We are having some trouble with our 2003 CR-V LX/4WD AT. It has 240,000 miles, and I really want to get to 300,000. But we have an issue during summertime months where it won't start after sitting at the grocery store or gas station for 5-10 minutes. Battery and starter are fine. It seems that when the engine is hot, starting is intermittent. My wife reports an "odor" sometimes when this happens (which I am guessing is fuel) but I have never had this happen to me, so no clue. Any ideas?

 

Reminds me of the classic main relay bad soldering problem but I will let others chime in with more experienced opinions.

 

You're going to recieve a variety of suggestions given the lack of maintenance history you provided.

Google: general problems surrounding no start conditions for cars. Eric the car guy is entertaining http://www.ericthecarguy.com/faq/solving-automotive-no-start-problem

Only you know how the car was maintained. Maybe its simply time for a tune up.

Pull the plugs after this happens. Are they saturated in gas? The fuel smell probably means yes. Which would mean you have gas but no fire. So it could be a weak spark, or no air. Is your air filter dirty?

240k is a lot of miles. Your injectors probably need a good cleaning.

You see where this is going right? May be this, or that.

Could be a temperature sensor issue.

 

How about passing diagnostics?

 

Precisely

 

I have had that issue. When the engine is cool I had no problem starting. Go for a quick stop to the gas station and it chugged and chugged to get started.

Coolant Temperature Sensor was bad. With a hot engine it was flooding the engine with gas and it was hard to start.

Bought a new sensor, took off the distributer, swapped the new part in and haven't had a hard start since. (2001 model)