AtWhatMileage
Brakes · 4 owner reports

Loss of braking on the 2000 Honda Civic

4 crashes 1 injury 5 of the 4 reports for this failure mention a crash, a fire, an injury or a death. Those are the owner's words on the complaint form, not a verified finding, and one report can mention more than one.

Only 2 reports for this mode came with an odometer reading, which is too few for percentiles to mean anything. The page is here because someone linked to it; treat the figures as anecdotes, and see the full report for this year instead.

Reports of this failure 4
With an odometer reading 2
Reports per 1,000 built 0.1 per 1,000
Filed below 36,000 miles 50%
Mention a crash, fire or injury 5
Typical repair $400–$3,000
What it means when it happens Critical
Rank among this year's problems 20th

When loss of braking gets reported

There are 4 reports of loss of braking on the 2000 Honda Civic, 2 with a mileage attached. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.

A part like this is normally expected to survive 78,000 miles. It is the 20th most-reported problem on this model year.

The whole distribution

Percentiles of the 2 odometer readings owners gave.
10th25thMedian 75th90th
— — 34,500 miles — —

Read the 10th percentile as “one report in ten arrived this early”. Exact figures are shown in this table because it is the table of record; everywhere else on the site they are rounded to the precision the sample can carry.

What a percentile can and cannot tell you here

These five numbers describe the readings owners gave, in order. The median is the middle one: half the reports arrived below it. The 10th and 90th are the edges of the bulk of the distribution, and the distance between them is the part worth reading. A tight spread — say 70,000 to 95,000 miles — points at something that wears out on a schedule, and the schedule is knowable. A wide one, 20,000 to 190,000, points at a fault that hits some cars and never troubles others, which means the mileage on the listing in front of you tells you very little about your odds.

What these figures are not is a survival curve. Every reading here comes from a car whose owner filed a complaint, so the sample contains only failures: it cannot say what share of the fleet made it past 150,000 miles untouched, because those owners had nothing to report. Nor is the mileage the moment of failure — it is the odometer reading as recalled at the time of filing, which may be weeks later and is sometimes rounded to the nearest ten thousand by the person typing it.

Percentiles are shown at all only once 8 readings exist for the vehicle and mode. Below that the middle of a handful of numbers is noise wearing a decimal point, so the figures are withheld rather than dressed up.

What happens, and what it costs

Of these reports, 4 a crash and 1 an injury are mentioned. Owners write their own complaints and the agency does not verify them, so read this as what the reports say happened rather than as a confirmed count.

Putting it right typically runs $400–$3,000 at an independent US shop. That range is an editorial estimate held in this site's failure-mode catalogue, not a figure from NHTSA, and it is a repair cost rather than a diagnosis cost.

This mode is classified as critical, which means a failure can leave the car unable to stop, steer, or stay out of the way of traffic. It is weighted accordingly in the risk score.

The same failure on other years

The same failure is reported on 16 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2004, at a median of 5,000 miles, and latest on the 2006 at 145,000 miles.

By volume the 2016 carries the most reports, with 16; the 2000 has 4. A mode that appears across most years of a model is usually a design choice rather than a bad batch.

If one year stands out to the left, that is the year to avoid; if the whole line sits at a similar mileage, this is wear rather than a defect in one production run.

Median
  1. 1996 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  2. 1997 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  3. 1998 Honda Civic loss of braking 115k
  4. 2000 (this one) 35k
  5. 2001 Honda Civic loss of braking 104k
  6. 2002 Honda Civic loss of braking 140k
  7. 2003 Honda Civic loss of braking 88k
  8. 2004 Honda Civic loss of braking 3k
  9. 2005 Honda Civic loss of braking 42k
  10. 2006 Honda Civic loss of braking 146k
  11. 2007 Honda Civic loss of braking 30k
  12. 2008 Honda Civic loss of braking 38k
  13. 2009 Honda Civic loss of braking 22k
  14. 2010 Honda Civic loss of braking 31k
  15. 2011 Honda Civic loss of braking 14k
  16. 2012 Honda Civic loss of braking 72k
  17. 2013 Honda Civic loss of braking 27k
  18. 2014 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  19. 2016 Honda Civic loss of braking 23k
  20. 2017 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  21. 2018 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  22. 2019 Honda Civic loss of braking 9k
  23. 2022 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —
  24. 2024 Honda Civic loss of braking
    no odometer readings given
    —

Tick median reported mileage Solid middle half of reports Faint 10th to 90th percentile Colour how bad the failure is when it happens

What owners wrote

Verbatim from NHTSA complaint narratives, trimmed for length. The mileage is the one the owner gave.

Brake failure on a honda civic 2000 with under 11, 000 miles causing car to hit several other cars in a parking lot. Cause of the brake failure was determned to be failure of the seal surrounding piston on the master brake cylinder. *tr

11,000 miles NHTSA complaint 809880 filed 2010-08-26

Also reported on the 2000 Honda Civic

Other powertrain problem

24 reports median 36k

Airbag failed to deploy in a crash

22 reports median 54k

Other electrical problem

22 reports median 60k

Other engine problem

20 reports median 97k

Other wheel or tire problem

20 reports median 27k

How far this goes

This page is kept out of search results because 4 reports is not enough to publish percentiles from. It stays reachable because somebody looking at this exact car would rather see the reports than be told there are none.

Complaints are voluntary, so 4 is a floor and not a count of affected cars. Mileages are typed in by owners and cluster on round numbers. And the mode itself is assigned by software reading the complaint text, which is reliable in bulk and fallible one report at a time.

Questions this page answers

At what mileage does loss of braking happen on the 2000 Honda Civic?

Across 2 owner reports that included an odometer reading, half were filed by 35,000 miles. A quarter were filed before — and a quarter after —. These are the mileages owners reported when they complained, not a prediction for any individual car.

How common is loss of braking on the 2000 Honda Civic?

4 reports have been filed with NHTSA, about 0.1 per 1,000 vehicles. Complaints are voluntary, so this is a floor rather than a count of affected cars.

What this is and is not. These are the mileages at which owners chose to complain to a federal agency, which is not the same as the mileage at which the part fails on every car. It skews toward failures that happened outside warranty, cost real money, or frightened someone. It is still the only public dataset that carries failure mileage at all, and the shape of a few hundred readings is informative even when a single one is not. Methodology · JSON · this failure on other cars

Source Owner complaints and recall records published by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, model years 1996–2027 Figures rebuilt Published by AtWhatMileage How every figure is computed