NHTSA Complaint #11691300 — 2016 HONDA ACCORD

When driving the 2016 honda accord ex-l, after driven for around 10-20 minutes, a static starts playing on the speaker starting small and gets progessively louder (even when the audio system is turned off, if audio system is on and volume is adjusted, it gets even worse) until you cannot hear anything else other than the loud static. You cannot hear anything said in the car by your fellow passengers, kids get scared with the loud noise. The only thing that works is a restart of the engine which can only be done by pulling over to a shoulder or another unsafe area of the road putting everyone in the car and other nearby cars at dangerous risk. The static noise is so loud, it completely takes over all of your driver senses and you'll be like a deer staring into headlights unable to do anything. In a recent incident, we (family including kid) were going in the left-most lane of a CA freeway when this started and in the ensuing 2 minutes I had to move over 3 lanes into the number 1 lane and stop at an unsafe curb near an exit in the evening and restart the car and go back home. This is traumatic everytime it happens and we have to plan for it. There are several people with the same issue complaining on social media (reddit/youtube) and they have evidence for the same in video format. 500+ posts and going [XXX] . Upon calling my usual service center, they did mention they saw similar problem recently, but it is not part of a recall and quoted me 250$ for diganosis and upwards of 1900$ for replacing the audio unit. My audio unit worked fine for 10 years, and I do no think this is an individual issue but a widespread one that triggers in this specific model of the vehicle. There were no warnings prior to this, started appearing around [XXX] INFORMATION REDACTED PURSUANT TO THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552(B)(6)