Yahoo Autos 2017 Honda Ridgeline vs. Canada
From the October 2016 issue
As any erstwhile Bernie Bro will happily mansplain to you, Canada is already the superior nation to our own, which is why moving there is the only reasonable course of action once President Trump turns the White House into a casino resort with 36-hole mini-golf on the front lawn. Canadians have socialized medicine, lower rates of gun violence, and even a new carbon pricing initiative.
And no pennies.
That’s right; as of February 4, 2013, the Royal Canadian Mint stopped distributing the useless little pocket weights as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan 2012. So when you pay cash for your hockey gear at Canadian Tire, the cashier will just round your purchase to the closest nickel. Indeed, Canada really is a land of clever ideas! And its proximity—the border lies just 45 miles from our office—made it the perfect location to drive the new-for-2017 Honda Ridgeline. Here, in the shadow of General Motors’ headquarters, we would discern whether this unibody truck might, ahem, trump the American body-on-frame paradigm.
You will remember that the original Ridgeline, which was too clever by half, went out of production after the 2014 model year. Its major defect was that it looked weird, with origami-like buttresses that extended from the cab to the bedsides. So the new Ridgeline is now indistinguishable from a pickup truck. Or a pickup-truck emoji. Or one of those genericized toy pickup trucks that you give to your infant son to get an early jump on reinforcing prevailing gender stereotypes. But it’s definitely nothing like the first-generation Ridgeline.
Similarly, on the surface, Canada doesn’t look all that different from the United States. Emerging from the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel with morning rising out of the southeastern sky, we find things seem pretty much the same as on our side of the Detroit River. Which, confusingly enough, is actually to the north. But squinting against the sun, we spot the first clue that we’re in a foreign land: The cute little maple leaf in the center of McDonald’s Golden Arches. Spending the day driving around Ontario in the Ridgeline, we notice more signs, like ones with metric speed limits, confounding in that they make you feel as if you are going fast but also slow at the same time. Did you know that Canada has 100 percent more signs written in French than the U.S., and 100 percent fewer in Spanish? And that in Canada, old, sunbaked Dodge Intrepids are Chrysler Intrepids, though no less old and sunbaked?
Under our new Ridgeline’s conservative (no exposed exhaust pipes, natch) but not-at-all sunbaked skin is a platform once again shared with the Pilot and the next Odyssey, but beefed up for truck duty, with its 125.2-inch wheelbase extended by 14.2 inches over the three-row crossover and 3.2 inches beyond that of the original Ridgeline. The truck still features a composite and nigh-on indestructible bed with a lockable trunk and a two-way tailgate that can fold down as well as swing open. Only now, the bed can be turned into a giant speaker by virtue of Honda’s Truck Bed Audio system that uses small electric actuators to vibrate the panels so you can blast Rush in the parking lot before the next Argos game.
If the actual Ridgeline won’t have any problem being heard, it remains to be seen whether the pitch for this carlike truck will again fall on deaf ears. We would argue that truck buyers should listen, because there is no more civilized truck extant. The Ridgeline drives like an Accord, meaning better than any other pickup, from heavy-duty models to full-sizers to whatever we’re calling the smallish trucks that form the Ridgeline’s would-be competitive set.
That would include the Toyota Tacoma, the Nissan Frontier, and the Chevrolet Colorado/GMC Canyon twins, trucks more alike than different. None of these dominant players much resembles the Ridgeline beyond exterior appearances (i.e., they are all trucks). The Ridgeline is shorter, but at 210 inches long and weighing 4423 pounds, the “compact” label no longer fits. The industry refers to them as mid-size trucks, but we might better dredge up that old term “intermediate.” The Ridgeline still tows only 5000 pounds, 1400 to 2000 pounds less than the others, which really just points out that intermediates are not well suited for serious towing.
Bottom left: The watertight in-bed trunk accommodates the contents of a Molson suitcase. Bottom right: The infotainment system is not as accommodating.
The Ridgeline uses front struts and a multilink rear suspension tuned on the firm side, but passenger-car firm rather than truck firm. Compared with body-on-frame trucks with solid rear axles, this one rides like a memory-foam mattress pad atop a bed of sea sponges. And compared with its Pilot sibling, the Ridgeline is a dream. If you want proof that the pickup has truck parts and not wimpy minivan underpinnings, you need only drive them back to back. It feels as if Honda torqued down all the nuts in the Ridgeline by an extra 20 foot-pounds. The body leans and rolls little and hardly transmits small bumps, while larger impacts deal only initial jolts, the secondary motions stopped dead. The electrically assisted steering has good on-center feel, but it’s light and distant. At least it’s quick enough to make the Ridgeline nimble, and we pulled a strong 0.80 g on our skidpad, which is not a trucklike number.
Also not like a truck: The Ridgeline is quiet, its optional laminated windshield helping to produce a lower decibel reading in the cabin than in a Mercedes S-class, both at idle and at freeway-cruising speed. At full throttle, the 3.5-liter Honda V-6 gets louder, though as you close in on the 6750-rpm redline it starts sounding like a Vitamix. As we said, not like a truck.
The single-overhead-cam engine in the Ridgeline now makes 280 horsepower and 262 pound-feet of torque, the 30 extra ponies and 15 more pound-feet coming in part from direct injection and a higher compression ratio than in the old truck. And no, this is not a detuned Acura NSX motor; that 3.5-liter V-6 has twice as many camshafts and a 75-degree vee angle. The Ridgeline is not an NSX, but it is quicker than its competition, with 60 mph coming in just 6.6 seconds, a half-second ahead of the quickest V-6 Colorado we’ve tested, despite the Chevy having 305 horsepower.
Throttle response in the Ridgeline is perfect, with none of the calibrated-for-fuel-economy electronic lag that some modern vehicles exhibit. That is, as long as you don’t press the green “econ” button to the left of the steering wheel. We didn’t, yet we still averaged 21 mpg, matching the EPA combined rating. The Ridgeline’s six-speed transmission consistently shifts for power and performance, never straying more than a gear away from the powerband and kicking down with an immediacy that shames the Pilot’s optional nine-speed, which hunts for gears as if it’s brandishing a rifle and an Ontario Outdoors Card.
Like the Pilot’s, the Ridgeline’s all-wheel-drive system (standard on our test truck) has a variety of terrain modes that affect how torque is routed to the rear wheels, though, like most owners, our off-pavement forays included nothing more challenging than a gravel driveway.
The brakes are the least impressive part of the Ridgeline’s mechanical package. We recorded a competitive 195-foot stopping distance from 70 mph, but the pedal has the Pilot’s soft initial bite and too much travel. The carlike feel of the brakes matched to the trucklike braking performance meant we often found ourselves having to apply extra pressure to “catch up” while slowing down, thus narrowly avoiding an inadvertent redesign of the Ridgeline’s bland front fascia when a truck suddenly swerved into the Beer Store ahead of us.
It was at this hallmark of Canadian good ideas that we set out to test Honda’s good ideas regarding hauling stuff. For those unfamiliar with the Beer Store, this is Ontario’s way of eliminating that uncertainty over whether the gas station on the corner sells beer or that convenience store down the street has nice cold ones. Because up until December 2015, the Beer Store was the only place to buy beer (you can now pick up a six-pack at select grocery stores).
Fear of the customs officer had us stashing our 28-bottle case of Molson Canadian in the in-bed trunk for our return trip. But not before we noticed that the Ridgeline’s bed is rather shallow at only 18 inches deep compared with 20.9 in the Colorado. That’s the price you pay for the independent rear suspension. And the trunk, which we realized would cost hundreds of dollars to fill with ice only to have it all melt before we got home, is not actually a cooler but an uninsulated plastic bin, one that smells like a Chevy Corvette (it’s the plastic). Also: You can’t access the trunk when you’ve loaded something large into the bed, as your payload then blocks the lift-up lid. Still, the trunk is watertight and has a convenient drain plug.
Top right: Instead of using black bars to obscure identity, we prefer the 28-pack. Top left: Flip the rear seat, and voilà!—more beer storage.
The Ridgeline’s cab is pretty much taken right from the Pilot, and it’s something Honda got more than right, with cubbies and bins and cupholders, four USB ports, and a vast center-console compartment. And it’s no deer-camp experience—the cockpit and seats are spa-vacation comfortable and our test truck even had three-zone climate control. The same thinking carries into the Ridgeline’s cavernous rear compartment, which can seat three adults or provide an enormous enclosed cargo hold with the split seat bottoms folded up. A shame then that the Ridgeline’s rear doors don’t open quite as wide as they should.
If the Ridgeline has one glaring fault, it’s the infotainment system. Coincidentally, we found that the Beer Store also suffers from being overcomplicated with technology. Rather than its wares being on display behind refrigerated glass doors, most of the inventory beyond a few racks of best sellers is kept back in the cooler. Up front, touchscreen menus with real-time inventory are set up to peruse. Browsing the inventory this way just felt too much like work and didn’t produce the appropriate salivating effect of ice-cold bottles glistening with perspiration. A dearth of physical buttons to control the Ridgeline’s infotainment system meant we often found ourselves pressing the wrong part of the screen or hitting the same area of the screen twice, producing the opposite effect intended. Like trying to turn the radio off for our Border Patrol interrogation only to accidentally switch it back on, earning a scornful glare and causing our own bout of perspiration.
How long before the guys at the tunnel get clued in to the Ridgeline’s built-in smuggling compartment? That will likely depend on whether American truck buyers recognize the cunning behind the new Ridgeline. Honda’s reputation for doing things differently and better was not much bolstered by the first one, though it should have been. And it should be this time, too, though we imagine most Ridgeline buyers will be among the few who already save for retirement, have good dental insurance, and voluntarily get vasectomies.
If you don’t tow much more than a pop-up and you aren’t going to do any serious off-roading, the Ridgeline is for you. And make no mistake, this describes most truck owners. Anyone still buying one of the other intermediate—or even full-size—trucks: You owe it to yourself to take a long look in the mirror and contemplate how much of your purchase decision is influenced by the desire to project a tough image. To paraphrase singer Geddy Lee and satirists Bob and Doug McKenzie, esteemed Canadians all, if you choose not to decide to buy a Ridgeline, you still have made a choice, hoser.
Competitors
Explained: The Buttress and the Box
The original Ridgeline's sloping buttresses weren't a styling edict or a structural requirement. They were dictated by a basic Honda manufacturing tenet, which requires standardized build processes to the extent that any of the company's final-assembly plants can build any Honda vehicle with minimal reconfiguration. One of the key commonalities (and universal to virtually all unibody construction) is the use of a single body-side panel from A-pillar to taillight. The 135-degree angle defining where the buttress met the top of the bed was as close as Honda could get to an L shape with a single panel and still ensure its quality.
For the second-generation truck, engineers were forced to alter their approach when Honda decided to stretch the bed length by four inches. The previous body side, already the largest stamping Honda produced, was so long that the die extended beyond the press, and the manufacturing experts weren't willing to move farther beyond the tool's dimensions. Instead, the new Ridgeline uses a bolt-on rear fender that allows for a more traditional cab-and-bed look. The unibody chassis hides beneath the skin with a stamped steel truss-like structure in the bedsides that is welded and bonded to the cab's C-pillar. The Ridgeline's unique rear fender now integrates into Honda's manufacturing process. In the Lincoln, Alabama, assembly plant where the Ridgeline is built, the addition of the rear-fender-installation cell offers the opportunity for additional welding or structural adhesive application on future models.
Specifications >
VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, all-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 4-door pickup
PRICE AS TESTED: $43,770 (base price: $43,770)
ENGINE TYPE: V-6, aluminum block and heads
Displacement: 212 cu in, 3471 cc
Power: 280 hp @ 6000 rpm
Torque: 262 lb-ft @ 4700 rpm
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed automatic
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 125.2 in
Length: 210.0 in
Width: 78.6 in Height: 70.8 in
SAE volume: F: 58 cu ft R: 51 cu ft
Under-bed trunk: 7cu ft
Curb weight: 4423 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS:
Zero to 60 mph: 6.6 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 17.9 sec
Zero to 110 mph: 23.5 sec
Rolling start, 5–60 mph: 6.9 sec
Top gear, 30–50 mph: 4.0 sec
Top gear, 50–70 mph: 5.0 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 15.2 sec @ 93 mph
Top speed (gov limited): 112 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 195 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.80 g
FUEL ECONOMY:
EPA combined/city/hwy: 21/18/25 mpg
C/D observed: 21 mpg
