Here’s Everything Wrong With The $260 Honda I Bought From Japan

Back in March, I found the cutest little car, a 1997 Honda Life, for sale in the Japanese auction system and then paid all of $258 for it. Now, after paying a few thousand dollars all-in, waiting the duration of a lengthy ocean voyage, and bungling a road trip to the port, my new Life is finally home. Unfortunately, I learned immediately that my little Honda wasn’t quite ready to hit the road yet, and some critical components needed replacing before I could confidently drive this car.

Japan has an entire industry dedicated to sending used cars to other countries. There are sites where you can buy a whole car just as easily as you can buy an old watch on eBay. Some exporters even take PayPal! It can be easy to get overwhelmed, feeling like a kid in a candy store. It can be especially tantalizing if you live in a place with a currency that’s much stronger than the yen. You can get entire cars purchased and shipped to America for well under $4,000.

Then there’s the fast-paced Japanese auction system, which is like one of the loot boxes from a modern video game. Rare cars will show up in the Japanese auction system that you won’t see on other Japanese car export platforms. If you miss out on these cars, there’s no way of knowing when you’ll see cars like them again. But, how are you supposed to know that you’re getting a good car before you ask your auction agent to put in a bid for you?

Condition Sheets Are Great, With One Caveat

One of the great parts about the Japanese auction system is that most vehicles will get a basic inspection. The inspectors at the auction write pretty detailed condition sheets that are supposed to tip buyers off to all sorts of potential red flags. The inspectors will mark little stuff, like scratches that you can only barely see, and big stuff, like rust, non-operational equipment, or crash damage.

At the end of it all, the car is assessed with a condition grade. If you want to know how to read these grades, click here to read one of my previous pieces.

In theory, these sheets can give you peace of mind that you know what you’re getting. Generally, a car with a grade of 3.5 could be expected to be in daily driver condition or at least wouldn’t take much work to get there. A car rated with a 4 or a 4.5 is supposed to be pretty close to being mint, and a 4.5 is generally the highest condition grade you’ll find for a car that’s older than 25 years old.

But here’s the thing: These grades are subjective. The inspectors sometimes exaggerate some issues or miss other issues. A grade R car might actually be in decent shape, while a car slapped with a 3.5 might be hiding something. My first-ever import was a 1991 Honda Beat, which was assessed with an RA grade. The inspector noted a “bent core support.” However, this so-called “bend” was just a dent to the car’s front recovery hook, a part that’s technically welded to the core support.

This is why I say that getting an independent inspection is crucial.

A Little Blueberry Shows Up For Auction

In my case, I saw the little blue Honda Life show up in the auction system and was excited to see that it was assessed with a condition grade of 3.5. However, my heart sank when I had the condition report translated, as it said that the car had peeling paint in two places, a torn driver seat, and a window regulator that did not work.

This put me in a weird place. I can search auction statistics going back about a year, and my data suggested that if I passed on this blue Honda, I’d end up with one that was silver or white. For whatever reason, perhaps about 95 percent or so of the Honda Life cars that have been going through the auction were either silver or white. Some red examples have gone through the auction system, but they usually had some bad paint damage.

Yet, at the same time, I didn’t want to buy this car for $258 (the minimum bid) and then pay more than the car’s value to import a window regulator. In my eyes, this car was borderline. It was a cool color, but it might have required me to spend more than I wanted to. When I find myself in a situation like this, I pay for an additional, independent inspection. This time, it was just $20.

My inspector had great news. What had failed was a tiny strip of clearcoat on the tailgate and some clearcoat on the right front fender. The inspector then confirmed that the air-conditioner blows cold and that all four windows work great.

Wait, so if the windows worked, why did the original auction inspector get it wrong? The actual problem was that the window up button for the front passenger window didn’t work on the driver’s window switch panel. The regulator was fine, and the button on the passenger door worked great! The only problem was with a single switch. The inspector also noted dry-rotted tires, but also reported that the car had a valid inspection until December 26, 2024.

Based on this updated information, I felt more confident in buying the car.

Better Than I Expected!

I breathed an initial sigh of relief when I got to Baltimore. The paint issues really weren’t that bad. In fact, I couldn’t even find the clearcoat damage on the tailgate for a least a couple of days. That’s how minor it was.

Sadly, I had realized that something was terribly wrong with the car the second I gave it any throttle. I drove the car no more than 5 mph to get it to the U-Haul trailer, and a terrible metallic rubbing sound emanated from the front wheels. I crossed my fingers, hoping that it was just rusty brake rotors from all of the salty air, then loaded the car onto the trailer.

When I finally got the car home, I went through a little bit of testing. The battery worked great, as did all four windows, all four stereo speakers, and even the air-conditioner. The little Honda Life has one of the coldest air-cons in my entire fleet, which is so cool. If only it didn’t feel like running the air-conditioner robbed the car of its already morsel of power.

I even love how I got all of the original documentation with the car.

Then, I was surprised that, on top of the original documentation, I also got a container of Japanese cleaning wipes, a yoga mat-looking thing, and two really nice cleaning towels. Stuff like this isn’t supposed to be left in the car during shipping, and yet, here we are.

I was especially excited to see not a speck of rust on the body and only what I’d call “California-level” rust on the underbody components.

Bursting My Bubble

Then, it was time for the test drive, and that’s when things fell apart. The first thing I noticed was that, holy crap, the left front wheel has the worst-sounding wheel bearing I had ever experienced in a car. It felt like I was sitting directly next to a low-bypass turbofan at takeoff thrust. Additionally, the bearing was so bad that I felt vibrations in the steering wheel, and the affected wheel had heavy vibrations during braking.

While I wasn’t being shocked by the horrible bearing, I had also noticed that the three-speed automatic was shifting quite hard. Now, it’s a 28-year-old transmission, and I don’t expect it to shift the smoothest, but this seemed abnormal.

I checked my inspection report again, and neither of these was noted. In fairness, your inspector will likely tell you that your car goes into gear, but they don’t take them for a drive, so I get how that part was missed. However, the bearing was so bad that I thought there was no way it could have been missed. My Honda Beat had a bearing that wasn’t as bad as this, and the inspector for that car noted the bad bearing.

Thankfully, neither of these issues was hard to solve. The transmission was only about half full. So, I just topped it up. Now the car shifts fine. I’ll do a whole transmission flush later. The vehicle doesn’t leak, so I suspect that the owner rarely checked their transmission fluid over the vehicle’s 150,000-kilometer/93,200-mile life.

The other good news is that the Honda JA4 platform, which also underpinned the Today of the same era, uses a lot of parts that are shared across Honda’s JDM models of the 1990s. The front bearings here are shared with the Honda Acty truck, a couple of JDM Civics, and other common JDM Hondas. This meant that I was able to get a pair of new bearings overnighted from Japan for only $60.

Then I called up my awesome mobile mechanic, Jack of Jet Mobile Auto Service, and penciled in a time to have the bearings installed. Part of the reason why I love Jack as a mechanic is that when other mechanics wave away my weird cars, he’s excited to work on something different. In this case, he mentioned that, once he peeled off the wheels, he bet the Honda Life isn’t much different to work on than a Honda that was sold in America.

I stuck around for a little while to watch this process, and we were both blown away. The Honda not only had fresh hardware holding its hubs and brakes on, but the existing fasteners and other parts had so little corrosion that they gave Jack no fight.

For example, when Jack loosened the clamp on the steering knuckle, the knuckle actually began falling off of the strut all by itself. I had never seen that outside of California before. Certainly, I had never seen it on a used car in Illinois before.

Jack told me that my 28-year-old Honda was in such great condition underneath it really was like it came from California. He couldn’t even remember when was the last time he had seen a classic Honda that was so clean underneath.

Jack then peeled the old bearings out of the hubs and showed me what was going on. Here’s a race from the bearing on the right side. I wasn’t even aware that this bearing was bad! The left side was significantly worse. However, the twist was that the wheel didn’t actually have any alarming play in it. So, it’s not surprising that an inspector who didn’t drive the car missed the bad bearing.

Based on the overall condition of the car and the fact that it had been legal to drive until late December 2024, I think what happened is that the front bearings started going out on the previous owner. Given the fact that replacing the bearings would have cost more than the car was worth, they decided to sell it rather than fix it. I bet the hard shifting probably even further motivated this.

I paid Jack $220 for the bearing job, bringing the total to just $280 to fix the bearings. I then spent $190 on a new set of tires and $103 to have them installed. Alright, so I put in $573 to make my $258 car safe to drive. Look, project car math never actually works out! But hey, the car was now perfect to drive, right?

One More Thing

The bearings and the tires made a night and day difference in how the car drove. In fact, the car drove so well that in just a couple of days, I managed to put half the miles on the Honda Life that I put on my Honda Beat over four years. I suppose that also illustrates just how rough my Honda Beat was, but that’s a story for another day.

But there was one issue that bugged me. At first, I felt a very small vibration and heard an extremely quiet rotational noise. The noise showed up only when accelerating and braking, but never when coasting or turning. But after I put more kilometers on the car, I started hearing loud clicking noises, specifically when turning left at slow speeds.

The car likely has a bad constant velocity joint. The boots aren’t leaking and aren’t torn, but the joints do look original. Maybe it was just their time to go. Fixing this will set me back about another few hundred plus labor, but once it’s done, the car should be mechanically as perfect as a 28-year-old high-strung city car can be. I’ve also done some experimentation, and it looks like some buffing and a shot of clearcoat should take care of the paint, at least good enough for my standards, anyway.

I spent way more money than I originally wanted to on this car. Initially, I expected to come out of this having spent less than $3,000. I’ll break down my costs later on, but I am probably past $4,000 now. I’m okay with it! I love this little car so much that I polished it up and parked it in my mini warehouse of dream cars. Once I fix the axle, I plan to get this car out on the show circuit this year and bring it to a Chicago Autopian meet, too!

If you want to import a car from Japan, don’t let this dissuade you. Do it! Just be aware that, even if you get a car with a decent condition grade, there might be a thing or two that you have to fix that you weren’t aware of. But once you fix it all up, it’ll all be worth it. Have fun!