Honda faces a lemon-law trial over claims its cars brake without warning

Eduardo and Celia Espinosa say the automatic braking system in their 2020 Honda CR-V and 2021 Honda Insight stopped the cars when nothing was in the way, and that dealers brushed off their complaints for years. The California couple is suing American Honda Motor Co. under the state’s lemon law in San Bernardino County Superior Court, and Honda disputes their account of what the cars did and why.

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The case turns on the Collision Mitigation Braking System, known as CMBS, which uses sensors to apply the brakes when the car judges a crash is coming. Honda is hardly alone in fitting such technology, but this dispute poses an uncomfortable question about what a manufacturer owes owners when the safety feature itself is the thing they say is broken, and a trial is where that question gets tested against sensor logs, service records and the memories of two owners who kept driving the cars. Lemon-law cases like this one usually hinge on whether the dealer had a fair chance to fix the defect and failed.

Autoblog reported on Nov. 5 that the Espinosas allege Honda’s distributor violated California’s Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act by refusing to replace or refund the two vehicles. The couple also says Honda has no established internal process for handling complaints about the system, which their lawyer argues is a separate violation of the same statute. Autoblog drew its account from a trial report by CVN, which streams court proceedings gavel to gavel, and it left out the court and the trial date, which CVN’s page supplies.

Song-Beverly claims before Judge Joseph Widman

According to CVN’s trial coverage, the case is Espinosa v. American Honda Motor Co. Inc., No. CIVSB2206449, with Judge Joseph Widman presiding. The plaintiffs allege breach of contract and willful violation of the lemon law, based on two vehicles whose CMBS sensors allegedly kept triggering hard braking at unexpected moments. The Insight was later totaled when another car hit it while it was parked.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Roger Kirnos of Knight Law Group told the court that Honda “shirked its obligations under the law and literally did nothing.” Autoblog adds that the Espinosas say they did not know their cars even had automated braking, or how it worked, until the unexplained stops began.

Honda’s defense: a driver’s foot was on the brake

Honda’s lawyer, Mike Hurvitz of Nelson Mullins, conceded in the CVN account that the system “can apply brakes when there is little to no chance of a collision under certain circumstances.” He then argued that in every single recorded incident the driver’s foot was already on the brake pedal when the car applied its brakes, a point meant to show the system was not acting entirely alone and that the drivers contributed to the stops. The framing concedes the odd braking happened while arguing it was not a defect Honda must remedy.

Autoblog’s summary of Honda’s position goes further. The automaker points out that the couple each drove more than 100,000 miles within six years and kept driving after they filed suit, and that they bought the CR-V off-lease knowing it was a lemon. The outlet does not quote a Honda spokesperson or print a formal company statement.

A jury already sided with Honda earlier in 2026 in a separate eight-year class action over 2017-2019 CR-V models and 2018-2020 Accords, which had argued the system was flawed across the whole fleet. That verdict does not bind the Espinosa case, but it shows the company has defended the technology successfully before a jury, and Honda’s lawyers will likely lean on it in public even if the Espinosa panel never hears the result.

NHTSA engineering analysis EA24002 and the wider fleet

The courtroom fight sits beside a federal one. Autoblog says NHTSA opened its investigation after 278 complaints and later widened it to nearly 3 million vehicles, linking 47 crashes and 93 injuries to the problem, though the coverage says only that the crashes and injuries were possibly related. The scale matters because a lemon verdict for two owners can be dismissed as an outlier while a federal count of that size cannot. The agency’s own EA24002 resume covers 2017-2022 CR-V and 2018-2022 Accord models and counts 1,294 consumer complaints of inadvertent CMBS activation, of which 31 alleged a crash and 50 an injury.

NHTSA’s document is careful about causation. It notes that some customers may have had an inadequate understanding of the system’s limits and that many dealerships could not reproduce the condition, which echoes the Espinosas’ account of being turned away at service departments. Across unique vehicle identification numbers, the agency counts 47 crashes and 93 injury incidents that may relate to the alleged defect.

Context cuts both ways. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has found, per Autoblog’s roundup of two studies, that automatic emergency braking cuts rear-end crashes by about half. Yet an Erie Insurance survey found 17% of drivers had switched the feature off, a habit that false activations tend to encourage.

What remains open is whether NHTSA’s engineering analysis ends in a recall request, and whether the San Bernardino court treats the Espinosas’ two vehicles as proof of a defect or as individual cases. Neither Autoblog nor CVN reported a verdict or a trial end date as of Nov. 6.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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