I often ask myself the most asinine, who-gives-a-shit car-related questions possible. I actively ponder things like the key chime of a Honda Accord and get lost in thought about the horn tone of a Mk6 VW Jetta. Is it just me? Well, there’s at least one other person who’s with me, and that is Honda Accord Guy 05 on YouTube.
Much of popular automotive YouTube seems to be typical influencer dribble. You can’t go three clicks without tripping over titles like, “I bought the cheapest X in Y country,” but there is still hope yet. We all have our favorite nitty-gritty YouTubers, and Honda Accord Guy 05 is my newest find. He answers the questions I have at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night and makes it easy and fun to watch in the process.
There’s no gimmicky music, no terrible shouting, no front-camera, and all good vibes. It’s refreshingly clean and simple and even has the undertones of camp. Honda Accord Guy takes himself just seriously enough that the love and appreciation for the weird stuff oozes out of the screen in earnest. You can even hear the nascent joy in his voice as he talks about deeply mundane cars like a base Subaru Outback.
What I love even more is the detail. No, not detailed engineering explanations or math. Instead, he always shoots at least three takes for the startup, gauge sweep, chime, and any extraneous graphics on the infotainment screen. It speaks to me because I really do care about that sort of stuff. On my own GTI, I coded in the gauge sweeping function, and I love how my bi-xenon headlights self-calibrate on startup. Similarly, I believe Subaru does the best gauge sweep, and it’s comforting to know I have a companion out there who cares about it just as much as I do.
Even the name Honda Accord Guy 05 is innocent and utilitarian. It’s a great car, he probably owns one, and it implies immediate dependability to the channel. You could almost mistake it for a YouTube bot, but he’s for real. His walkarounds of various normal cars make for superior vanilla time-wasting, but his real magnum opera will be his compilation videos.
This guy does have an angle, and it’s a very loud one. Though, loud in a literal sense, not in the way other channels decorate their thumbnails (“I BOUGHT WHAT?!”). This angle is “My Car Horns Part 3” videos in which he puts 12 minutes of horns from cars he has reviewed into a mega-edit. Another great one serves up 38 minutes of “Every Startup On My Channel,” which is a mega-edit of every single car he has started on the channel. The best ones, though, are the “key chime compilation” and “every honda civic key chime” videos that are filled with exactly what the titles say.
I love it to bits, and it’s a great reminder to be less jaded in life. These videos are subtle suggestions to love the grittiest random stuff about cars with pride.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go plug in my VW OEM diagnostic computer and listen to all the warning chimes my car can make and run some gratuitous gauge calibrations for fun. This is where I ask commenters to share if they know about any more channels like this, because for real, we would love to see them.
