A couple weeks ago while driving up a mountain in 100 deg heat, my RL just died. Felt like an old car vapor locking. We were at about 7000ft elevation, hot out and I was pushing the car a bit to make time. It cooled off a little and restarted, but wouldn’t keep running for long. A long tow truck ride home followed. A quick search here showed that there was a factory service bulletin about this exact issue. I ordered a new Denso pump, installed it (super easy!) and it’s fixed and running better than ever.

The pump is under the drivers side of the back seat, 20-30 minutes total installation. Be careful to get the fuel line lock clip off of the old pump or you may end up with a puddle of gas on the ground like I did.

Hope this helps the next guy who’s RL dies on a hot day in the mountains!

 

Nice piece, thanks. These babies are gettin' on in years and very creative in the ways they can fail. Cheers.

 

When we were sitting on the road side I searched for the cause of the problem, it brought me right back here!

These are getting old, but at 140k mine is still a great driving car. The breakdown was a surprise but finding out that a known problem from 19 years ago was just now happening actually made me feel even better about the car. A few years ago I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee (WJ) that had a number of factory service bulletins, on that car I had to fix the same problem several times in the 7 years I owned it, sometimes inventing a better fix so that it would stay fixed.

Honda/Acura works to a higher standard.

 

Update: It’s fixed and runs better than ever. My pump must have been failing slowly over the years. After installing the new pump I had a check engine light for a couple days, it cleared itself after a few hot/cold cycles and a hundred or so miles.