2016 Honda Pilot : Time's Almost Up
WHAT WE LIKE: Seats this comfortable encourage long-distance drives, especially when they’re heated and ventilated, and the Pilot’s 280-hp V-6 makes merging into any traffic just a squirt of gas away. After nearly a year, the styling is starting to grow on some of us. Well, as long as we hold a hand over one eye so we don’t have to look at the minivan-esque nose. But we’ve been noticing some previous-generation versions around. Remember how bizarre they looked?
WHAT WE DON’T LIKE: The variety of ways Honda has found to make the fundamentally inoffensive notion of a three-row crossover illogical and weird. The stop/start system continues to win detractors, its unpredictable behavior meaning that it spends most of its time disabled. Ditto the adaptive cruise-control system, which we tend to turn off so that we have regular old cruise control—which still allows a startling discrepancy between set speed and actual speed. And the throttle mapping, which is so abrupt that we’ve been toggling the system to Econ mode to soften powertrain response. It always sounded exciting to crawl into a race car and have to flip a bunch of switches—for the fuel pump, fan, water pump, et cetera—before pressing the start button. When that sequence is reversed and, after starting, you have to hunt around for buttons to disable a bunch of unsatisfactory systems, it’s a lot less cool.
WHAT WENT WRONG: Hey, nobody ran the Pilot into anything in the past few months! We did carefully drive it to the dealer for a routine 30,000-mile service (oil change, tire rotation, filters for the engine and cabin), which cost $154. More notably, the Pilot was recruited to rescue creative director Darin Johnson when the Land Rover he bought for our off-road beater challenge started making ominous noises 200 miles from home. However, when he arrived at the U-Haul lot to rent a trailer, he realized that although the Pilot has a trailer hitch, it does not have a wiring harness for a trailer. Which is good, because our Pilot also lacks the transmission cooler that would raise the tow rating anywhere near what one needs to accommodate a Land Rover on a U-Haul car trailer. Ever notice how sturdy those things are? Seriously overbuilt. Our Pilot’s hitch, on the other hand, must be intended for 3500 pounds of bicycle racks.
WHERE WE WENT: We haven’t gone anywhere. If we’re being honest, we’ve felt stagnant for a while, like it’s the same grind with different beans, day in and day out. Oh, you mean the Pilot? It’s now out in Montana, spending its last few thousand miles on wild adventures with John Phillips, exploring the deepest reaches of the Bitterroot Mountains and parking-lot corners nearest the tavern’s front door. By the time the Honda makes its way home to Ann Arbor, its 40,000 miles should just about be at their end.
Months in Fleet: 11 months Current Mileage: 36,367 miles
Average Fuel Economy: 22 mpg Fuel Tank Size: 19.5 gal Fuel Range: 425 miles
Service: $442 Normal Wear: $0 Repair: $0
Damage and Destruction: $986
source by caranddriver.com
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