The Honda phantom braking lawsuit is a class action alleging that the Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) in certain Honda CR-V and Accord models slams on the brakes when nothing is in the road. A jury rejected those claims on April 17, 2026 and found for Honda (CarComplaints, 2026).
Phantom braking is what drivers call it when a car’s automatic emergency braking (AEB) system fires with no obstacle ahead. Picture cruising at 65 on an empty stretch of interstate. Bright afternoon. Nothing in front of you but asphalt and a bridge shadow. Then the car decides the shadow is a wall and stands on the brakes.
Your coffee becomes a ceiling decoration. The pickup behind you becomes a very close friend. Nobody hit anything, so there is no police report, no insurance claim, and no proof. Just a driver with a racing heart wondering what happened.
Honda calls its automatic emergency braking system the Collision Mitigation Braking System, or CMBS. It uses a camera, a radar sensor, and software to spot obstacles ahead and brake if the driver does not (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024). CMBS is part of the Honda Sensing package.
The case that went to trial covered the 2017-2019 Honda CR-V and the 2018-2020 Honda Accord equipped with CMBS, bought new from an authorized Honda dealership in one of eight states (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024).
That is a much narrower group than most headlines suggested. The original 2018 complaint targeted Honda Sensing as a whole, including Road Departure Mitigation, Adaptive Cruise Control with Low-Speed Follow, and Lane Keeping Assist. By trial, only CMBS was left standing (CarComplaints, 2026).
| Class element | What the court certified |
| Vehicles | 2017-2019 Honda CR-V and 2018-2020 Honda Accord equipped with CMBS |
| Purchase type | Purchased new from an authorized Honda dealership |
| States | California, Florida, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, Arizona, Iowa |
| Excluded vehicles | Vehicles listed as fleet orders in Honda’s sales data |
| Excluded claims | Personal injury, property damage, and subrogation claims |
| Opt-out deadline | January 27, 2025 (passed) |
Source: Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda Motor Co., Inc., 2024.
Notice what is missing from that table. Leases. Used purchases. Certified pre-owned buys. Vehicles bought in the other 42 states. The Pilot, Passport, Odyssey, Insight, and every other Honda that also uses automatic emergency braking. If you own a newer model, our breakdowns of 2023 Honda Pilot problems and 2025 Honda CR-V Hybrid problems cover what owners are reporting outside this case.
Honda won because the jury accepted a specific argument, that an imperfect driver assistance system is not the same thing as a legally defective one. The company pointed to owner’s manual language describing the limits of automatic braking and to the button that turns the system off (Autoblog, 2026).
Honda did not argue that phantom braking never happens. It argued that occasional false activations do not make the product defective under the law, and that CMBS prevents far more rear-end crashes than it causes (Autoblog, 2026).
Honda also raised credibility problems with the plaintiffs’ side. One plaintiff had sold his Accord to CarMax without disclosing the braking complaint or the pending lawsuit. Others said the defect made them stop driving the car entirely, even though the system can be switched off with a single button (Autoblog, 2026).
After the verdict, American Honda said the evidence at trial did not match how CMBS performs in ordinary driving, and welcomed the jury’s decision (American Honda statement, 2026).
Eight years of litigation. Ten named plaintiffs. Two law firms, Gibbs Law Group LLP and Greenstone Law APC, appointed as class counsel (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024). Zero dollars for the class.
The jury verdict ended the lawsuit. It did not end the federal safety investigation, which is a separate process run by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and remains open in 2026 (The Crash Report, 2026).
This is the single most useful fact for a Honda owner right now, and almost every article about the verdict skipped it. Courts decide whether a company owes money. NHTSA decides whether a vehicle gets recalled. Those two questions travel on completely different tracks, and one does not decide the other.
Here is where the federal side actually stands.
| Investigation | Vehicles covered | Population | Reports on file | Status |
| PE22-003, opened February 2022 | 2017-2019 CR-V, 2018-2019 Accord | About 1.7 million | 278 complaints | Upgraded in 2024 |
| EA24-002, opened April 2024 | 2017-2022 CR-V, 2018-2022 Accord | 2,997,604 | 1,294 complaints, 47 crashes, 93 injury incidents | Open |
| EA25-002, opened January 2025 | 2019-2022 Insight, 2019-2023 Passport | 295,125 | 106 complaints, 475 unique-VIN reports, 3 crashes, 2 injuries | Open |
Sources: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation resumes for PE22-003, EA24-002, and EA25-002, 2022-2025.
An engineering analysis is the last stage before regulators can push for a recall (Associated Press, 2024). Honda has not been ordered to recall anything for phantom braking, and the agency has not closed either file.
One detail from the EA24-002 paperwork deserves a full stop. Honda told regulators that some customers may not have understood how CMBS works and what it cannot do. Owners told regulators the opposite story, that dealerships could not reproduce the problem or told them the sudden stops were normal operation (NHTSA ODI, 2024).
If a dealer has ever handed you a repair order that says “no problem found,” that paragraph is your entire experience summarized in a federal document. Our guide to what happens when a dealership cannot fix your car walks through what that repair order is worth later.
Not automatically. Whether the verdict affects you depends on three things: where you bought the vehicle, whether you fall inside the class definition, and what kind of claim you are bringing.
Class members who stayed in the case are bound by the judgment on the claims that were decided in it (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024). Anyone who filed a valid exclusion form before January 27, 2025 kept the right to sue on their own.
Three groups are worth separating out, because they get lumped together constantly.
People who were never in the class. If you bought used, leased, bought outside the eight states, or own a different model, the class definition never reached you. Our guides to lemon laws for used cars and leased car mechanical problems explain how those situations work.
People with injury or property damage claims. The class notice states plainly that claims for personal injury, property damage, and subrogation were excluded from the class (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024). A verdict on an economic loss theory does not resolve a claim by someone who was hurt when a car stopped on a freeway.
People with an individual warranty or lemon law claim about their own vehicle. A class action asks whether a product design was defective across millions of vehicles. A lemon law claim asks a much smaller question: whether one specific car came back to the shop for the same problem over and over during the warranty period and never got fixed.
That difference matters more than it sounds. If you are trying to understand how class actions and individual claims interact, our walkthrough of how to join a transmission class action lawsuit covers the same mechanics in a different case.
Because the answer turns on your purchase paperwork and your repair history, this is a question to put to an attorney before you assume the door is closed.
A class action resolves one legal question for a large group at once. A lemon law claim resolves one vehicle’s repair history for one owner. The two systems ask different questions, use different evidence, and pay out differently.
| Feature | Class action | State lemon law claim |
| Who it covers | Everyone meeting the class definition | You and your specific vehicle |
| Core question | Was the product defective as designed | Did the manufacturer fail to repair your car in a reasonable number of attempts? |
| Main evidence | Engineering analysis, internal documents, statistics | Your repair orders, days out of service, warranty records |
| Typical outcome | Small per-owner payment, or nothing | Buyback, replacement, or cash compensation, plus attorney fees in most states |
| Your control | Almost none, class counsel drives it | You decide whether to file, settle, or push forward |
| Time to resolve | Often many years | Commonly a few months to a year |
The Cadena case ran from May 2018 to April 2026 and produced nothing for the class (PacerMonitor, 2018; CarComplaints, 2026). Meanwhile, individual lemon law claims filed and resolved during those same eight years quietly delivered buybacks to owners one at a time. Our page on how long a lemon law case takes sets realistic expectations.
Both federal and state protections may apply. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act is the federal warranty law that often runs alongside a state claim, and our guide to the federal lemon law explains how.
Phantom braking can qualify if it substantially impairs the use, value, or safety of your vehicle and the dealer failed to fix it within the repair attempts your state allows. Safety defects usually get the shortest leash, meaning fewer attempts are required before a claim ripens.
Most state lemon laws share the same skeleton. A defect covered by the manufacturer warranty, a reasonable number of repair attempts or a total number of days out of service, and written notice to the manufacturer. The details vary a lot by state, which is why how many repairs are needed before a lemon law claim is the question we get most often.
Two things make braking complaints harder than a leaking sunroof, and both have workarounds.
The first is reproducibility. Phantom braking is intermittent by nature, so the dealer test drive comes back clean and the repair order says no fault found. That repair order still counts as a documented attempt. Do not skip the service visit because you assume it will be pointless.
The second is the fact that CMBS can be turned off. Honda leaned on that at trial (Autoblog, 2026). If you disabled the system and stopped complaining, you also stopped building a record. Report it, in writing, every time.
If your Honda has been in the shop repeatedly, how long a dealership can hold your car for repair explains how days out of service factor into a claim.
Start by building the paper trail, because a lemon law claim is won or lost on documentation rather than on how frightening the incident felt.
For the eight states that were in the class action, our state pages cover the local rules that would apply to an individual claim in California, Florida, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, Arizona, and Iowa. Owners in every other state can start at our state lemon law directory.
A lemon law buyback typically returns the purchase price, taxes, registration, and finance charges, minus a mileage offset for the miles you drove before the defect first appeared. Some states also allow civil penalties when a manufacturer refuses a valid claim without a reasonable basis.
Owners often assume the math will not be worth the trouble. Then they run the numbers on a vehicle they still owe money against and find the offset is smaller than expected. Our lemon law buyback calculator gives you a working estimate in a few minutes.
Cost is the other reason people hesitate. In most states, lemon law statutes shift attorney fees to the manufacturer when the consumer wins, which is why these cases are usually handled with nothing due upfront. Our page on what lemon law attorneys cost breaks down the fee structure.
Automatic emergency braking is now standard on nearly every new vehicle sold in the United States, so a jury’s view of when a driver assistance system becomes legally defective reaches well past two Honda models.
NHTSA adopted Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 127 in May 2024, requiring automatic emergency braking, pedestrian automatic emergency braking, and forward collision warning on all new light vehicles by September 1, 2029, with small-volume manufacturers given until September 1, 2030 (Federal Register, 2024). Industry litigation over that rule is pending in the D.C. Circuit and has been held in abeyance, while the 2029 compliance date remains in place (Nelson Mullins, 2026).
Similar phantom braking complaints have drawn regulator attention across multiple automakers, and Honda alone has two open engineering analyses covering different model families (NHTSA ODI, 2024; NHTSA ODI, 2025). The Cadena verdict gives manufacturers a data point to cite. It does not give them a recall exemption, and it does not decide the next case.
It is a class action claiming the Collision Mitigation Braking System in certain CR-V and Accord models brakes hard when no obstacle is present. Filed in 2018 and consolidated as Cadena v. American Honda Motor Co., Inc., it went to trial in 2026 and a jury found for Honda (CarComplaints, 2026).
Honda won. A federal jury in the Central District of California returned a verdict for the company on April 17, 2026, ending the case after eight years without any payment to the class (CarComplaints, 2026).
The lawsuit covered the 2017-2019 CR-V and 2018-2020 Accord. The open NHTSA investigations reach further, covering 2017-2022 CR-V and 2018-2022 Accord under EA24-002, and 2019-2022 Insight and 2019-2023 Passport under EA25-002 (NHTSA ODI, 2024; NHTSA ODI, 2025).
No recall has been ordered for phantom braking in the CR-V, Accord, Insight, or Passport. Both NHTSA engineering analyses remain open, and an engineering analysis is the final stage before regulators can seek a recall (NHTSA ODI, 2024; Associated Press, 2024).
It depends on your situation. Class members are bound on the claims decided at trial, but personal injury, property damage, and subrogation claims were excluded from the class, and people who bought used, leased, bought outside the eight class states, or opted out by January 27, 2025 were never bound (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024). Have an attorney review your paperwork.
The class covered original purchasers of a new 2017-2019 CR-V or 2018-2020 Accord with CMBS bought from an authorized dealer in California, Florida, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, Arizona, or Iowa. Fleet-designated vehicles were excluded. The court-authorized administrator maintains a helpline at 1-833-657-4900 (Court-authorized class notice, Cadena v. American Honda, 2024).
It can. Braking defects go to safety, and most state lemon laws treat safety defects as qualifying when the manufacturer cannot repair them within the attempts the statute allows. Documented repair visits matter more than the severity of any single incident.
That is a safety decision to discuss with your dealer, and it has a legal consequence worth knowing. Turning the system off and staying quiet stops the repair record from growing, which weakens a later claim. If you disable it, keep reporting the underlying problem in writing.
A jury verdict in someone else’s case is not a ruling on your car. If your CR-V, Accord, Pilot, Passport, or Insight has been back to the dealer for unexplained braking and the problem is still there, the repair orders sitting in your glovebox may be worth more than you think.
Lemon My Vehicle connects Honda owners across the country with lemon law attorneys who handle these claims. Case reviews are free and most lemon law cases are handled with no fee unless you win.
Start your free case review or submit your repair documents for a review.
This article is general information about vehicle defect litigation and lemon law rights. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Laws and case status change, so consult a licensed attorney in your state about your situation.
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