Honda Drive (D) Shift Indicator Light Flashing

To ensure that your last question doesn’t happen — damage — my first suggestion is this, take your car to your Honda dealer and have his techs take a look. They are the people most experienced with handling Hondas (or they are supposed to be), so it makes sense. It is true that you will find dealers tend to be the most expensive service areas, however, they do make up for that expense in an important area — return warranties.

Yes, most service areas will give you a service warranty where they will continue to work and attempt to fix a problem. But — it’s a big but — there comes a time when an independent shop may throw up its hands and say go to your dealer — not a great endorsement of some independents (it’s not all of them, by any means) but it is nevertheless true.

Dealers, on the other hand, while, as noted, expensive have to keep on working the issue until they fix it. There are a couple of reasons they do this:

• Public relations: Imagine what would happen to a dealer’s reputation if his mechanics said after a couple of visits: “Take it elsewhere for repairs, we can’t fix it!” The dealer’s reputation would be in tatters quite quickly especially when Social Media gets their hands on it. They will have a field day.
• Reputation: It may seem like this is a repeat of the first note, but it isn’t. A dealer’s reputation and customer service reputation is what sets it apart from other dealers. If they blow it, it will quickly be spread far and wide. However, if they work the issue and solve it — which does happen, eventually — then they gain bragging rights and enhance their rep.

Getting back to your central issue, your tranny’s poor performance. The Drive light flashing means that the Transmission Control Module (TCM) is reporting an error the the Engine Control Module (ECM) continuously.

There are two likely reasons it is on, the torque converter is having issues or your transmission is down on fluid. Of the two, I think the most likely is that your transmission is probably down a quart or so.

You can have the dealership perform the work — they would be glad to do it — or you can do it yourself.

We have information that will help you at Checking Your Transmission Fluid Level.” Take a look at it and see how you can measure the level of your Odyssey’s fluid. Don’t worry about the steps in replacing the fluid because you won’t be doing that.

It should take care of your problem. Let me know what happens as I like to hear from my readers to see if there are followup issues.