CarComplaints.com Notes: The 1999-2003 Acura TL has a known & widespread defect with the transmission.
Honda fixed some vehicles with a recall in 2004 by changing the oil cooler return line. To settle a class action lawsuit in 2006, Honda extended the transmission warranty on some of these Acura TL's to 93 months / 109,000 miles.
Now these vehicles are past the warranty limit, so buyer beware.
10.0
really awful
Crashes / Fires:
2 / 0
Injuries / Deaths:
2 / 0
Average Mileage:
40,840 miles
About These NHTSA Complaints:
This data is from the NHTSA — the US gov't agency tasked with vehicle safety. Complaints are spread across multiple & redundant categories, & are not organized by problem.
So how do you find out what problems are occurring? For this NHTSA complaint data, the only way is to read through the comments below. Any duplicates or errors? It's not us.
The warranty only covers to 50K miles and the transmission might go out again...there is lots of Acura TL owners with bad transmissions including mine which I just replaced, but afraid it will go bad again. Please help!!!
Brought car to dealer. They said they couldn't duplicate problem. Problem happens everyday. Warranty is almost up. What do I do? no safety defec tmentioned.
- Union, NJ, USA
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Many Acura 3.2 cl owners have been reporting transmission failures, as well as Acura 3.2 TL owners, who have the same transmission units in their cars, and believe that this may be a safety hazard. If the transmission failure occurs while driving the vehicle, the vehicle sometimes slows down abruptly, especially when the driver is accelerating. For example, when trying to pass someone, the transmission will suddenly leave the engine revving high, but the car wonT actually accelerate and actually slows down, sometimes very noticeably. This can cause someone to rear end you if theyre coming up from behind you not expecting you to suddenly come to halt for no apparent reason. Also, it seems that Honda/Acura may have known about this problem with its automatic transmissions since the release of the Honda V6 Accord, which is the platform on which the Acura cl and TL models are based. The cl/TL models have increased horsepower over the Accord, especially the type S models, and these transmissions may not be able to handle the extra power.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T S
- Va Beach, VA, USA