Overall, I’d be thrilled to commute in this – the mileage wasn’t half bad either. The ride quality and noise at speed on those interstates was less like a Toyota Tacoma (or my beloved A/T-bedecked Hiace that got me out here to Southern California) and more like a tall sedan, which I appreciated in my hundreds of miles criss-crossing the sprawl of the city back and forth to visit friends and check out car shows. It does not feel like a truck, and to be clear, this is a compliment.
Sure, there are the numbers that convey this – it does boast the best shoulder room in the midsize truck class (62.0 inches in front and 61.5 in back) – but the actual feel of being in a truck built off a crossover platform does it huge favors. And the Ridgeline’s cabin and seating scores well for me. The average commuter in Los Angeles loses six days and twenty three hours of their life per year to traffic jams, so it’s not an idle question. A city criss-crossed with freeways and dotted with strip malls and tight suburban streets where parallel parking is the only option – yet surrounded with desolate, desert mountains – is more or less the ideal location to evaluate a truck as people actually use them. Luckily, when I picked up the Ridgeline (a base Sport model, equipped with the HPD performance package, that gives it those radical-looking gold wheels and machismo-without-aggression fender flares), I was in Los Angeles. Living out of a truck feels like the most intense test of its functionality possible. It should perform as a competent off-roader with plenty of bed space for whatever the owner needs, while still recognizing that most of the miles it will ever see in its lifetime will be on the freeway or around town, performing the mundane tasks all cars suffer through before they’re allowed a chance to shine in their natural biome.
#Truck camper boondocking images full
And throw in the much-bemoaned unibody facet, when most competitors still soldier on with the more antiquated but very robust body-on-frame style of construction, and the Ridgeline has been dismissed for a significant portion of its life.Ī truck is not usually the best vehicle for these activities, but it is legitimately the best choice for going hunting or driving dirt roads with a bed full of tools out to a pipeline, and owners suffer through the downsides of truck ownership in order to enjoy those moments where their truck fulfills their five-percent-of-the-time use cases for them with no complaints.Ī good truck, therefore, needs to cover as many bases as possible. The Ridgeline’s payload capacity leads the small/midsize truck segment by a whopping 23 pounds over the Ford Ranger and Colorado, which translates to about one extra cinder block carried. This is respectable, but translates to a dismal 5,000-pound towing capacity, which trails the competition significantly – the V6-equipped Chevrolet Colorado can haul 2,600 pounds more for a similar price.Īs always, the Ridgeline is available solely with a 3.5-liter V6, good for 280 horsepower and 262 pound-feet of torque. As always, it’s available solely with a 3.5-liter V6, good for 280 horsepower and 262 pound-feet of torque, which puts it midpack in the midsize truck category. Not helping the Ridgeline is that it’s not memorable on paper. We’re getting spoiled, so we tend to look with a disparaging eye at vehicles that are intentionally marketed as jacks-of-all-trades, as though covering more use cases is a bad thing. Off-roaders get external shock fluid reservoirs and absurd articulation to assist them as they hit the double black trails at Moab. Sports cars, for example, are lowered and stiffened and strung ever-tighter to shave down extra tenths of a second around the local road course. As enthusiasts, we have a tendency to make our cars hyper-specialized. People have mocked the unibody Ridgeline as not truck enough since its inception. So with the green light to tackle some serious trails, I was itching to hit the dirt and see how the refreshed Ridgeline stacked up as a truck. They’re on the ones labeled “4WD” with tire tracks that date back to the Carter presidency. The good dispersed camping spots aren’t found on pavement nor on neatly manicured trails. So when Honda asked me if I wanted a new Ridgeline to review, the first question I asked was, “Is it alright if I go off-roading in it?” But no, really, off-roading.
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