Most engine-complaint data is hard to read, because most cars offer more than one engine and NHTSA files complaints by model. A pile of "engine" reports on a Camry could be the four-cylinder, the V6 or the hybrid, and the database will not tell you which. These five will. Honda sells the Pilot, the Odyssey, the Passport, the Ridgeline and the Acura MDX with the J35 V6 and nothing else — no four-cylinder, no diesel, no alternative in any trim. Across their 2016–2020 model years, owners filed 1,732 engine complaints with NHTSA. Every one of them is a complaint about that V6.
Read the reports and the same words keep coming back: knocking, rod bearing, engine replaced. A connecting-rod bearing is a thin shell of soft metal that sits between the crankshaft and the bottom of each connecting rod, riding on a film of pressurized oil. It is a wear part in the sense that a hip joint is a wear part — it is supposed to outlast the car. When the oil film breaks down or the bearing clearance goes wrong, metal touches metal, the shell wears through, and the rod starts hammering the crank. That hammering is the knock. Once it starts, the engine is usually finished: the crankshaft is scored, and the fix is a long block, not a bearing.
The 2016 Pilot is the middle of the fire, not the edge of it
The 2016 Pilot carries 501 engine complaints on its own — a third of the whole family total, and the largest single-model-year engine cluster of any Honda product in this era. It was the first year of the third-generation Pilot and the first year of the direct-injected version of this V6 in that body. But it is not an isolated bad year. The 2017 Pilot adds 280. Pilots from 2016 through 2020 account for 1,036 between them, the MDX 324, the Odyssey 219, the Ridgeline 122, and the low-volume Passport 31. Five different vehicles, three body styles, two brands, one part.
That spread is the tell. A minivan, a three-row SUV, a unibody pickup and a luxury crossover do not share suspensions, transmission tuning, bodies or buyers. What they share is an engine, and the complaint pattern follows the engine rather than any one vehicle. When a failure crosses a lineup that otherwise has nothing in common, you are looking at a component problem, not a model problem.
It breaks at 94,000 miles — long after the warranty
This is the number that decides what the problem costs you. On the 2016 Pilot, the reported failure mileage clusters at a median of 94,000 miles, with the middle half of failures falling between roughly 62,500 and 128,000 miles — and that distribution rests on 113 mileage-tagged reports, the largest sample in this dataset. The 2016 MDX lands almost on top of it at a median of 96,000 miles, the 2017 MDX at 105,000, the 2018 Odyssey at 100,000. The 2017 Pilot runs earlier, a median of 70,000 miles on 50 reports.
Honda's powertrain warranty is five years or 60,000 miles. Every one of those medians sits past it, most of them by a wide margin. That is the whole shape of this failure from an owner's point of view: it does not show up in the first year and get fixed for free. It shows up in year six or seven, on the second owner, and it presents as a repair bill roughly the size of what the vehicle is worth.
What it sounds like, and what it does next
Owners describe a consistent sequence. First a faint tick or tap from low in the engine, often noticed at idle or on a cold start, easy to dismiss as normal V6 noise. It gets louder over days or weeks rather than months. It is a bottom-end knock — a deep, rhythmic hammering that rises and falls with engine speed, not the light top-end tick of a valvetrain. Frequently there is no warning light and no low-oil-pressure alarm before the noise, which is what makes it so easy to keep driving.
Then it fails, and it usually fails hard. Report after report describes losing power at highway speed, a hard stall, or an engine seizing outright — a handful describe smoke. In this dataset the reported failure is far more often a stranding than a fire, but a car that quits in a highway lane without warning is the safety complaint owners are actually filing.
The practical version: a new noise from the bottom of this engine is not a wait-and-see item. The gap between "there's a tick" and "the crank is scored" is short. Shutting it off and having it looked at is the difference between a bearing job and a long block, and once in a while it is the difference between a repair and a tow off the interstate.
If you own one, or are about to buy one
Check the VIN against NHTSA yourself. Honda has issued campaigns touching these engines, and coverage depends on the exact VIN, not the model year. Run it at nhtsa.gov/recalls and ask a Honda or Acura dealer to pull open campaigns and any extended-coverage bulletin on that specific vehicle before you spend money on a repair. We are not asserting what is or isn't covered on any given car — the VIN lookup is free and it is the only answer that binds.
Buy the oil history, not the story. Rod bearings live on oil film. On a V6 that fails in this range, documented oil changes matter more than the odometer reading, and a car with a gap in its service record around 60,000–90,000 miles is a car with a gap where this failure lives. Ask for records. If there are none, price accordingly.
Listen to it cold, and listen from outside. Start it after it has sat overnight, stand at the front bumper, and listen for a deep tick that fades as oil pressure builds. That first thirty seconds tells you more than a test drive does. Any bottom-end noise on one of these is a walk-away or a major-repair negotiation, not a "have it looked at later."
Know where you are on the curve. A 2016 Pilot or MDX on a lot with 90,000 miles is sitting almost exactly on its own median complaint mileage. That does not mean it will fail. It means the most-complained-about part on the vehicle is at the point in its life where the complaints happen, and you should price the possibility of an engine into the offer.
How we did it
Source. NHTSA engine-category owner-complaint counts and failure-mileage quartiles for the five Honda and Acura nameplates sold only with the 3.5-liter J35 V6, from our copy of the public NHTSA complaint database (verified against the current snapshot on August 20, 2026). Across the 2016–2020 Pilot, the 2018–2020 Odyssey, the 2019–2020 Passport, the 2017–2019 Ridgeline and the 2016–2020 Acura MDX — 18 model-years in all — the engine clusters hold 1,732 complaints; the ten charted model-years account for 1,500 of them. The 2016 Pilot distribution (first quartile 62,500, median 94,000, third quartile 128,000) is drawn from 113 mileage-tagged reports, and the 2017 Pilot's from 50.
Caveat. NHTSA files complaints by model, not by component, so "engine" is a model-level category that also picks up cooling, oil-consumption, emissions and accessory reports — it is not isolated to the rod bearings. We chose these five nameplates precisely because none of them offered a second engine, so the counts can only belong to this V6; the counts still are not a rod-bearing-only figure. Complaint counts reflect how often owners file, not a failure rate: a widely publicized problem draws more filings than an equally common quiet one, and none of these reports is verified by NHTSA or by us. Medians drawn from fewer than 25 mileage-tagged reports are greyed in the chart for that reason. We make no recall claim in this piece — not that a campaign exists, and not that one doesn't. This is about the owner-complaint pattern and the mileage at which it lands; for what applies to a particular car, run the VIN.