American CR-V vs. European

[dabel]

Hello everybody from Slovakia/Mid Europe,

as a very lucky driver of the latest Accord 2.4i, I'm just considering buying a used CR-V for my wife. Looking through the ads, I found a CR-V 2.4i imported from US: it's a 2004 model, 156HP.

To be exact, this is the car that I found:
http://www.autovia.sk/auto_honda-cr-v_244882.htm

And now my questions:
- are the spare parts the same for the CR-Vs sold in Europe and America CR-Vs? In Europe, only 2.0i was sold in 2004. The question is: are the spare parts for the 2004 CR-V fully compatible?
- are the CR-V sold in US built in Japan? This would be a real advantage because all the CR-Vs sold in Europe are built in UK
- this car has an automatic gearbox. Is it 5 gear or only a 4-gear one? The european 2.0i automatic version has only 4 gears and I read everywhere that the gearbox is giving the car quite a poor performance compared to the manual gearbox. Has anybody tried to compare the performance of a 2.0i with manual gear box and the 2.4i with automatic?

Thanks a lot in advance for any information and sorry for any mistakes in English :)

[bush555]

American CR-Vs come from both Japan and England. On Japanese-built models the vehicle identification number begins with J. On British models it begins with S.

The automatic transmission has four gears, but performance should be better with the 2.4i. The Honda Element uses the same drivetrain and, though heavier, performs very nicely.

American and European CR-Vs are largely the same, but I would discuss parts issues with a Honda service representative. As the U.S. model's K24A1 engine isn't sold in Europe (though is similar to the Accord's K24A3), certain parts may be more difficult to obtain.

Best of luck! Keep us informed.

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