Dumb Ass Designs

All this started with a tiny crack in a paper thin plastic housing for a sensor that is banged on every time you add gas to the car.  You spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car and they cut corners by making ultra thin connectors for sensors?

We purchased a 2002 Honda Odyssey to haul around our kids, and loved the automatic sliding doors. Our old Plymouth van had manual doors that seamed like a safely hazard to little arms. The Voyager was a repair hog too, so we decided to go with a van with a better repair record..the Honda Odyssey. It’s been a good van, but the driver side passenger door has not worked for a couple of years. We had estimates from a repair shops that in the hundreds of dollars to fix, so we just lived with one working passenger door. I finally decided to look into the problem myself and see if I could fix it. I spent several hours searching the web for suggestions on how to fix it. There were several sites that suggested removing a fuse and resetting the doors…

1.) Disable the power door switch on the left dashboard.
2.) Remove the power door fuses located under the front passenger leg area.
3.) Manually open and close both sliding doors.
4.) Restore the power door fuses located under the front passenger leg area.
5.) Enable the power door switch on the left dashboard.
6.) Try opening the sliding doors.

2001 Honda Odyssey Power sliding door trouble

That didn’t work for me. The door wanted to stay locked. In order to open the door, we would have to turn the doors on manual, reach in and hold the lock in the unlocked position while operating the handle. Another thing that had also been happening was the gas door would not pop open when you pulled the gas door switch in the car. I saw another post on FixYa that suggested a sensor behind the gas door as the culprit. Upon inspection, I noticed that there were two buttons in the area under the gas door. One of the buttons was permanently depressed.

Aha…the gas cap stuck issue! One button (the back one) is the latch, and the broken one was the spring. The broken one was also a sensor that told the car the gas door was open. If the car thinks you’re dumb enough to leave the gas door open, it prevents the sliding door from going back.

In the FixYa forum, one person had gone inside the car and took apart his rear panel to get to the switch. I couldn’t believe that Honda would design it so a small simple part that would be prone to failure would require such lengths to fix. I tried to twist the part from the outside…no go. I looked in the tire well and there was a plastic cover right under the gas cap. “Great”, I was thinking, “they made a protective cover held on with two screws for easy access to the parts”. WRONG! The FixYa forum post was right. You have to access the parts from inside the car…. dumb ass design. I tried to remove the cup holder/storage bin, but it was screwed on from inside the panel. Another dumb ass design. For one thing, if you could remove the storage assembly, you would have some access to the passenger door hardware and the gas door latches/sensors. Another thing is the storage area has a door with two flimsy plastic hinges molded into the housing that are easy to break by little monkeys. You would think that would have been another consideration by Honda. If the assemble simply snapped into place, it would be an easy part to replace. That isn’t the case. you have to remove the whole panel and unscrew the storage assembly from underneath. Back to the task at hand.

I decided to bite the bullet and remove the panel. I took off the passenger door kick plate first.

Then I had to pull the molding back from the panel.  This can be done easily with your fingers.  There are molded in clips (L shaped) that the molding holds the panel down with.

After taking the molding from around the panel, you can reach in and unplug the sensor.

After unplugging the sensor, the door worked! If you need more space to get your arm in, or want to take the whole panel off, here are the other steps…

If you still need more space to get your arm in, pop the speaker panel off from the back and remove the screws that attach the plastic ring to the metal bracket.

To completely take the panel out, you have to take the two hooks out in the rear.

Finally, you have to remove the two seatbelt bolts out (not shown), and the screw by the seat bracket.  Yes, I did clean my van after I put everything back together.

I wanted to get the gas door working again too, so I completely removed the interior panel to get to the spot where the sensor attached, but I noticed a hairline crack in the sensor housing that prevented it from staying attached though. Since I didn’t want to spend some outrageous price for a little piece of plastic failure, I just kept the sensor out, went to the gas door and bent the metal latch so that it would not engage. Now we have a working passenger door, and the gas door we simply have to open from the exterior….whew!

Another suggestion if you think the sensor is the problem is to open the passenger door kick panel and cut the wires.  You can see the coloring of the wires on mine here.