NHTSA Complaint #11487553 — 2019 HONDA PILOT

The car is equipped with a stop-start system that is supposed to shut off the engine when you stop (eg at a red light) and restart almost instantly when you lift the foot off the brake. The restart feature fails somewhat regularly, maybe about 5% of the time. It has happened for many years, and with increasing frequency as the car is getting older. Sometimes the restart has trouble, the car misfires a moment, but then the engine restarts, sometimes a bunch of unrelated warnings sound when this happens, the car reporting that the collision avoidance systems are now offline or similar. Sometimes the engine completely stalls and does not come back online at all; when this happens, getting it restarted generally means putting it in park, turning the car completely off, then starting it again, a process that takes 10-15 seconds. When this happens at an isolated stop sign it is annoying; it has also happened on a highway exit ramp with traffic going around our disabled vehicle. Various Honda dealers have inspected and maintained the vehicle, and none have detected anything wrong to explain this behavior. The problem is intermittent and thus hard to reproduce on demand.