2020 Honda Pilot Reliability Report

Two failures dominate. In the first, the front multipurpose camera dies and shuts off adaptive cruise, lane keeping, collision mitigation braking, road departure mitigation, and auto high beams all at once, often with a brake system warning. Dealers quote roughly $1,700 to $2,000 for a new camera and re-aim. In the second, the collision system warns or slams the brakes with nothing ahead, sometimes at highway speed or because of oncoming traffic. Several drivers report near rear-end collisions. Dealers often cannot reproduce the false braking.

The transmission shudders, clunks, lunges, or lags, usually starting around 50,000 to 60,000 miles. Dealers often answer with repeated fluid flushes, and the problem comes back. Some vehicles lose power when accelerating at highway speed. Others shift into park or shut off while moving, and one dealer blamed a front camera communication fault for that. Stop/start no-restart complaints show up here too. Other reports mention metal flakes in the oil, an electronic shifter that cannot reach neutral with a dead battery, and 1 injury from a rollaway.

Most of these reports are about recall 23V858000 for the fuel pump. Owners got the notice, but dealers had no parts to do the repair, and many had not seen any failure yet. When failures do happen, the vehicle stalls in traffic, loses power, hesitates, or will not accelerate. Some drivers say they nearly crashed. Check engine, emissions, and AWD warnings often show up with the stalls. A few cases continued after the recall repair or were blamed on fuel injectors or the battery.

Long waits for the recall 23V-858 fuel pump repair are the main theme. Dealers said parts would not arrive until fall 2024, while some vehicles kept stalling in traffic. A second pattern is fuel injector failure. The check engine light flashes and the car jerks or surges in first and second gear. Dealers find P0430 codes and failed cylinder tests and recommend new injectors, with no coverage for 2020 models. A few owners report fuel pump symptoms even though their VIN was left out of the recall.

Two kinds of reports appear. In the more serious kind, the pedal sinks to the floor or the brakes do not respond, and the vehicle crashes or surges forward with the pedal pressed. These complaints include 3 crashes and 4 injuries, some within the first few thousand miles. In the more common kind, the collision system flashes a brake warning, shakes the wheel, or brakes hard on an empty road. Soft, low pedal feel also comes up. Dealers often find nothing wrong.

Second-row and third-row seat hardware can fail. In one report, a second-row seat unlatched under hard braking and slammed forward into the front seatback. In another, a third-row headrest would no longer lock upright, so that seat was unusable. There are only 2 complaints, so no broad pattern is visible yet. One is marked crash-related, and both describe a real injury risk to passengers.

Front airbags failed to deploy in a head-on collision followed by a rollover. Separately, a driver airbag deployed and the cabin filled with smoke, and the driver was burned. Both reports involve crashes with injuries, 3 people in total. With only 2 complaints, there is no repeat pattern, but both describe the airbags not working as intended in a real collision.