Verdict: 2008 Honda Accord EX-L V-6
Honda has been building the Accord for over 30 years, fine-tuning it with each generation to the point where it’s become the benchmark car in the midsize-family-sedan class. The Accord defines what Americans want in their midsize vehicle: reliability, comfort, performance, and affordability.
This latest Accord has gone through some changes and, this time, some of those changes aren’t necessarily so good. For 2008, Honda made substantial exterior and interior styling changes to the Accord, going for a more modern, edgy look and feel, which some liked and others didn’t. Along with the styling changes came size changes: Everything on the 2008 Accord got bigger. The interior and exterior dimensions have grown significantly, and the new 3.5-liter V-6 is bigger and more powerful than the last generation V-6.
For all those reasons, we had to get the 2008 Honda Accord EX-L into our long-term fleet to see if all these alterations actually improved the car or just changed it.
We ordered our top-of-the-range Accord EX-Lloaded with the only option offered: a $2200 navigation system, ringing in at $30,895, but you get a lot for your dollar here: leather throughout, heated front seats, XM Satellite Radio-everything you’ve come to expect from Honda vehicles. And when a car comes this outfitted-size, comfort, amenities-it’s going to see a lot of travel time. During its stay with us, our Accord EX-L ticked just over 22,000 miles, traveling up and down the California coast, trips to Arizona, Utah, Death Valley-any place a car can go, this one went with nary a complaint from anyone driving it.
We had only one performance issue with our Accord EX-L: At just under 15,000 miles our local dealer said we needed new front and rear brake pads and had to have the front and rear rotors resurfaced. Now, we can understand the fronts: We work our long-term cars pretty hard in order to give you an accurate account of our experiences. But rear rotors?
That was a bit odd and very unexpected. We suspected an overanxious dealer, but doing some looking, it seems others have had this problem as well. Either all Honda dealers are doing this maintenance or there’s a small problem with the Accord’s rear brakes. You don’t go through rear pads and rotors in under 15,000 miles, unless maybe you leave the parking brake on for a few hundred miles (we hadn’t).
While we had no complaints about how this vehicle performed during its tenure with us, there were plenty of comments about those styling changes. Many staffers questioned the exterior differences: The hard edges don’t flow with the smoother ones, especially at the rear end, with so many different curves and bends. Looks like they tried to make the Accord look like a larger, more luxurious vehicle when it should have just remained the much loved Accord.
The dash, specifically the center stack, was another highly discussed topic. The layout is confusing, the flow is off, and buttons aren’t where one expects them to be. All the controls are lumped together, when they need to be separated, radio controls in one section, HVAC controls in another, nav in yet another.
Our complaints were more subjective than anything else; the styling and design changes did not affect how the vehicle performed its duties. Our Accord did a fantastic job keeping us on the move. Everyone liked the steering feel, comfort, build materials, and ride quality. Offering ample room, comfortable seats, a peppy engine, minimal road noise, and driving fun (though not quite as much fun as past-generation Accords), it delivers everything we have come to expect from a Honda product.
There was nothing bad about our Accord EX-L. Notwithstanding the center stack’s sea of buttons and the questionable styling, quality and performance complaints were non-existent. The fact that not one night went by when our car sat in the garage proves that the Honda Accord V-6 EX-L is still a great car.
[source:MotorTrend]
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