The car was on cruise control going down the freeway when all of a sudden, without warning, there was no power and the engine was racing. I had to maneuver in heavy traffic to the right shoulder while coasting up a slight hill. Fortunately, I made it safely to the shoulder where we were able to push it backwards down an on-ramp to the freeway from a rest stop. Again, we were fortunate this happened near a rest stop on the freeway, otherwise, we'd have been stranded on a busy freeway (I-80). We waited 2 1/2 hours at the rest stop for a tow truck.

This happened on a Thursday before the three day 4th of July holiday. The local Honda Dealer/Service Center would not be able to look at the car until Monday, after the holiday. On Monday, they diagnosed that the CVT belt disintegrated and threw shards of metal throughout the transmission, therefore, we'd need the whole transmission replaced. Given the options of having a 31K mile, 80K mile or brand new transmission installed, we opted for the new transmission which would have a lifetime warranty. The used transmissions only came with a 12 month warranty.

This is the 4th Honda Accord we've owned and NEVER had any issues with them, the last two were driven over 250k miles. We were quite shocked at the seriousness of this issue, especially given there was no warning signs whatsoever and that we'd never encountered a serious repair issue with any Honda we've owned. Not only are we out $6,281.67 for the repair bill and nearly $400 for a rental car, we've lost confidence in Honda.

In our experience, this transmission failure is not up to their reputation. We feel there must be something wrong with the design of the

transmission or the quality of materials used in the transmission.