NHTSA Complaint #11468508 — 2017 HONDA PILOT

The system that has failed involves the auto-idle feature which is automatically engaged when the car is turned on, and operates by putting the car into idle and turns off the engine when the vehicle is stopped; when the brake is released, the engine is supposed to automatically restart. However, in our vehicle, when the brake is released, the car stalls. Sometimes it cannot be restarted for several minutes. This is extremely unsafe, as it has happened in bumper to bumper traffic, and at traffic lights, where the car stall unexpectedly, then we are stranded in traffic and this puts the occupants of our car at risk, as well as the occupants in cars around us who don't know that we are stalled and are expecting our vehicle to continue in traffic. We reported this to our local Honda dealer, and they said that they have not heard of this problem and don't know what is causing it. The car has not been inspected by others. There have been no warning signs that this will occur. We are able to manually disable the auto idle feature when we turn on the engine, so that the car will not stall. This is what we generally do every time we drive our car. If we forget, the car stalls after we brake at a full stop then release the brake. We don't recall the date that this first occurred, but it has happened at least a dozen times over the past several months or longer. The date below is the date of a recent incident when the car stalled at a traffic light on a high speed road and we were unable to start the car for several minutes. We had four occupants in the car at the time.