2008 Honda Accord EX-L V-6 Long-Term Test Verdict

Honda has been building the Accord for over 30 years, fine-tuning it with each generation to the point where it's become the benchmark car in the midsize-family-sedan class. The Accord defines what Americans want in their midsize vehicle: reliability, comfort, performance, and affordability.

This latest Accord has gone through some changes and, this time, some of those changes aren't necessarily so good. For 2008, Honda made substantial exterior and interior styling changes to the Accord, going for a more modern, edgy look and feel, which some liked and others didn't. Along with the styling changes came size changes: Everything on the 2008 Accord got bigger. The interior and exterior dimensions have grown significantly, and the new 3.5-liter V-6 is bigger and more powerful than the last generation V-6.

For all those reasons, we had to get the 2008 Honda Accord EX-L into our long-term fleet to see if all these alterations actually improved the car or just changed it.

We ordered our top-of-the-range Accord EX-Lloaded with the only option offered: a $2200 navigation system, ringing in at $30,895, but you get a lot for your dollar here: leather throughout, heated front seats, XM Satellite Radio-everything you've come to expect from Honda vehicles. And when a car comes this outfitted-size, comfort, amenities-it's going to see a lot of travel time. During its stay with us, our Accord EX-L ticked just over 22,000 miles, traveling up and down the California coast, trips to Arizona, Utah, Death Valley-any place a car can go, this one went with nary a complaint from anyone driving it.

We had only one performance issue with our Accord EX-L: At just under 15,000 miles our local dealer said we needed new front and rear brake pads and had to have the front and rear rotors resurfaced. Now, we can understand the fronts: We work our long-term cars pretty hard in order to give you an accurate account of our experiences. But rear rotors?