DIY: Replacing the 4th-gen Honda City's horn

As drivers we honk to let others know of our position with respect to them. It's a sort of communication on the road.

BHPian viXit recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Rant + DIY

I love good pics, so let's start this off with what I think is one. This is my Honda City, and how I changed it's stupid set of horns.

A world of white cars! @RGIA Arrivals ramp.

As drivers we honk to let others know of our position with respect to them. It's a sort of communication on the road. Short beep-Hi there! Long Honk -Get out of my way, and many more. Sometimes maybe honk at someone to vent, don't do this though. But us Honda owners, we honk to get ourselves embarassed. Every honk no matter how long or how many times, means only one thing. "Dominate me!". These are Hella dual tone horns but honestly, Activas have better horns. But I was learning to live with it. Then saw LeoShashi's thread. Related to his incident a lot. If not for anything else, for safety, wanted to change the set of horns on my car. Opted for a pair of Bosch Symphony horns. Unfortunately, the ordeal of changing the horns was just as irritating as the meek horn is to me.

Stupid Honda gave us a terrible horn and made our life hard as is is, but in addition to that, made it impossible to change the horn reliably without cutting the Horn's wiring harness.

Add to all this, the Horns are of terrible quality where it matters. There are two horns situated on the drivers side of the car behind the bumper. Marked in the locations below.

The fog lamp has a cut out next to it to aid audibility of the horns. The passenger side fog lamp doesn't have any cut out next to it.

Driver side with cutout.

Passenger side with no grille.

Coming to the quality of the horn, it fails very often. Many Honda city owners have had their horns replaced under warranty several times. We've had it fail twice. This is the third replacement from Honda that I will be removing and replacing with Bosch ones. I noticed it sounding strained, changed the horn and battery both.

If you look closely through the grille, you will observe how the horn is rusting away badly. My car is about 5 years old, hardly has 25k kms on it, and is parked in a dry, covered and closed parking  and this is the second warranty replacement in case I haven't mentioned it earlier.

Forgot to add that I have a rust spot on the roof too. Just like many other Honda owners who have terribly rusted wheel arches and fenders. Hondas and rust go hand in hand nowadays.

The new horns I'm using.

Cars are DC circuits after all, polarities do matter. But horns are speakers, they get their signal in an AC like fashion, You'll get sound from a speaker even in a wrong polarity, but it will be out of phase with other speakers and kill bass. Standard horns have two terminals but the Honda horn has only one conductor in it's proprietary horn connector. This connector is a major pain in the tailpipe  It's a sealed waterproof type connector with a rubber vapor shield and all that jazz but the horn itself is of horrendous quality which will fail on you. The horn is grounded by the mounting hardware and +ve is from the harness (stupid honda horn connector).

Pic from sam003's post.

This is where the connector plugs in, you can see the single metal pin that makes contact. Horn side is shown.

Other BHPians have tried, but everyone has either cut or tapped into the wire. I couldn't bring myself to do that.

Continue reading viXit's experience for more insights, information and BHPian comments.