3rd oil change today at 20%, 24,143 miles, without the "splash guard" getting in the way. Took about 15 minutes to do. I was able to reach the filter and drain plug w/o lifting the car. Yes, it's just that easy! Sorry, no drama.

 

I've done multiple mis-focused headlights with the handyman's secret weapon.
And they lasted.

 

So this thread made me crawl underneath and check.
Happy to report my splash shield is intact and tightly attached to the underbody.
I bought the car pre-owned, it now has 22,000kms on the odometer and it has had several oil changes done (at Honda service as well as Subaru dealer where I got it from).
I guess they were competent enough not to damage anything and I have luckily not ran over any dead or live objects as of yet, so that must have helped, lol.

 

in front of the splashguard...I am about to get on my senior citizen back again to
do an oil change in the gravel with the fire ants. For kicks I measured the distance
from the rubber guard to the ground: 4 INCHES.

I then measured my forearm at it's thickest point: ditto.

No wonder I hit dead fish.

 

@wasserball Mine just fell down on one end while driving for the 2nd time in 4 years stranding me on the side of the road again. This last drop was after 6000+ miles after the last oil change and 40,000 miles of no problems. AAA came and jacked up the car and put the Cover back up so I could get home, but the AAA Tech said that it will eventually drop again so maybe just take it off permanently.

I called Honda this week to see if I could get an official position on, "if it Okay to operate the car without the Cover?"
The Honda rep that I spoke with when I told her about the problem with my Cover immediately said, "I know what you are talking about, mine kept on falling off so I had my son just take it off." I asked her, was it a FIT?, she said it was a Nissan Altima.

After a long conversation with Honda and the Rep placing me on hold twice for a while to do research she said the following:

1. Honda cannot offer an official position on whether it's okay to operate the car without the cover?
2. I am the first person the report this problem directly to Honda. There are no records in their database of any FIT owner reporting this type of problem.
3. She will notify the engineers about my complaint.
4. Bring the car to the Honda Dealer for analysis.

So Wasserball, you have been driving for a long time without the Cover it seems, have you had any problems with your FIT as a result?
Would you still tell someone to remove the Cover or would say, don't do it!?

Thanks.

 

Just zip tie the cover to the underbody. I have written instructions on how to do this. Zip ties are a strong, inexpensive and effective fix. It just takes a few extra minutes. I do agree that this is a flaw in the car's design.

https://www.fitfreak.net/forums/3rd-...locations.html

 

With a little doing the cover works as designed. But the problems illustrate how the level of mechanical knowledge in our society is sinking, even among technicians. On a trip I took my car in to get a flat fixed. The first thing the kid did was look at his phone for 5 minutes. Then he put the jack in the wrong place. Then he said he couldn't fix it. This was at Walmart.

 

I just posted about my splash guard missing a few days ago. Although, I can't find my thread and I haven't had time to respond to it if I could (until now). The inner wheel guards are knocking around on my Fit since the splash guard has gone missing. Is there a way to secure those inner bumpers without the splash guard?

 

I just had a fight with Bambi. Splash cover and most of the bottom of the bumper is gone too. I'll post up repair costs...

 

FWIW, I bought my '15 LX in '16,CPO, and I guess Honda's
"certification" system isn't so thorough - my car came without the under engine plastic. Wonder if they missed anything else? But, cars have been naked down there for 100 yrs, I see no problem with it being missing, other than it might slightly negatively impact highway mpg, which is not a concern, for the most part. Having read of all the problems folks have had on here regarding this and that, I've had no trouble in my ownership, just the cold start grind maybe 2x per year. I wonder if the previous owner pretty much got all the niggling problems fixed, and traded it in. As humble as a '15 LX manual is, it's been one of my favorite cars to have ever owned, splash/aero guard or not

 

It's not just a "splash" shield. :-)

There's a measurable aero effect from about 45 mph, which helps the Fit with its ideal mpg in the 55-60 mph range.

I'm a fan of keeping them, although it's not the end of the world if you want to do without. I can certainly understand a student or young person having second thoughts about spending the money to replace it.

 

Yes, cars have been naked without the shield for 100 years but when they started adding the shields maybe they made other stuff less strong since it's now presumed to be protected?

 

The splash shield isn't there to protect anything. From everything I've ever read the shield is there primarily to improve aerodynamics and fuel economy. Once upon a time nobody cared about that but now every little bit of better mileage is very very important. It may not do much in the city, but it will help a lot in higher speed highway driving smoothing out the air flow under the car. If you don't want it on though nothing's stopping you from taking it off.

 

The Honda engineers would not have incorporated the splash shield if it wasn't considered worthwhile and approved by management. My wife's '16 Fit now has 62K miles so I've done a lot of oil changes on it. It's not a big deal to R&R six Philips head screws and two plastic fasteners. Eventually you will want to replace the plastic fasteners, Honda part number 91514-TG1-T01 and relatively cheap on line. I like to buy a bunch of specialty fasteners and things like the aluminum oil drain plug washers on one order from one of the many online Honda parts specialists to spread out the shipping cost over many small parts. If you're a zip-tie kind of guy you do you, but it's not that much more money to stay with OEM parts if you DIY. If nothing else, the bottom of the engine and transaxle looks nice and clean every time I drop the shield to do an oil and filter change ;-)

 

I don't have any pictures but I ran into this issue this past weekend. Got my car over to wash and I must have aimed poorly when trying to clean the undercarriage, cause a plastic cover was hanging loose when I got home. Can't tell if it was the power washer that got it or my shop was lazy and didn't put the plastic clips back in. Anyway long story long I threw it up on ramps and ziptied it back into place. (Which fun fact for anyone with a GK Sport, the front lip will scrape going up ramps. Learned this the hard way, make sure you have some wooden blocks in front to ease the angle a bit).

 

The aluminum oil drain plug washer is readily available from a variety of sellers on Amazon. I bought a bag of them and then a little while later when I bought 6 genuine Honda oil filters I found that each also came with the washer taped to it so now no shortage of those

 

The screws are available in any hardware store. In Middle Atlantic states of the US they are called sheet metal screws. They are used to grip inside a hole drilled into a thin sheet of sheet metal. They will also work in deep pilot holes drilled into wood, tapping threads into the wood. In the Fit they screw into captive nuts which slip over the pieces of plastic shrouding behind the oil-change shroud. The captive nuts are simply a piece of sheet metal with a hole in it, bent so you it can be attached to another piece of sheet metal, or sheet of plastic, with a bigger hole. Sometimes the captive nuts slide around on the plastic pieces they are clipped to, causing the screw to become mis-aligned with the hole n the nuts. These clip-on captive nuts are not as well-captured as the kind that are welded in place. You can just slide the captive nuts around to align the hole with the screw tip. It seems that one reason the shrouds fall off is that technicians don't bother to do that – they just screw the screw into nothing instead of into the captive nut.

There are sheet metal screws with metric designation and sheet metal screws with US designations, but when screwing into a simple hole in sheet metal or plastic, it doesn't make any difference really if the screw diameter is slightly larger than the original size, or if the thread taper angle is slightly different. The originals are undoubtedly metric but similar size US will work fine. It may widen the hole slightly in the captive nut then the metric may not work again. At hardware stores you can also buy new captive nuts that clip on similarly.

 

Not necessarily so. My dealer said it will take an week to order.
I had noticed when swapping to my snows that the shield wasn't there. It hadn't fallen off. the dealer tech simply forgot to replace it after an oil change. So I at the time of my next oil change I mention it at check-in and the rep comes over after a time with the "multi-check report" and say everything is ok but I'm missing the shield, do I want to replace it, $xx? Anyway, yaday, yada, yada, they're replacing it free but they have to order it.

Another thing they do is only use some of the screws when replacing it. The shield started dragging one time & I had to crawl under the car to fix it. The techs hadn't replace the forward screws but rather just tucked the front of the shield over the lip of the edge where it would normally be screwed. Faster to remove, I guess. Problem is a little pressure from a snow drift or something will push it back enough to slip off the lip and start to drag.

 

There aren't any screws in front where the lip is. There are 3 along each side and 2 plastic clips in the rear. (Picture credit: wasserball)

 

I have a 2019 Honda Fit LX. I am missing the passenger side under the front bumper the plastic flap as shown below. Can you please help with the part number and name. Thanks!