Tested: 2024 Honda Ridgeline TrailSport Embraces Off-Road Fantasy

Americans tend toward an instinctive aversion to moderation. We embrace drama and revel in inhuman scale, a nation of would-be tycoons and indefatigable explorers. We come up with ideas like Mount Rushmore and the Sphere in Vegas and nobody can talk us out of them. We look at the $20 million house on Zillow that has its own go-kart track and think, "That could use some more elevation change around Turn 3." Into this miasma of ambition and delusion rides the 2024 Honda Ridgeline TrailSport, a relentlessly pragmatic machine in search of that narrow subset of Americans guided by rationalism. It's the pickup truck for people who've never owned crypto.

The irony of the Ridgeline's TrailSport trim, new for 2024 and priced at $46,375, is that it represents a calculated step toward fantasy, a calculated attempt to win hearts rather than minds. Which is to say, it's an off-road version of a street-oriented pickup. The primary hardware that effects this mild transformation—limbered-up springs, dampers, and anti-roll bars, along with General Grabber A/T Sport all-terrain tires—doesn't turn the Ridgeline into a Ford Ranger Raptor, but neither does it ruin the Ridgeline's outstanding on-pavement composure.

The Grabbers look the part with aggressive tread design, but they're the same 245/60R-18 size (nearly 30 inches in diameter) as the Firestone Destination LE 2 tires on every other Ridgeline since the 2017 redesign. The Generals were developed specifically for this truck, we'd guess with an eye toward retaining on-pavement civility. Indeed, the Grabbers are quiet on the highway, and the TrailSport's 0.78-g skidpad performance doesn't much lag the 0.79 g we saw from a 2021 Ridgeline Sport HPD or the 0.80 g from a 2017 Ridgeline Black Edition on the Firestones. As we saw with the Honda Pilot Elite and its 0.84-g skidpad performance, Honda's torque-vectoring rear differential—which can send 70 percent of total torque to either rear tire—is a boon for handling.

More surprising than the TrailSport's lateral grip was its braking. At 180 feet from 70 mph, this Ridgeline and its General Grabber boots knocked a full 15 feet off the Black Edition's results. Honda confirms there have been no changes to the brakes themselves, so credit likely goes to the tires, strange as that seems.