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Other · 14 owner reports

Unclassified problem on the 1996 Honda Odyssey

1 crash 1 of the 14 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 3 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 14
With an odometer reading 3
Reports per 1,000 built 467 per 1,000
Filed below 36,000 miles 0%
Mention a crash, fire or injury 1
Typical repair —
What it means when it happens Moderate
Rank among this year's problems 26th

When unclassified problem gets reported

There are 14 reports of unclassified problem on the 1996 Honda Odyssey, 3 with a mileage attached. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.

It is the 26th most-reported problem on this model year.

The whole distribution

Percentiles of the 3 odometer readings owners gave.
10th25thMedian 75th90th
— — 185,000 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, 1 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.

The same failure on other years

The same failure is reported on 26 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2018, at a median of 7,500 miles, and latest on the 1999 at 200,000 miles.

By volume the 2018 carries the most reports, with 109; the 1996 has 14. 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 (this one) 185k
  2. 1997 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem
    no odometer readings given
    —
  3. 1998 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 109k
  4. 1999 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 200k
  5. 2000 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 84k
  6. 2001 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 132k
  7. 2002 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 114k
  8. 2003 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 121k
  9. 2004 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 134k
  10. 2005 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 117k
  11. 2006 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 108k
  12. 2007 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 101k
  13. 2008 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 91k
  14. 2009 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 69k
  15. 2010 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 77k
  16. 2011 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 25k
  17. 2012 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 54k
  18. 2013 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 31k
  19. 2014 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 29k
  20. 2015 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 35k
  21. 2016 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 16k
  22. 2017 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 26k
  23. 2018 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 7k
  24. 2019 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 23k
  25. 2020 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 93k
  26. 2021 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 8k
  27. 2022 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem
    no odometer readings given
    —
  28. 2023 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem
    no odometer readings given
    —
  29. 2024 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem
    no odometer readings given
    —
  30. 2025 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem 185k
  31. 2026 Honda Odyssey unclassified problem
    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.

Tl* the contact owns a 1996 honda odyssey. While the vehicle was parked and the engine was running, the driver side air bag deployed independently. The vehicle was not diagnosed or repaired. The manufacturer was not notified of the failure. The approximate failure mileage was 120,064.

120,064 miles NHTSA complaint 1104941 filed 2014-09-02

Also reported on the 1996 Honda Odyssey

How far this goes

This page is kept out of search results because 14 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 14 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 unclassified problem happen on the 1996 Honda Odyssey?

Across 3 owner reports that included an odometer reading, half were filed by 185,000 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 unclassified problem on the 1996 Honda Odyssey?

14 reports have been filed with NHTSA, about 467 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