The curious story of the Honda Crossroad, the most problematic model with the emblem of the Japanese brand, ever produced

Honda was one of the few manufacturers in the world that emphasized reliability from the very first car produced. The philosophy of Honda's plant managers was that it was more profitable to produce a car without defects and not waste time and resources correcting them in the spaces adjacent to the production line, than to skimp on quality. And yet, in Honda's history there was a model called the Crossroad, in its first generation, that fell well short of Honda's reliability standards, and even though Honda spent hours trying to fix chronic problems before delivery to customers , the car turned out to be the most problematic and troublesome Honda in history anyway.

First of all, some of us might have deja-vu at the sight of this model, recognizing from somewhere that she had a figure. And they will be right. It is the silhouette of the first generation Land Rover Discovery. In 1979, British Leyland signed an agreement with Honda, which materialized slightly in the 80s and especially in the 90s, through which the British obtained the possibility to replicate Japanese models with their emblems and thus increase their competitiveness. Triumph Acclaim, Rover 200, 400, 600 and 800 — all were cars created on Honda platforms. Instead, Honda was getting diesel engines for some European markets, and something else was needed to add to the balance.

At the beginning of the 90s, the Land Rover Discovery was already a model that had become popular in Great Britain, and the people from Honda thought it would be a good idea to launch themselves in the offroader segment. And since they didn't have one, and Land Rover was seen as the expert in offroaders and also a brand in the same group as Rover, it didn't take long before the British and Japanese clapped hands for a new model of badge engineering, this time in the direction reverse. The new Honda Crossroad would be a clone of the Honda-badged Land Rover Discovery, manufactured in Great Britain at the same Land Rover factory.

The model was launched in 1993, with a 3.9 liter V8 engine under the hood. In fact, it is the only model in history with a V8 engine and Honda emblem! But criticisms and problems emerged quickly. First of all, the V8 was a lazy, low-revving one, barely extracting 182 HP from its huge displacement, power that Honda could easily extract from 4 cylinders with its engines revving at 8,000 rpm. The engine on the Discovery felt like a dinosaur compared to the renowned quickness of other Honda engines.

In addition, the model exuded a much poorer quality of assembly than what Honda had accustomed its customers to. Malfunctions in the electrical and engine systems, as well as all kinds of malfunctions and leaks, were visible from the first weeks of operation. If previously Honda owners bought their cars and didn't think that they might encounter a problem, here problems flowed like a trickle and you couldn't clear yourself up with one, that another started.

In light of such a bad image, the people from Honda stipulated that all copies of the Honda Crossroad will have to pass through the Honda factory in Japan first, before being sold to customers. Each car went through a 73-hour labor procedure by Honda employees to fix known sources of chronic problems, and only then was it sold to customers. Everything that Honda did not want to do in its factories, it was now doing, solving problems in the wake of the Land Rover factory.

And besides, the acquisition of Land Rover by BMW, in 1994, upset Honda, who said that this model and this partnership could no longer continue, so production only lasted a few more years years, until 1998, and only 4,754 cars were produced in the entire career. The annual production in the peak year, 1994, reached only 620 copies. Honda definitively abandoned the partnership with Land Rover, and the next generation of offroader was called Passport and was based on Isuzu. At the same time, Honda also created its own more civilian SUV model, which still exists today and which it calls, of course, the CR-V.