Originally Posted by 
buddah51au
				 
			Primetime, please allow me to respond to your comment, & those with similar thoughts from a technical point of view. What I am about to say is not meant to be offensive to anyone, rather to inform those outside the industry how problems like this are dealt with within the industry.
Firstly, cars like the Accord Euro are low volume sellers, i would guess around 100 cars a month Australia wide, but i stand correcting on that figure. Honda Australia being strictly importers of a product would have very little, if any input into into the design specifications of the car. 
In this case there was a problem with engine pinging on some vehicles under certain driving conditions. I think the CU2 was released in June 08, so lets hazard a guess that it was 4 to 6 weeks before HA started to get some feedback on this problem. They would have noted it at that time but needed more feedback to realise that in fact the was a definate problem, so I would hazzard a guestimate of 6 months before they had sufficient complaints to contact Honda Japan to let them know there was a definate problem over a number of vehicles.
From there Honda Japan would have sent over a couple of technicians to evaluate the cars under Australian conditions. From there they would have gone back to head office in Japan with thier findings. They would then have to replicate the problem within their technical department, probably on both an engine dyno & a chassis dyno. That would be the easy part, but time wise probably about 9 months after the release of the car in this country.
Once they could isolate the problem & find the cause, they then have to find a remedy and try different components, design & test those components until they found a suitable solution. That would have covered the replacement knock sensor we are getting. They then have to rewrite the software which turned out to be a comprehensive update, this would not have been a 5 minute job. Once they felt they had found a remedy for the problem a few technicians would have returned to Australia, applied the update to a few cars and extensively road tested those cars. I believe it would have taken 2 or 3 efforts of the above process until they were happy that they had a suitable update that could be released through the dealerships.
The update has been available now for about 2 months, so that would be 14 months after the initial release of the CU2, but more than likely about 8 months since they were notified of the problem by Honda Australia. (these time frames are approximate). After spending more time in the industry than I care to admit, i am personally suprised they found a solution as quick as they did. 
They are my thoughts alone and I am not affiliated in any way with Honda. I have seen many worse problems than we have faced on cars far more expensive than a Euro that have never been solved.