Honda reliability’s bit of a myth in my view as I’ve had a few problems with this car during four years’ ownership

Not really a fair comment as historically Honda's have been amongst the most reliable cars on the road at any price. What would be a fair comment is that Honda have dropped the ball of late and that reliability is no longer up there with Toyota.

Wife’s Audi A1 has been far more reliable and definitely better built imho.

Funny you should say that as there is a current thread re an A1.........!

Honda have a long history of recalling cars that had design problems.

Back in the eighties they recalled all their cars in the Northern hemisphere to fix the rust problems which my Accord suffered from. They even replaced the cam shaft at 80 k miles free of charge.

Not sure that qualifies as a long list?

And rust issues would be an assembly problem rather than a design one. But lets face it, many cars had rust issues in the 80's, possibly the most (in)famous being Lancia.

This is really surprising Rusty and another indication how Honda have lost their way. Even loyal Honda owners are finding the style of the new Chinese built EVs hard to warm to.

But a company that for years have Mede some of the advanced petrol engines in the world and fitted them to garden machinery equipment , marine , motorcycles and Formula One should need to outsource a popular engine like the three cylinder is really surprising.

The current Red Bull F1 engine which powered their cars to a clean sweep in the 2023 season and which is based on Honda technology is evidence of their expertise !

Indeed, reminder of when Toyota lost sight of the ball for a while due to outsourcing component supply (maybe without enough supervision?) leading to a few QC issues that spoiled their otherwise excellent record, that ended with a very public apology from the CEO of the company and Toyota are now back on track.

Hopefully this experience for Honda will result in a similar clean broom sweeping operation and see them back on track too.

I get the impression that Honda have been penny-pinching on the R&D / quality control and now customer service side for some time now, possibly since around the time the new lot of cars were put into production in the mid-late 2000s, getting steadily worse.

It's almost as though they 'gave up' after so many years of excellent design innovations and great customer service. Whether the bosses were / are still way too conservative, and/or the company is run by bean counters rather than (at least some in top positions) engineers and/or car enthusiasts, I don't know.

I witnessed similar issues (of 'managing decline' through cuts) in my old industry of M&E Building Services Design, where tried and tested management was replaced by short termism and cost cutting. Many firms were never the same (quality) again, with once cherished reputations reduced to just 'another player' in the market.

I get a similar impression with many car manufacturers, many of which seemed to go through similar times as Honda from around the same period - some faring better than others and if and to the extent they've turned things around

It often depends upon who's at the top and whether their egos can withstand criticism and often requirements to make big changes to correct their own previous mistakes. Few top bosses fall on their proverbial swords either.