NHTSA Complaint #11615062 — 2019 HONDA RIDGELINE

I request Honda consideration of payment for hood replacement on my 2019 Ridgeline. Since I bought the truck new in 2019, the hood has fluttered alarmingly in turbulent air. I took it in when I got the recall notice in Jan 2022, hoping that it would resolve the problem. The local dealer installed a bracket reinforcement at that time. It did not prevent the hood flutter. This summer, as I was travelling in Wyoming on a 2 lane road at 55mph, I encountered a blast of air from a semi truck going the opposite direction. The left side of the hood blew up 4-5 inches, accompanied by a loud banging noise. The hood latch held. When I stopped, the left side of the hood was deformed upward about 1.5 inches. At roadside, I torqued it down so that it did not have such a big gap, but after that, it would even deform up substantially with the bow wave from a passing motorcycle. Ultimately, I used Guerilla Tape to hold the hood down and to try to prevent air pressure from getting under the hood and lifting. This was effective, but I noticed that now the entire hood would flutter. In 2021, Honda sent me a recall notice about this issue and I complied. That notice said that one of the potential remedies was hood replacement. This seems adequate evidence to me that Honda acknowledges a design flaw. i believe that there are actually 2 flaws. one with inadequate stiffness of the leading edge of the hood, and the other inadequate prevention of air ingress under the leading edge of the hood. The combination of these led to hood failure. I believe that if I had waited to respond to the recall notice, that Honda would have certainly replaced my hood, the skin of which is now completely debonded from the underlying skeleton. I suspect that my local dealer followed recall guidelines in the placement of latch reinforcement, but maintain that this was inadequate remedy for a potentially lethal problem.