Yahoo Autos The Honda Pilot TrailSport is intended for outdoor adventures. We'll see about that
BEND, Ore. – Outdoor adventure trim levels are all the rage throughout the SUV landscape. The 2023 Honda Pilot TrailSport is one of the newest in the three-row segment, joining those by Nissan, Ford, Kia, Hyundai and GMC. Some, like the short-lived, last-generation Pilot TrailSport, are just glorified appearance packages, while others like the redesigned ’23 TrailSport actually include componentry upgrades along with rugged visual enhancements. The task before us was simple, then: Take the Pilot’s outdoor adventure trim level on an actual outdoor adventure to see if it lives up to the billing.
Google Maps would be set for the outdoor adventure mecca of Bend in Central Oregon (see the route here), or 826 miles from Autoblog’s West Coast headquarters in Agoura Hills, Calif. That should satisfy the highway performance quotient of the test, along with answering a key question: Would the TrailSport’s all-terrain tires increase noise and ruin the ride as they do in the Kia Telluride X-Pro? Into the standard 2-inch trailer hitch would go a Yakima StageTwo bike rack, which is specifically designed to carry increasingly popular electric bicycles like the Gazelle Ultimate 380+ I brought along to review while venturing further off the beaten path with my son in his Thule child seat. Onto the standard raised roof rails could be fitted the Yakima Timberline roof racks I still had from previous tests, but sadly, my plans to strap a kayak to the roof were nixed by the road to Bend’s many nearby lakes still being closed due to many feet of snow in late May. There’d be one fewer outdoor adventure, then.
Well, two actually. I had intended to get to one of those lakes by way of a rutted, rugged dirt road that seemed like the maximum sort of challenge an owner would throw at the TrailSport’s enhancements. Instead, a few dirt roads around Bend would have to suffice as easy-cheese challenges for those tires and the unique suspension that includes special stabilizer bars, spring rates and damper valve tuning, plus a 1-inch lift for a grand total of 8.3 inches (still 0.4 less than every Subaru Ascent but better than those other three-row outdoor adventurers). There are also skid plates and a full-size spare tire, though the latter chews into the underfloor cargo area such that there’s not enough room for the removable second-row middle seat available on other trim levels. I’ve already reported how much luggage space remained, but what about space for a whole load of outdoor adventure gear … and the people who’d use it?
Finally, I’d be keeping my eyes and ears open for the public response to the TrailSport’s visual enhancements, including plenty of gloss black trim, orange accents, black wheels and, most obviously, the unique-to-TrailSport Diffused Sky Blue Pearl paint job. Let’s not delay the response: People clearly dug it. It stuck out from the crowd in just the right way and received multiple unsolicited compliments from passersby. For the Patagonia-wearing set, at least, the Pilot’s new design and the TrailSport’s extra flair are winners.
Setting out onto Southern California’s consistently inconsistent and uniquely crappy highway pavement immediately revealed that Honda’s engineers did a much better job than their counterparts at Kia of tuning a suspension to accept the more rigid Continental TerrainContact all-terrain tires. While the exact same tires on the Telluride SX X-Pro I drove to Arizona two weeks prior felt like the equivalent of swapping out your running shoe soles for winter boot rubber, the Pilot’s extra firmness was really only noticeable on certain concrete surfaces. Noise is definitely elevated, perhaps more so than the Telluride, but not to an objectionable degree. Many won’t notice.
I haven’t driven another Pilot trim, but I strongly suspect that the tires do impact steering precision as well as the lane-centering steering assist system that comes standard along with adaptive cruise control. There’s a degree of on-center numbness that just doesn’t feel right, especially for a Honda – I found myself making more corrections than expected and the lane-centering system was acting in a nervous way, making even more corrections to counter the constant subtle back-and-forth drift. The lane-centering also skews too far right, which is nerve-wracking when you’re passing big rigs. While I gave the system a fair shake on the drive there, I left it mostly off on the return trip.
The adaptive cruise control system is vastly better than its dimwitted predecessor in the old Pilot, but it’s still too slow to get back on the gas once slower traffic clears ahead. This is admittedly a bigger pain in busier, multi-lane environments. On the mostly two-lane Highway 97 that splits off Interstate 5 in Weed, Calif., and heads toward Bend, it was as much a godsend on a two-lane road as ACC typically is, helping to keep my sanity while patiently waiting to pass glacial big rigs and RVs.
