I know for a fact that the 5-speed auto fails on Acura TLs and CLs. My
dealer has already replaced several, including mine last week. However, the
'99 CL and TL have a different transmission.

Honda / Acura transmission problems are not blown out of proportion (if the
transmission were to fail on YOUR car).

I have a 1995 Acura Legend, a totally problem free and rock solid reliable
car, I will probably drive it until gasoline becomes obsolete.

I believe that 1995 was the height of quality and pride for the Japanese
auto industry, and quality and reliability have been in steady decline ever
since then.

The reason why Honda's and Acura's are losing there superior quality is
triple tiered:

1) Outsourcing, unfortunately the Japanese work ethic is getting too pricey
for Honda.

2) Globalization, that's a fancy word for produce cheap crap for slave wages
in dictatorships while using familiar corporate logos and branding.

3) A far less sosphisticated and less demanding US market, feed them a
crap-quality and over-sized SUV barge and they're happy. Meaning that car
companies don't have to spend as much on making decent car lines, they
butter their bread a lot easier with SUV's and the salt lick cattle that buy
them.

Don't let a few token U.S. plants that build Japanese branded cars such as
the CL fool you, almost 80% of the parts and inners are now slapped together
on a third world sh.t for quality work farm.

Bullcrap my friend, bullcrap, they would have no reason to do a recall
if there were so few failures.

My guess, based on my experience and the few messages posted in
newsgroups like this, is that somewhere between thousands and 100% of
units out there malfunction, but most people just live with it
unaware, unless the malfunction gets bad enough to actually leave them
stranded.  Read the message at the head of this thread.  The number
that are left stranded may be relatively small, less than one percent,
but that is more than enough to motivate a government-intiated recall,
if the word gets out.  How would Honda like to replace 100% of their
transmissions - WHEN THEY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO REPLACE THEM WITH!!!

Well, hear of it now, my 2004 Accord I4 shows signs of the same
torque-converter slippage or whatever you want to call that failure,
that I lived with in my 1999 CL.  Ten months old, eight thousand easy
miles, and at the least, it needs a flush, or something.  But for now,
I'm just living with it, I know how to work around it, somewhat, and
it was twice as bad on the old Acura.

They are playing with fire.  At least, they are costing themselves
hundreds of millions of dollars.  If they lose their quality rep, they
will lose tens of billions.

I do admire their customer service response, but at some point, their
customer service people will be overwhelmed by what I see as a
*design* failure in their automatic transmissions.  I do not see this
as a manufacturing quality issue at all, they simply lack the
engineering skill to design and build automatic transmissions that
work reliably for even the warranty period.  VERY embarrassing, and
potentially FATAL, and the problem is going on FIVE YEARS now, with
really no signs of improvement.  You do the math.

J.