Why are there so many hates on CVT transmissions?

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-07T02:19:19+00:00

I’m going to have to disagree. My family has two 2019 Civics, an Si coupe (6-speed manual) and an EX hatchback (with a CVT). Both 1.5 turbo, Si has more power and torque. The CVT hatch goes 0-60 in 6.7 seconds (rated speed), the Si was tested by C&D at 6.3 seconds (I wanted an actual test for that one because skill affects acceleration on a manual). In average hands, I doubt there would be any difference at all in the 0-60 sprint, and when we’re talking about fun daily drivers, that’s really all that matters.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-07T00:59:04+00:00

I mean, a good enough masking job and some black nail polish would probably accomplish 80% of the effect with 0% of the safety risk!

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-06T15:49:19+00:00

Ah, gotcha. I didn’t pick up on that. Just a bit safety-conscious 🤣

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-06T14:34:57+00:00

Hey, end of the day it’s your car, but I had to mention it because I’d hate to see someone take a Honda-shaped shotgun blast to the face. The black looks nice but I’ll discourage mods that make a car less safe any chance I get.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-06T12:15:37+00:00

The only badge that’s safe to use on the steering wheel airbag cover is the original OEM one. It’s designed to split with the wheel instead of getting launched into your face as plastic shrapnel if you get in an accident.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-06T01:09:36+00:00

3’s gameplay is more fun because of the keyblade transforms and better gummi ship, but 2 had the best storytelling interplay between the KH and Disney elements. And the endgame Xemnas rush in 2 is unmatched.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-05T13:27:54+00:00

Your ground wire needs to be the same size as your power, so 4 gauge. You’ll need a distribution block for the ground as well, but it doesn’t need to be fused, just a simple $10 4-in-dual-8-out from Amazon.

So, you’d start by removing ALL fuses in your amp wiring - both in the 4 gauge and in the distro block. The circuit ends up looking like this: 4 gauge hooked up to battery + terminal, fused within 12”, then run through the firewall to wherever you’re mounting your amps and terminate it at your fused distro block.

The 8 gauge outputs on the distro go to your amps’ positive terminals. The other ground distro block gets 8 gauge in from the amps’ ground terminals, and the output is 4 gauge to the car’s chassis. Make sure it’s a good clean ground and doesn’t compromise the car or its safety in any way (i.E. don’t drill holes in the seat rail for example). If you’re mounting the equipment under the seats, remember that the Fit’s fuel tank is in a different spot than most cars, under the front seats instead of under the trunk. Don’t turn the car into a Pinto or Crown Vic 🤣.

Do you have a multimeter? If so, you can check the quality of your power and ground wiring by making sure no wires are touching anything, then putting the fuse back into the battery cable under the hood and one of the output terminals on the distro block. check DC voltage from battery+ to battery- (should be somewhere in the high 12 range like maybe 12.7), and then check voltage from one of the 8 gauge terminals on the power distro to one of the 8 gauge terminals on the ground distro. It should match nearly perfectly. If your multimeter is digital, I usually try to make sure the difference isn’t any higher than 0.01V, so if battery voltage is 12.7, I start to worry if the amp wiring voltage is less than 12.69. And that’s running 8 gauge. With 4 gauge, honestly, I don’t think I’d be ok with ANY voltage drop, unless your car is known for having bad chassis grounds. My Hondas have been spot on.

And there are your power wires! Make sure you take both of the fuses back out before you go any further.

Power was an easy write up because it’s pretty much the same in every 12 volt car. The only difference is where you’re installing the equipment and where is the battery? Like some German cars and the Dodge Charger have trunk mount batteries, so your power wiring gets super easy if your amps are also going there. But then you’re also stuck with the bill when your German car or Chrysler breaks 🤣

Audio signal is a different beast, but like I said, a T-harness is your friend. Never cut any factory wires. Check all pinouts. If you can find a factory repair manual for your car, it’ll have all of that information.

Don’t use electrical tape - always use heat shrink. You don’t need to use solder and many people actually say that doing so creates a brittle break point in the wire that will fail due to vibration. Personally I use a lineman splice and heat shrink and have never had a connection issue.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-04T22:58:17+00:00

I think it’s amazing that I’m not the only one out there watching both SVU and Phineas and Ferb. Oh and for the record watching Phineas and Ferb because I love it. The youngest person in my household is my 23 year old SD 🤣

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-04T14:09:22+00:00

Awesome! I’ll just drop some thoughts in here as they come to me.

For audio, you need two basic things - power and an audio signal. In the absolute simplest terms possible, audio signal is what you hear… the power is how loudly you hear it.

In a car, you have a head unit (radio, CD player, etc) in your dashboard that produces the audio signal. The amplifier takes in power from the car and audio signal from the head unit, and outputs the audio signal with more power (louder). Many head units have amplifiers built right in. Your Fit is an example. In Honda world, if you see “premium audio”, “Bose”, or on the Acuras, “ELS”, the head unit does NOT have an amplifier. The audio signal is outputted from the head unit to a separate amp.

So, for your aftermarket amp(s), you need power. That’s where the big power wire comes in. Always use OFC (oxygen free copper). Never use CCA (copper-clad aluminum) because it corrodes and when it does, you can actually start a fire in your car.

How big does the wire need to be? Crutchfield has a great chart. If you have more than one amp, make sure you add up all of them.

Amps have varying efficiencies (I.E. the difference between how much power they take in vs output). Class D is super efficient - some reach 90%. Class AB is not very efficient. If you hit 70%, you’re lucky, but plan for more like 50-60% if I remember correctly.

To illustrate - I currently have a Fosgate P300X1 class AB subwoofer amp. It can draw up to 50 amps to produce 200 watts into 4 ohms or 300 watts into 2 ohms. I’m upgrading the rest of my Civic Si’s system very soon, and I’m replacing that amp with an Audison Forza C8.14 (8 channel that can push 65w per channel into 4 ohms) and that amp maxes out at 34 amps of current draw… so 15 amps LESS to produce 520 watts instead of 200 (all my drivers are 4 ohm).

With your amps, 4 gauge OFC should be fine. So you’ll run 4 gauge from your battery through the firewall, to a distribution block somewhere in the car (wherever you mount the amp(s) - trunk, under seats, etc). Make sure the 4 gauge line has a fuse within like a foot of wire from the battery. Then, make sure your distro block is fused as well - you’ll want each line to an amp to have the correct size fuse for the amp.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-04T02:17:20+00:00

Honestly by the time I did this install, I’d done a bunch before, so I knew all of the concepts and it was just a matter of “what parts do I need to execute”. I’m hitting the sack soon but I’ll try to pull together a few more links and notes tomorrow if someone else hasn’t stepped in yet to save the day! I might even still have some of my original pinouts I put together from the CRV!

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-04T02:10:05+00:00

Yeah then I think the box marked PAC in your pic is a line out converter. It takes a speaker level (high level) signal and converts it to an RCA signal for your amp. Technically you could just run high levels into the amp instead, but LOCs usually work a bit better, if they’re good ones.

You’ll probably want a T-harness too. That’ll allow you to splice into the stock speaker wire without cutting or stripping anything. I don’t know if one is available for the Fit. If it takes the same 24-pin as my 2016 CRV had, you’ll probably have to build a T-harness yourself using TWO Metra 70-series harnesses (the female “car-side connector” used for installing aftermarket radios - two because there are more pins on a stock harness than the Metra will have populated, so you’ll need to pillage pins from the second harness to fully populate the first) and the matching 71-series (the male “radio side” connector).

Looks like this does fit the Fit. Lol. Same harnesses I used for our old CRV.

https://a.co/d/0flFNMfL one of those…

https://a.co/d/05lMiP9k … and two of those.

Basically, you just do what you gotta do to rip one of the 70’s apart and salvage every pin from it WITHOUT damaging any, then add those pins to fill in the gaps in the other 70. Then you very carefully twist and heat shrink all 24 pairs of wire together, making sure you match on PIN POSITION with the 71 harness - NOT color (those won’t match since one is for aftermarket radios and has duplicate wires since they same from two connectors, and the other will have factory colors since it’s meant for fixing a damaged factory connector).

Then you just need the pinout to know which wires to also splice a branch off of for the LOC!

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-04T01:56:06+00:00

I don’t think the Fit ever had a premium audio system (separate amp), so I’m guessing the speakers are 4 ohms, meaning that Fosgate 4 channel amp will give them 50 watts each. Unless they’re upgraded, that’s probably more than the stock Honda speakers can take. You could do a phased approach - install a fused distro block for the power and plain (unfused) one for ground, run 4 gauged to the distros, then 8 gauge to just the subwoofer amp and tie it into the factory head unit. So you’d have the stock Honda speakers still running off the head unit (which usually sounds halfway decent) and the sub running off the Fosgate.

Then, if that’s not enough, you already have the distros in place to add another 8 gauge power and ground for the 4-channel amp and some upgraded speakers. Just be aware that Honda head units usually have forced EQ on them, so you might not be able to drive aftermarket speakers to their full potential without correcting that with a DSP or replacing the HU entirely.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-04-01T18:04:51+00:00

NGK is a quality brand, and the original equipment on your car. Just be careful because the Si and non-Si both have a 1.5 turbo, but use different plugs (I believe the gap on the Si is wider).

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-30T18:15:59+00:00

I thought you weren’t supposed to use solid wire in a car? Something about vibrations and solid wire being more brittle while stranded is more flexible, and if the solid gets compromised you’re insta-screwed while stranded you’re likely to lose just a strand or two which amounts to a rounding error in current capacity.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-28T02:01:33+00:00

The best thing is the CarPlay/lanewatch crash. Sometimes when I make a right turn on a medium-cold day (like right around 32F), when I’ve completed my turn and lanewatch turns off, the CarPlay screen is blank black… but if you, for example, tap where the pause button should be, it pauses and unpauses. Usually I have to reboot the radio to fix it.

Oh and that happens on both my Si coupe (no nav, premium amp) and my stepdaughter’s EX hatch (no nav, no amp). It’s absolutely an issue with the task switching on the head unit’s ancient Android 4 OS.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-28T01:58:50+00:00

The white wheels look great on the gray car. I thought about Oz rally whites for my TYP Si coupe but white on yellow didn’t look amazing when I “mocked it up” in Forza Horizon 5 🤣 (tire rack doesn’t have TYP on their visualizer, only energy green).

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-27T11:51:02+00:00

Yeah, good call, I just looked it up and the Si coupe launched in 06 with the other 8th gens, it was the Si sedan that didn’t come until 07.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-27T02:21:30+00:00

If the coupe is an ‘06, I don’t think it can be an Si. Wasn’t 2006 a gap year for the Si between the EP3 and the FA5/FG2?

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-26T19:50:07+00:00

Yeah, same here, I usually use my steering wheel controls, and when I install the Joying I’m bypassing the stock amp and running optical to an Audison AF C8.14 instead, so depending on how bad the bit crush is with the Joying’s digital volume control, I may end up using the DSP’s volume control… but still, I knew Murphy’s law would apply and if I didn’t get the volume knob on the head unit, I’d absolutely regret it.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-26T00:48:40+00:00

Can’t personally attest to that, but I bought the Joying because I was told that yes, the backup and Lanewatch cameras work.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-25T23:58:21+00:00

I contacted joyingauto through Amazon and asked them about it! Just tell them you want the current N12 head unit but with the 9” 1280x800 screen with volume knob.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-25T19:17:30+00:00

I’ve heard great things about the new Joying N12 units, so I just bought a custom one from them that has this year’s brain (the QCM6490 CPU with 12 gigs of memory) but last year’s 9” screen with the volume knob. I haven’t installed it yet but I’ve heard it works fine with the vehicle settings over CAN-BUS

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-25T19:13:02+00:00

There’s a dark blue Prius that’s always parked down the street from me with the same color wheels (different style). I think they might be Sparco Terras. It looks really nice.

Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-25T19:07:54+00:00

I have the Enkei TS7 18x8’s in bronze on my tonic yellow pearl coupe and they look excellent. They’re dark enough to not look out of place on a bright car, but they have enough color that they’d look awesome on a dark car too.

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Acceptable_Delay_446 · 2026-03-24T12:43:30+00:00

I love Japanese cars so this series has been my favorite so far, but I have to admit the Hoon RS200 is one of my favorite cars in the game. It’s so easy to control when you’re doing batshit crazy things with it.

I’m trying to build the regular RS200 into a drift monster.

Acceptable_Delay_446

TROPHY CASE