2016 Honda Pilot
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| 2016 Honda Pilot |
Is the Pilot an SUV or a minivan? We spent 40,000 miles trying to sort the answer.
When practicality is paramount, all other considerations sit even further back than usual, particularly style. Take three-row crossovers, a genre with space for all manner of considerations. Once you package three rows of seats, plump out the silhouette to maximize interior volume, and pull the beltline low for the sake of visibility, you’re left with a fairly bland template onto which to project your brand’s aesthetics. Not that buyers in the big-crossover class seem discouraged by their vehicles’ sameness—sales success in mainstream segments often requires automakers to color inside the lines. That said, the crossover’s role as a minivan surrogate means that plenty of its passengers will color all over the interior.
When Honda redesigned the Pilot for 2016, it lengthened and lowered the triple-row SUV, shucking the previous generation’s blocky exterior for a softer form that bears more than a passing resemblance to that other paragon of blandness, a minivan. And specifically, Honda’s own activity book, the Odyssey. But both have long been among our favored means of moving large numbers of people and great volumes of junk, and so we lined up a Pilot for a long-haul test. We opted for the ultimate Pilot, the Elite. It came loaded with all-wheel drive, leather, navigation, heated and ventilated front seats, heated second-row captain’s chairs, two sunroofs, a Blu-ray rear-seat entertainment system with HDMI and RCA inputs, and Honda’s full complement of driver-assist features: forward-collision warning with automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitors, and automatic high-beams. To this hefty load of equipment we added a trailer hitch ($360), roof-rail crossbars ($225), and a rear-bumper appliqué ($70), bringing the total MSRP to $47,955.
With an abundance of space, comfort, and luxury, the Pilot completed its 40,000-mile assignment in just 11 months. It passed through some 20 states and four Canadian provinces in our hands, once piling up more than 7000 miles in a single month.
Those highway miles helped keep our fuel consumption at an average of 22 mpg, outstanding for a 4351-pound bus. Honda redesigned the Pilot’s 3.5-liter V-6, now turning out 280 horsepower and 262 pound-feet of torque, for this generation. Cheaper Pilots back that with a six-speed auto, while the uplevel Touring and Elite trims get a nine-speed.
When new, our Pilot turned in straight-line performance that would beat a Dodge Challenger V-6, with a 6.0-second zero-to-60-mph sprint and 14.6 seconds in the quarter-mile at 95 mph. After 40,000 miles, it slipped a couple of tenths in the quarter, handing the lead back to the muscle coupe. Its braking performance—172 feet to stop from 70 mph new, 178 at the end of the test—places it among the best family haulers, and its 0.81-g skidpad performance improved to 0.84 g on worn tires, giving it an edge over many competitors in shopping-cart-avoidance maneuvers.
Its interior is certainly an attractive place to pass the miles. It’s inventive, appealing, and loaded with storage bins, cubbies, depressions, and the like. It literally has storage on top of storage. There’s the usual map pocket along the bottom of the front doors, with a second tier of receptacles above that, and then the door pull on top, which doubles as a shallow storage cubby. And the console between the front seats could swallow a full-grown Lhasa apso with room for a chew toy or two. Visibility all around is excellent. Riding in back and then switching to the driver’s seat made us jealous of the enormous sunroof enjoyed by back-seat passengers, though the entertainment screen that flips down from the ceiling is so small that it might be contributing to the myopia outbreak in today’s children.
The second-row captain’s chairs fold and slide forward at the touch of a button, offering wide passage to the distant rear seats. Unlike some systems that power the seat forward slowly, the Pilot’s have an electronic actuator, and they slide forward with a satisfying, spring-loaded mechanical quickness. One staffer called them “a game changer.” In back, we found so much space that even our lankiest lunks had sufficient headroom. The trade-off is that if all seven seats are occupied, there’s barely space for each passenger to pack a lunchbox between the third-row seatbacks and the power rear hatch. Now that the Pilot looks even more like the Odyssey, the storage sting feels especially sharp. The Odyssey allots an extra 20 cubic feet each to people and stuff.
Our Pilot did its part to continue Honda’s reputation for trouble-free ownership. It required zero unscheduled service visits, and the total for four visits at 10,000-mile intervals squeezed in at less than $600. However, we also did our part to continue our reputation by twice backing the big Honda into things. The first time, a pipe in a parking garage skewered the left-rear quarter panel. The subsequent metalwork and some new plastic trim pulled $986 out of our indiscretionary spending account. Not even three months later, a post ambushed the same corner, but this time the damage was less. A new plastic trim piece cost only $23.
As satisfying as the Pilot is when stationary, the logbook was filled with numerous, er, off-color comments. Honda found a startling array of fussy ways to make the Pilot call negative attention to itself. The annoyances begin before you even start driving, with a nonsensical push-button shifter in which park and neutral are the same size buttons in different planes, drive is a different size and shape (and nested at an angle in a chrome trim ring), and reverse is a pull switch. That these buttons and switches take up precisely as much space on the console as a regular shifter won them no friends.
And yet, while the Pilot is naturally predisposed to road trips, every staffer who’s driven Honda’s Ridgeline—with which the Pilot shares its underpinnings—has climbed out of the pickup and wondered aloud why Honda doesn’t offer its firmer suspension in the Pilot. The looser Pilot occasionally feels as if it’s manufacturing its own crosswinds. There’s plenty of fore and aft bobbing, too, thanks to the adaptive cruise control’s abrupt braking. The system also hunts endlessly through the gears and often accelerates well beyond its set speed, meaning that few drivers left the active function engaged.
Around town, the throttle and transmission calibrations are so jumpy that several of us took to driving the Pilot in economy mode for the more tolerable, relaxed programming. Similarly, the engine stop-start system’s logic lags its peers, on several occasions shutting the engine off in the middle of parallel-parking maneuvers. These are commodity systems now—they should be simple and intuitive. That good examples are found in economy cars but not in a nearly $50,000 Honda is supremely disappointing.
Nearly every mainstream car brand in the U.S. today sells a three-row crossover, giving the Pilot about a dozen direct competitors. If you stretch a few grand beyond the extremes of the Pilot’s pricing spectrum, it has about that many indirect competitors, too. Few are as attractively finished as the Pilot, and fewer still are likely to offer such an affordable ownership experience. But most share its core competencies, and few are as annoying in full trim. The Pilot is a good crossover; the Pilot Elite is a good crossover overwhelmed by the very thing an activity book is supposed to alleviate: fussiness.
Rants and Raves
Is the cruise-control system messed up, or does it just suck? —Rusty Blackwell How did this throttle calibration ever leave the proving ground? Low-speed and standing-start responses are as bad as I’ve driven. —Josh Jacquot The one-touch sliding second-row seats are a game changer for parents of small children. —Dave VanderWerp The primary controls were clearly secondary concerns. The brake pedal is too soft, and the throttle is too touchy at tip-in. —Eric Tingwall Almost like a pickup in that the ride quality improves when it’s loaded down. —Joseph Capparella If only there were knobs and physical buttons for the infotainment system. —Jennifer Harrington There are way too many annoyances here for me to recommend this vehicle to anyone. —John Phillips. Source By caranddriver.com
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