Loss of braking on the 2013 Honda Civic
2 crashes 2 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 4 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.
When loss of braking gets reported
There are 4 reports of loss of braking on the 2013 Honda Civic, 4 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 26th most-reported problem on this model year.
The whole distribution
| 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | 26,890 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, 2 a crash is 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 2013 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.
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.
Driving home up 50 degree hill. Approximate speed 35 MPH. I took my foot off accelerator because I like to coast the last 1/4 of the hill for safety, slowing down for any potential idiots who might sail around the corner from the flat cross street, cutting off the part of the street that, by law, should be left clear for the car coming uphill. In a split second, my car accelerates suddenly, as though I had stomped down on the accelerator again. Now what do I do? My 2012 honda civic had premature brake failure that is now the subject of a class action lawsuit. Do I get rid of this "new" honda that turned one mid-october??? I don't know what to do, given the other stories about unintended acceleration in new hondas. *tr
Driving home up 50 degree hill. Approximate speed 35 MPH. I took my foot off accelerator because I like to coast the last 1/4 of the hill for safety, slowing down for any potential idiots who might sail around the corner from the flat cross street, cutting off the part of the street that, by law, should be left clear for the car coming uphill. In a split second, my car accelerates suddenly, as though I had stomped down on the accelerator again. Now what do I do? My 2012 honda civic had premature brake failure that is now the subject of a class action lawsuit. Do I get rid of this "new" honda that turned one mid-october??? I don't know what to do, given the other stories about unintended acceleration in new hondas. *tr
I purchased a used 2013 civic sedan from a private seller on march 23rd 2018. The day I bought it, as I was pulling out of the parking lot of the credit union where I met the seller the power steering failed. A yellow warning light that looks like a steering wheel with an exclamation point came on on the dash, and it was very difficult to steer the vehicle. I put it in park, hit the hazards and turned the vehicle off for fear of hitting someone. I contacted the sellers and they came back. We discussed having it towed to the shop, and the previous owner got in it, to re-park it somewhere more out of the way while we waited for aaa. At this time, the car started up fine, no warning light was present and he was able to safely drive it into a parking spot. He suggested that he just drive it to the shop, and I ride over there with his wife. So we did, and they hooked it up to the computer at the shop, and informed me that it didn't throw any codes, and that "the computer doesn't lie" they told me that since it drove over there fine, to just take it home, and don't worry about it. So I did, and I drove it around for a couple weeks until…
Also reported on the 2013 Honda Civic
Other body or interior problem
Airbag inflator rupture
Other brake problem
Airbag warning light or occupant sensor fault
Other steering problem
Other electrical problem
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 2013 Honda Civic?
Across 4 owner reports that included an odometer reading, half were filed by 25,000 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 2013 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