Tuesday, July 16th of 2024 was the day that I finally bought my 2nd car. I was fortunate to find a 2003 Honda Element in Sunset Orange Pearl with a mere 129K (rust free) miles on it just a few hours’ drive away. I called off work, drove up there, and spent the afternoon haggling with an Arabic kid, trying to talk him and his dad off of the $8K that they wanted for the E.
Before I expressed any specific interest, I made sure to (literally) crawl over every inch of it and take in the total condition. I tested the windows (more on that later), the locks, looked for rust, checked panel gaps, respray, chips, scratches, tires, etc. I even scurried under the damn thing to check the mission-critical undercarriage.
The main sales associate tossed me the keys and basically said “have fun”. I took it for a twenty minute test drive on the nearby street, highway, and I even tested the braking power in an abandoned parking lot. I came back, pointed out the mismatched tires, small amount of wear ‘n tear, and the rusty bumper but they wouldn’t budge far off of their sticker price.
Unfortunately, I’m not much of a haggler so I was only able to knock off the paperwork fee; a $600 (in my case), bullshit charge for selling me a car and filling out half-a-dozen pages of simple paperwork. I paid cash, signed some documents, and was on my way.
The drive home was helpful as it gave me a much longer-term idea of the drivability of the Element—my Element—as well as some of the issues I noticed.
01: Windows The passenger window seems to only work intermittently. It worked fine when I tested it not two hours earlier, but it seemed to have died in the interim.
02: Noise There’s some high-pitched squeaky sound that revealed itself at around 72mph and wasn’t noticeable at significantly higher or lower speeds.
03: Drivability The overall suspension and alignment need attention. I plan to address those before I put too many more miles on it.
I got it home, spent a while buffing out the goddamn Armor All, and eventually got it to a slightly less oily condition. The interior, seats, body, and trim are in remarkably good condition though. I plan to rust-proof it, rub some conditioner into the plastic trim, and coat the paint with a simple rub-on, wipe-off wax.
At the request of my coworkers, I drove it to my office the next day and they all took a look at it out in the parking lot before the day started. I showed off some of the obvious features including the folding seats, suicide doors, and hatch / tailgate.
I really only plan to drive it as a secondary vehicle; at least until I can replace the fluids, change the tires, and get the whole thing aligned.
This weekend, I plan to change the oil, swap all he lights with LEDs (except the headlights, those stay halogen [Note: I’m testing LED headlights this week]), swap the air filters (cabin and engine), de-stinkify it (smells like undesirables), and replace the hatch struts as they aren’t very weak, but they don’t lift up much on their own. I’ll take some pictures and include in the next entry, but for now, please enjoy the Element pictures I’ve captured on the last few days:
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2024-07-19 - original article written 2024-07-25 - revised and updated