Last night my 2002 Civic's transmission failed suddenly as I was going up a hill. The car was going from 2nd to 3rd gear as I was going up a hill, but failed to change gears, revving but no change. Put my foot off the accelerator a bit (to see if the car would go up in 2nd, albeit slowly), but still it revved. Took my foot off to avoid any further damage and stopped the car on the road, turned it off and back on again (including putting it into park), but the car would not move (it would rev, but no movement, even in reverse). In the end I had to roll the car back down the hill to pull into somewhere that wasn't blocking traffic.

Called NRMA, mechanic came, checked transmission fluid, battery etc (all good), then took the car for a 'test drive' (this was after about an hour). It worked for about 10 seconds as normal, but then reverted back to revving with no acceleration. Ended up getting the car towed to my mechanic, but he's not open until Monday, so the car is currently parked on the road outside.

A bit of Googling tells me that it's likely to be a transmission failure and will require a rebuild, and that this is very common with 2001-2002 Civics at about 160,000km (mine passed that milestone this month). Don't think there was ever a recall by Honda to fix this issue. What I'd like to know is if anyone here has had this issue, and what kind of money I'd be looking at to get it fixed. I'm not going to take it to Honda to fix (as I know this would be very expensive), I'd be going with a local mechanic who specialises in Hondas.