Top 5 Problems Honda Civic Sedan 8th Generation 2006-11

Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. So, today in the studio, we have an 8th Generation Honda Civic. We wanted to go over some of the top problems that we've come to find with it. So, let's get started.

Now, for our first problem, we wanna talk about your passenger side occupant airbag sensor. Now, this airbag sensor has a very important job. What it's supposed to do is if it feels as though somebody's sitting inside this, or at least somebody that weighs over 50 pounds, it's gonna make sure that the airbag is ready to deploy. If it's somebody or something that weighs less than 50 pounds, the airbag is gonna be deactivated. This is, of course, gonna be very important for safety overall. Just in case maybe you for some reason have a small child in the front seat, you definitely don't want the airbag deploying. So, symptoms for if you are having an issue with this airbag sensor located underneath your passenger seat will pretty much only include the little airbag light that comes on on your dash. Aside from that, unless you got into a little incident or accident, you probably wouldn't even know you're having an issue.

Now, as far as fixes for this, I'd say you've got about two options. For me personally, I would go ahead and disconnect my negative battery terminal. Leave that disconnected for approximately 30 minutes. Once I've done that, I would get underneath the passenger seat and I would grab onto the little yellow connector. You're gonna find that there's two underneath your passenger seat. Go and grab onto both of those, one at a time if you want, give them a nice little squeeze, make sure they're 100% connected. You might actually hear a little click noise. If that's the case, that just means that it wasn't completely connected. Other than that, it is a very common problem for these sensors, in particular, to go bad. Honda actually offered a recall process for this. So, of course, if you were to go ahead and get a hold of them, they're gonna go through the recall process and make sure you're okay.

Now, for our second problem, we're gonna talk about motor mount issues. So, now what is a motor mount? Well, obviously, it's gonna be a very important thing. Essentially, what they're supposed to do is be a metal piece that attaches to your engine, a metal piece that attaches to your body, and then in between, you're gonna have a rubber bushing of some sort. The reason why you have to have the rubber in between these two pieces is essentially for vibration dampening. Inside of your four-cylinder engine, you're gonna have a lot of combustions happening. Essentially, every time that spark plug goes and lights up that fuel-air mixture inside, it's gonna go boom. And, of course, each one of those booms is gonna be controlled as much as possible, but it is gonna cause a vibration. So, essentially, if you're hitting that accelerator pedal and the engine's RPMs are going up, up, up, but so are the vibrations coming into your car, well, then you probably have a bad motor mount.

Another symptom that you might happen to find might be a loud clunking or thumping coming from your engine compartment, and it sounds as though it's hitting up against your firewall in between the engine compartment and the actual passenger compartment itself. So, how are you supposed to tell if you have failing motor mounts? Well, essentially, you can just get underneath your hood and take a peek. There's gonna be a whole bunch of mounts that go from the engine to the body itself. Any of those mounts are gonna have rubber bushings on them. Like I told you before, they're very important. The problem with the rubber though is, of course, over time it's gonna break down. That's just what's bound to happen. You might potentially look at it and just see minor stress cracks coming along it, you might see large cracks, or even some separation. If you happen to see separation, well, then that's very bad. So, after you take a visual look at all those motor mounts and you determine that maybe they look good or maybe they look a little weak, the next thing I would want to do is grab a second person.

Now, I wanna have one person inside of the car getting ready to do a break stunt in drive, and I wanna have a second person outside of the car standing off to one of the sides, definitely not in front of it, and I wanna have them watching that engine. Essentially, what's gonna happen when we do the brake stunt from inside the car is we're gonna be holding the brake and then hitting on that gas like this vroom, vroom, vroom. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna make the engine rock around a little bit. But like I said, the engine is mounted with rubber, so a little bit of rocking is perfectly fine. That's great because it helps with the vibration dampening. If you happen to see your engine shifting around like a maniac inside here, well, then you know you have an issue.

One thing I'd like to mention though is just because maybe you don't happen to see any movement with doing the brakes stunt in drive, don't stop there though. Go ahead and try it in reverse now. Do the same thing, put in reverse, put on the brake, go ahead and hit on that gas pedal a couple of times. Standing outside to one side of the car or the other but definitely not in front or in back, you're gonna want to take a look at that engine. Once again, if you see it rocking around a lot, well, then you know you have an issue with your motor mounts. If you happen to find that you're having a lot of movement coming from any of your motor mounts, you wanna definitely inspect all the rest of them thoroughly. Typically what it comes down to is just replacing them all at the same time.

Now, for our third problem, we're gonna talk about window switch issues. Now, of course, you're gonna have window switches on both of your front doors, but the one on the driver's door is gonna be typically the one that goes bad. Common reasons why it might go bad could potentially be maybe you left your window down a little bit and some moisture or rain or even snow made its way inside. Underneath these little switches, there's a little circuit board underneath here and then, of course, some wiring that's gonna, in turn, lead to the car and, of course, to the motor for each window. Now, obviously, electrical circuits don't like to have moisture inside of them. So, if moisture somehow made its way into the switch area to the circuit board, you gonna find that you have an issue. Typically what might happen, well, you go ahead and try to put down the window and it just doesn't go down, you try to go up, it doesn't go up, or maybe it starts going down and just stops. This could be a very common thing. Maybe sometimes you go and you hit it a couple of times, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then it ends up going up and it works fine for a couple of days after that, and then eventually, it just goes back to not working again.

These are all gonna be common issues that have to do with the circuit board that's located inside of your windows switch. Of course, to fix this, what you would probably wanna do is to take it apart and inspect it. You wanna make sure that you don't see any corrosion in there. Any type of moisture or debris that could have made its way inside is, of course, gonna cause an issue. You want to test to see if you have power and ground going to where it's supposed to go. If for some reason you don't have power getting to the switch, well, then it's, of course, not gonna work. So, make sure you check for power, make sure you check your fuses. Assuming you have power coming to the switch but nothing leaving the switch, well, then, you know you got an issue with the switch.

Now, for our fourth problem, we're gonna talk about front compliance bushings or control arm bushings. For that, let's get under the car. Now, under the front of your car, you're gonna have two lower control arms, one for each side. We'll come over to the passenger side. This is your lower control arm right along here. Essentially, what it's supposed to do is mount to your subframe. And then, of course, it's gonna come over here to a ball joint and then lead to the knuckle, which, of course, has your wheel and everything else attached to it. Now, the lower control arm is gonna have some rubber bushings just like those engine mount bushings. So, essentially, what they're for is vibration dampening and, of course, noise reduction and everything else. They're also gonna help with the control arms' ability and be able to pivot.

Now, if these bushings are worn out or even for some reason got a whole bunch of oil on them like this, that's gonna, of course, cause them to deteriorate faster. If you were to look at them and see a whole bunch of cracks or anything to like, then you know that you're probably gonna have an issue. A lot of times on these control arm bushings if they went bad to the point that they were noticeable, what you're probably gonna hear is a clunking over bumps or even when you come to an abrupt stop or even accelerating. The reason why that is is because the control arm is gonna try to shift a little bit. And if the rubber bushing can't do its job and hold everything nice and tight with just a little bit of wiggle room, it's gonna move a lot and you're gonna hear a clunk. Other symptoms that you might happen to find is while you're driving the car down the road, if you hit a little bump or something like that, it might start to feel a little squirrely. Essentially, that's because these bushings are just letting the control arm do what it wants. You might also take a look at your tire tread, and if it looks like it's starting to get wiped out on one side rather than the other, that obviously means you have an alignment issue. And if the control arm bushings are worn or torn or damaged in any way, well, of course, that's gonna cause an issue with the alignment.

Looking at the front bushing of this, what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to take a nice pry bar and I'm gonna come in between the subframe and the control arm itself, give it a nice little wiggle. I want to see just how much the bushing itself moves. Does it move a lot? Does it move a little? Is it separating or is it just minorly cracked? So, now you're just gonna check all the bushings just like that. The passenger side is gonna have two, driver side two as well. Check on both with the bar. If you see excessive movement or damage, you're gonna have to replace the control arm. Now, for the control arms, you don't necessarily have to replace them as a pair. Sometimes people do, sometimes people don't. It really depends on your prerogative. But if this side over here looks like it was bad possibly because of a little bit of oil, that doesn't necessarily mean that the driver side is bad. So, that's just something to think about. But if it looks like both of them have dry rotting, cracking, or even starting to separate, replace them both. Other than that, once you replace the control arms, go ahead and get yourself a four-wheel alignment.

Now, for our fifth problem, we're gonna talk about a wiper blade motor. Now, the wiper blade motor has a very important part. Essentially, when you go ahead and you twist the little switch to go ahead and turn on your wiper blades, the motor is supposed to kick on and it's gonna move that regulator around, which in turn is gonna move the wiper arms. Now, what can commonly happen with these wiper motors essentially is they go bad internally. It's an electronic component, and every electronic component over time is gonna go bad. When this happens, it can be intermittent or it can be permanent. What you might happen to notice is you turn off your wiper blades, but for some reason, they don't come all the way down into the park position. They might look something like this or even a little lower. Or even a little less commonly, the wiper blades just stop working altogether. Obviously, if this was to happen, it would be very unsafe because, well, you need to be able to see out your windshield.

Another common reason why this might potentially happen is maybe you got a good snowfall that just came into your area. You don't feel like cleaning off your car for some reason, you just go ahead and hop in, turn on those wiper blades. And while the snow weighs a little bit too much, puts a lot of pressure on those arms, in which turn puts a lot of pressure on that wiper motor. If that's the case, you could potentially cause a lot of damage to the wiper motor or potentially anything else in the wiper system. Now, for fixes for this, we need to determine is this an intermittent issue or is it a permanent issue? Essentially, you try to turn on the wiper blades and they just don't move from this position, or you just try to turn them on and off, on and off, on and off, they move a little bit but then they just kinda don't really do what they're supposed to do or the main thing essentially is they just don't come down into the park position where they started at. Now, if the issue is that the wiper blades just don't move at all, well, maybe you blew the circuit. Essentially, maybe check your fuses or check for wiring and make sure that you have power leading to that motor. Maybe you check out the motor and you do have power going to the motor, but nothing is happening even though you're telling the wiper arms to do their job. If that's the case, typically it comes down to just replacing that wiper arm motor because it probably got burnt out inside. Maybe like I said, due to the fact that you just didn't feel like cleaning up the snow from your car.

Okay, friends. So, that's pretty much what I've got for you for some of the top problems that we've come to find on an 8th Generation Honda Civic. Like we always say, every car has its problems. Maybe you've got one of these cars with problems of your own. If so, leave it in the comment section below because we always love to hear from you. Of course, if you liked the video or you learned a little something, go ahead and smash on that like button for me. It will mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell, and, of course, click on that share button, and that way there you and all your friends can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.