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Junkyard Gem: 2000 Honda Passport 4WD

The suits at American Honda Motor Company must have spent the bulk of the 1990s tearing out their hair in frustration as their rivals raked in big money from the sales of ever-more-profitable SUVs, even as American car shoppers lost interest in sedans and hatchbacks. Oh, sure, the Civic-based CR-V appeared here for the 1997 model year and sold well enough, but the lack of a larger SUV pained Honda more with each passing year. With the Acura MDX and Honda Pilot not ready for showrooms until the 2001 and 2002 model years, respectively, some stopgap had to be found. Isuzu stepped up and made a deal with Honda: the Rodeo would get Honda badges and become the Passport, while the Trooper would show up in Acura showrooms with SLX badges (for the 1994 and 1995 model years, respectively). Here's one of those Passports, found in a Denver-area self-service yard. Things got even weirder in the Isuzu/Honda world around the turn of the century, with the Honda Odyssey getting Isuzu badges and being sold as the Oasis. Fast-forward to 2009, and the only Isuzu-badged vehicles available new here were rebadged Chevrolets: the I-Series pickup (Chevy Colorado) and the Ascender (Chevy Trailblazer). The Passport name has some interesting American Honda history, stretching back to the first Honda vehicle sold here (and the biggest-selling motor vehicle in human history): the Super Cub. American Honda Motor Company couldn't use the Super Cub name on our shores, because Piper Aircraft had been selling a small plane called the Super Cub since 1949, so the motorcycle was called the Honda 50 over here. Eventually, this bike got a 70cc engine and became the Honda C70 Passport, sales of which continued through the middle 1980s. That means the Passports sitting in your local Honda dealership right now got their name from a one-cylinder motorcycle. General Motors has a Passport connection as well; when GM created the Geo brand to sell rebadged Isuzus, Suzukis, and Toyotas in the United States, it created a marque called Passport to sell the Daewoo LeMans as the Optima in Canada (all the other vehicles sold by Passport dealers were Isuzus). So, Honda's need to offer SUVs in its American dealerships led to an arrangement with GM-connected Isuzu to sell these trucks with a model name bearing links to both companies. So much history in the junkyard! Just as Geo-badged Toyota Corollas (mostly) got Delco radios, so did the Passport get Honda radios.

GM recalls over 230,000 more Trailblazer-family SUVs over door electronics

Back in August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a recall on the General Motors GMT360 SUVs (Buick Rainier, Chevrolet Trailblazer, GMC Envoy, Isuzu Ascender and Saab 9-7X) ranging from the 2005 to 2007 model years and the 2006 GMT370 SUVs (Chevrolet Trailblazer EXT and GMC Envoy XL) due to potential fires associated with the driver's door module. Initially limited to 250,000 units sold or registered in 20 Snow Belt states (and the District of Columbia), the recall has now been expanded to include an additional 193,000 of these SUVs in the US and, according to The Detroit News, 40,000 more sold outside the US, including Canada and Mexico.
Like the original recall, the issue is still a faulty driver's door module that can short out, which could lead to a fire. The Detroit News is reporting that, out of the 443,000 units being recalled, GM says that there were 58 fires that caused 11 minor injuries, and the expanded recall accounted for six fires and one injury. Despite the lower number of fires, the recall notice recommends that owners park their vehicles until the recall repairs has been performed.
On recalled units with functional modules, the repair consists of a protective coating being applied to the module, while vehicles with modules that are not working properly will have the driver's door module replaced. The official recall notice is posted below, and it includes contact information for customers of all five brands.

Junkyard Gem: 1996 Isuzu Trooper

Though Americans had been buying the Isuzu-built Chevrolet LUV pickup since the 1972 model year (plus plenty of Isuzu-derived Chevettes and Chevette components later on), the first widely available Isuzu-badged vehicle available here was the LUV-sibling P'Up. That was the 1981 model year, and the I-Mark (Gemini) and Impulse (Piazza) soon followed. Later in the 1980s, GM (which owned a hefty chunk of Isuzu by that time) began selling Isuzu-built Spectrums and Storms with Chevrolet and/or Geo badges… but Isuzu started its United States business by selling trucks, and that's the only type of Isuzu you could buy new here when the company departed our shores in 2009. The Trooper SUV first went on sale here for the 1984 model year, and eventually the Trooper became the biggest-selling Isuzu in North America. Here's an example from the sales heyday of the middle 1990s, found in a Colorado self-service yard. In its homeland, this truck was known as the Bighorn. Elsewhere around the globe, however, it went by far too many names to list here (though Trooper was the most common). Highlights include the Holden Jackaroo and Caribe 442. Honda's desperation to cash in on the 1990s North American SUV craze led to the creation of an Acura-badged Trooper, known as the SLX and sold here from the 1996 through 1999 model years. As part of this arrangement between Isuzu, GM, and Honda, the Isuzu Rodeo became the Honda Passport here (confusing every North American who had ever bought a Passport-badged Honda Super Cub, which got that name so as not to run afoul of the builders of the Piper Super Cub aircraft) and Isuzu dealers sold Honda Odysseys with Oasis badges. Once we'd gotten a few years into our current century, the only Isuzu-badged vehicles you could buy new here (not counting commercial trucks) weren't even built by Isuzu at that point. One was the Ascender (a badge-engineered Chevy Trailblazer) and the other was the i-Series pickup (a badge-engineered Chevy Colorado). Oh, sure, a handful of Axioms and Rodeos slunk out of American Isuzu showrooms in the early years of the 2000s, but the clock really started ticking for Isuzu USA when the final Troopers showed up for 2002. When this truck was built, Isuzu was engaged in an eye-gouging, kidney-spearing price- and financing-deal war with Mitsubishi Motors and its Montero.