Yahoo Autos 2023 Honda Pilot TrailSport Preview Drive: Honda tries its hand at off-roading
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — To this day, Honda has never built a warlord-grade body-on-frame SUV, the sort that serious off-roaders would actually consider taking off-road. And no, rebadged Isuzus don’t count. So you might think it a bold reach to create a off-road-optimized machine from a Honda Pilot, but the company founded by a rebellious racer who built what's still the world's biggest motorcycle manufacturer from the Superfortress-and-earthquake-ravaged rubble of his first business should never be written off.
The Pilot TrailSport is still a crossover and it’s unlikely serious off-roaders will go near it, but this ruggedized version of the next-generation 2023 Honda Pilot is a more complete effort than the last version. You might have missed it, but the TrailSport actually debuted for 2022 on the long-lived previous-generation Pilot as a three-row compliment to the Passport TrailSport. It had tougher tires, a bit more ground clearance and an enhanced-outdoorsiness look to knock’em dead in the REI parking lot. It was competent enough for the average outdoor adventure seeker, but the 2023 Honda Pilot Trailsport gets substantial engineering upgrades that make it a lot more likely to make it to that remote trailhead and back in one piece. Honda didn’t try to make it a rock crawler, but would anyone expect a Pilot to be one?
To be clear, this is in fact Autoblog’s first drive of the next-generation, 2023 Honda Pilot. However, we only have information about the TrailSport, and even that, it’s thin. Basic dimensions and specs are still to be announced, as well as details about the other trim levels. We don’t even know what it really looks like beyond the below teaser photos. Honda kept the camouflaged wrappers on during our drive, which exclusively took place off-road. It’s an odd way to introduce a new generation, but we’re not going to say no to a sneak peek among the peaks of Colorado on the Middle Fork Swan River road near Breckenridge.
Having done my share of backpacking trips to remote areas of the Mountain West, I've learned that the goal of such journeys is to get away from the noisy crowds that turn the more accessible destinations into mini-cities. With the pandemic sending even more folks to the great outdoors, a vehicle that can leave the ordinary all-wheel-drive machinery behind and get past the oil-pan-puncturing, exhaust-system-detaching obstacles on the more challenging trails will allow you to reach the more exclusive trailheads and campsites. Honda's American engineers designed the new Pilot TrailSport to do just that for weekend getaways, even as the exterior designers made it look tougher for the weekday school-dropoff crowd (even with the camo, that much is obvious). Maybe most buyers of this SUV will never take it on any surface more arduous than the gravel road to the lake house, but the idea is that you could if you wanted to.
The head of the powertrain team for the 2023 Pilot spends his spare time obsessively restoring an FJ40 Land Cruiser (about as serious a pure off-road production vehicle as you'll find on the planet), while the Pilot TrailSport Suspension Potentate (not his real title) gathers parts to build a modernized MGB-GT with a Honda K-engine swap. There's a noticeable air of Mickey Thompson-style American hot-rodder ethos around the engineers who toughened up this crossover SUV, perhaps with a dash of Soichiro Honda staring down the staid Japanese government bureaucracy once he started building cars.
