25 Year-Old Honda CR-Vs are beat to shit. That’s pretty much a universal truth, not just about CR-Vs in particular, but about any vehicle used almost entirely as a family commuter. Old Subaru Outbacks? Faded and scraped. Old Ford Escapes? Toasty. Old Toyota Camrys? Covered in dents (especially on the rear bumper). And yet, somehow, this 2000-ish Honda CR-V that I spotted in Santa Monica, California is absolutely mint. Let’s have a look.
It’s not easy to keep a commuter car in great condition, especially if that commuter is an SUV from the 1990s, the era of sun-fading clearcoat and plastic cladding. Between the brutal red ball in the sky and the general chaos of LA traffic, especially in the last 15 years since smartphones made distracted driving all too prevalent, keeping a commuter looking minty fresh is nontrivial.
It’s for this reason that I respect this baby seat-equipped CR-V more than I would a nice Lamborghini or Porsche or Ferrari; keeping this CR-V minty is not only challenging, but it’s not really beneficial financially. A minty supercar is worth a lot, but a minty CR-V? Well, for most of the last 25 years, it hasn’t been worth much, but with Bring a Trailer and early aughts cars catching on…maybe this owner could reap the rewards of his/her diligence.
Anyway, just look at those plastics! And that bright red paint!
The clearcoat is perfect, and those headlights! Look at how clear those lights are! Either those are new, or this vehicle has sat in a garage almost all of its life:
Behold that perfect rear bumper and spare tire carrier:
I can’t stop looking at this thing:
Strangely, I saw this perfect Honda CR-V shortly before I spotted a daily-driven Dodge Viper beater. LA is a weird, weird place.
I wonder how many miles it has on it. DT, did you happen to look through the windows at the odometer?
The wheels look remarkably clean and un-rashed for a car that old.
I’ve always heard that cars living their whole lives in SoCal often look weirdly mint even when old. Add to that a meticulous person who gets their car regularly detailed and I suspect this is what you’d get.
this is obviously not the original paint. the red pops through the gap between QP and rear bumper.
My dad bought a 1998 CR-V new. It was handed down from my dad to my sister to two different cousins and lasted somewhere north of 350,000 miles (the odometer was the only thing that broke on it to my knowledge) before we got rid of it sometime around 2018 or so. I loved the contemporary-Japanese (at the time) look it had.
I also remember getting out the picnic table it came with the day my dad brought it home it and dropping it on the ground, lightly denting the plastic. My dad was not very happy about that, but I don’t believe the picnic table ever made its way out of the car again and was forgotten about.
As a kid I would point out other CR-Vs I saw on the road as a little game we played, especially white ones, because that was not a color available until 1999, so it seemed more special!
I think Honda odometers are known to be designed to stop counting at 299,999, so even that probably didn’t actually break.
Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe has entered the chat….