- the honda certified website is getting some not-quite-certified additions starting on december 7, with an influx of used vehicles up to 10 years old.
- used vehicles from both honda and acura will now be available on the sales site, each in their own section.
- the goal is to lower the bar for car buyers to get into the honda and acura brands when they're young, and (the automaker hopes) become brand loyal for life.
there are a few rules used vehicles have to follow to be officially called "certified pre-owned," or cpo for short. for honda, those rules include being less than five years old, having no more than 80,000 miles on the odometer, and passing a comprehensive mechanical and visual inspection. you can see the thousands of vehicles that met these requirements on the honda certified website. and starting today, you will also find used cars that don't quite hit those levels.
that's because honda is now the first mass-market brand to sell non-cpo vehicles on its own website. the reasons for this change are pretty easy to figure out, dan rodriguez, manager of auto remarketing at american honda, told car and driver.
"there's a big opportunity in that six-to-eight-year-old range, and when you look at the overall used-car market, it’s close to 40 million cars a year," he said, noting that the u.s. new-car market in a good year is around 17 million vehicles. "in a utopic world, we're bringing in this young, first-time buyer into our brand through a used car, where the car's been checked by our dealer network that knows the car the best and has technicians who have been trained on it . . . so the experience is a good one. our goal is to bring them into our family and then keep them for a lifetime."
used acuras, too
another new addition to the honda certified website will be used acura models, segmented off in their own section. between the two brands, just over three million used cars were sold on the general market in 2019, rodriguez said, but only about a million were sold through honda or acura dealers. "we think that we can to do better than that, and we really want to have more of the sales go through our dealer network," he said.
those dealers will be the ones pricing the non–certified pre-owned vehicles that are added to the site, rodriguez said. mechanics working at honda dealerships will also take a look at the less-than-certified-but-still-checked-out vehicles that will be listed and sold through the site. while the non-cpo cars on the honda site will not, obviously, be asked to pass the standard cpo tests, rodriguez said each used vehicle on the site will have any outstanding recalls taken care of and there will be no problems with the titles. the non-cpo models will also have less than 100,000 miles and will be no older than 10 years.
over the next year, honda will determine other ways to give shoppers peace of mind with these used vehicles, perhaps by adding some sort of warranty, rodriguez said. currently, each cpo vehicle listed on the site has a digital checklist to let the shopper know what was done to that particular vehicle. the non-certified vehicles will also have one of these lists; it just won’t be as comprehensive as the current offerings.