being unreliable for starting and not being about to shift gears when the battery is dead, I like the car. It does everything I wanted in a car. It gets excellant gas mileage, I can put a lot in it, It has so many features I don't even know what some of them are.

I'm wondering when the class action suit and the recalls start. Surely nobody can tell you you must drive your car 20 miles a day to keep the battery charged. There must be other retired people with this car who don't drive 20 miles a day and have no intention of ever doing so. I had planned to keep this car 20 years, drive it 5k a year and trade it in with 100 k miles. I can't see that happening now.

Now I'm just trying to figure out how to make it reliable so I can keep it long enough to have equity in the car and be able to trade it in on something that will hold a charge.

And I got rid of an 1997 Toyota Tacoma that took this kind of treatment very well to buy this car. It had high mileage and I was tired of it. I wish I had it back. Drive around town twice a week and sit in the garage the rest of the town. Cars should be so lucky.

 

Class action? Recall? Lemon?

These words.. they do not mean what you think they mean, apparently.

You are ridiculous. Go buy a $30 trickle charger. Or crazy thought.. buy another non OE battery.

How is it Honda's fault you don't drive the car? Your friend who told you the 20 mile/day driving bit is full of it. I have had my Fit for three years and because I had a spinal injury for most of the first year it sat, and that included a winter with several weeks below 10*F with no issues starting what so ever when I was finally able to drive again.

You might at worst have one of the "white case" batteries, in which case you should go to pep boys and buy a 151r or a 51r bosch battery. There is nothing lawsuit or recall worthy about this. Grow up.

 

This modern car is highly controlled by electronics. The ECU controls the transmission, and the transmission uses servos to accomplish shifts. No juice, no shift...

It is true that modern cars are designed to be driven on a regular basis (at least weekly), and as such it is industry acceptable to have load on the battery when the car is parked. Sadly, the Fit uses an undersized battery and as such has low reserve. The Tacoma you are comparing it to had a battery easily twice the size (and weight), which allows for a higher reserve, and also used fewer electronics, so therefore had a lower standby draw. (My sister had an alarm system with a starter kill relay which was regularly draining her Civic's full size battery flat in under a week. The standby draw was around 100mA)

Now, in all fairness and to elaborate on a comment made by DSM - If your battery has a white case (NOT the cover, but the case itself), it is known that these are prone to abnormally short lives due to circumstances of their manufacture and design. The only way to tell if one of these is indeed defective is to perform a load test - you can take the battery to Autozone, Advance, etc. and they will perform this test for you for free. The dealer generally will not. Be aware that this *may* take an hour or so.

If, due to circumstances of your lifestyle, you find a non-defective battery to "die" often, there are two solutions which will help with the problem. One, replace the factory battery with one which has a higher reserve capacity. Two, install and use a trickle charger - this is a guaranteed "fix" for standby draw issues. Two wires, a couple zip ties, an outlet in the garage, and you are all set.

 

My friend didn't invent that story about Honda telling people to drive thier car at least 20 miles a day including weekends to keep it charged because they have no other answer, he found it on car talk, you disgusting, foul troll.
Car Talk - 2009 Honda Fit dead battery

I do drive my car about twice a week, 50 miles each time, thank you very much.
Look, your own members can't keep the battery alive.
https://www.fitfreak.net/forums/1st-...d-battery.html

And if you look at the very last comment here, a dude called leonardo10 says
"Did the 2009 Honda Fit have issues with the battery again? I have heard many people are having problems with the battery failing even though they just bought the cars."
2009 Honda Fit Sport: Dead Battery

So just delete me from your board. I don't do this kind of abuse. I didn't do anything to deserve it and you can find a new chew toy for your pet monster.

 

Honda seems to have problems with the battery, take it back to the dealer for a new one. If the battery was never fully charged then it will have a charge memory. So it will never charge higher than lets say 40 percent. A load test take a few seconds to do and I do it all the time for our trucks at work. Its a load box that loads the battery and shows the volts of the battery. Any thing less that 12.2 needs to be replaced.


I have a Chrysler sitting out side with a 4 year old Walmart battery a it will discharge but hasn't moved for a year and only need to charge battery twice and it has an alarm.

 

It's a battery replace or charge it. This is not rocket science and definitely not lawsuit or recall worthy.

And not a whole lot of people are having this problem. Counting up the ones in the threads you linked, on this board there are about 15 people who have reported this issue, out of 48,000 members!

Even rounding up that is 0.0005% of Fits.

In your first link here is what they said in the concluding sentence:
Car Talk - 2009 Honda Fit dead battery


The only troll here is you, at least for your sake I hope you are trolling if you don't know what to do about a dead battery when you are old enough to have retired from the USAF.

The guys on the other forum you linked, only one who had already had a grudge, like you, suggested it is common place.

Again, if you are driving the car a total of 50 miles a week, you will never charge the battery.

 

Here is some links of load tests Battery Testing, Maintenance And Myths

Battery Tutorial

We have 3 batteries in the trucks. When 1 battery fails its like all of them failed. Our batteries are usually 12.6 volts so its around 90 percent charged. The load test on a bad battery is 12.2 volts and loads usually lower and no rebound.