In my previous review I lauded the Ford Mustang for driving like it looks. The car has its faults, but all the bits come together to form a cohesive whole.

Well, after driving the Mustang I drove a few hundred feet to the Honda dealer and test drove the new Honda Ridgeline. I was intrigued by the idea of a Honda truck. What would it actually be like to drive? Well, here we have a clear case of incohesion. Let me explain...

Styling

There have been rumors for years that Honda was considering a pickup. Supposedly they were held up by the lack of a V8 engine and large rear-drive chassis. But it seems they got over these concerns, because now we have a V6 pickup based on a front-drive chassis.

Why am I talking about this in styling? Because as if to compensate for the untrucky mechanicals Honda seems to have decided to give the Ridgeline the most butch styling of any pickup. Full of flat surfaces, blunt angles, and hard edges, the Ridgeline would not look out of place in a Hummer showroom. They weren't aiming for pretty here, folks. One curious omission: The doors are stamped with a pair of long, deep indentations to lend the appearance of an armored bodyside, but there are no bodyside moldings to protect the tender paint in parking lots.

Inside I had fully expected to find a Pilot interior. But Honda worked hard here as well to give the Ridgeline the truckiest possible appearance. I personally don't care for the hard, cheap-feeling textured plastic that rings the instrument cluster. Very un-Honda. I'm also not sure about the massive yet hollow feel of the large diameter front door pulls. But I can see what they were trying to do.

I drove the RTL, which has a leather interior. The two-tone perforated olive-hued hides were perhaps the bit I personally liked best about the look of the interior.

So, stylistically what we have is a vehicle that really, really, REALLY wants you to know it's a truck. A real tough truck. GOT IT!?

Accommodations

The Honda Ridgeline is based on the Pilot, just without the third row, and as such has a broad, roomy cabin. Both rows of seats provide very good if not great comfort and support. They're fairly firm, but a truck's seats should be.

One curious omission: truck buyers often opt for a front bench, and the Ridgeline is easily wide enough to seat three across. But only buckets are available up front.

The driving position is very open, perhaps too open for a truck. I generally like to sit well above the instrument panel, but in the Ridgeline I kept checking if the power seat was really all the way down. They gave the instrument panel a massive appearance, but the high driving position dampens its intended effect.

The interior is chock full of storage compartments, as you'd expect from a truck designed by Honda. The split rear seat cushion flips up to the back wall with very little effort. This is typical of a pickup. But not so typical is the low, totally flat load floor this operation exposes.

Move to the bed and you'll find the "in-bed trunk" Honda has been touting. Through clever packaging (i.e. using the Odyssey/Pilot platform with its well for the third-row seat) Honda has fitted the Ridgline with an 8.5 cubic foot lockable storage compartment beneath the rear area of the bed. To facilitate loading and unloading this "trunk," the tailgate opens to the side as well as down. Kind of like those big wagons from the 1970s, except one handle does not perform both operations.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I always thought of the Chevrolet Avalanche, with its lockable hard tonneau, as providing the equivalent of a really big trunk. I questioned the salesperson on this, and he argued that the hard tonneau was a dealer-installed accessory on the Avalanche just as a similar one is with the Ridgeline. Well, it's not. The hard tonneau is standard on the Avalanche, and while it can be deleted for a $600 credit I've never seen one of the Chevrolets without it.

Honda's additional compartment is still welcome. But I'm not quite seeing the huge breakthrough in functionality.

Now that I'm on the subject of the Avalanche, I've got to wonder why ultra-innovative Honda didn't fit the Ridgeline with a "midgate," so that the cargo area could be extended into the rear part of the cab. As it is, we've only got five feet of bed here. A bed extender is available as a dealer accessory, but it adds only about an extra foot. So we're still well short of the eight feet offered by the Avalanche with its midgate folded. Sure the Avalanche is a longer vehicle, but its bed is only three inches longer than that of the Honda truck. The difference is the midgate.

I found it even more odd that the Honda Ridgeline isn't fitted with a folding front passenger seat. These have been appearing in more and more cars. One day it will be in just about everything. Will Honda for once be among the last to adopt a highly functional innovation?

Given the Ridgline's limited ability to carry long cargo, it's hard to see what it offers beyond the Pilot SUV to compensate for its lesser seating capacity. I suppose there is some additional cargo volume here, as the Ridgeline is about a foot-and-a-half longer than the Pilot. But, owing to the space-robbing rear cab wall, not much. What I'm left with is a cargo area that's easier to hose out.

When I first wrote this review I compared the Ridgeline primarily with the Chevrolet Avalanche. The salesman stressed that the Ridgeline is a midsize, but it looks larger than that to me. Partly this is because of the styling, but physical dimensions also play a role. Like the Pilot on which it is based, the Ridgeline rivals full-size trucks in width. And width affects perceived size as much, if not more than, length.

This said, in length the Ridgeline is actually very similar to compact crew cab short bed pickups like the Chevrolet Colorado and Toyota Tacoma. Like the Ridgeline, these trucks have five-foot beds. So while the limited utility such beds provide is a weakness, it is a universal weakness within this product segment.

On the Road

As I mentioned above, the Ridgeline is styled to leave no doubt that it is a truck. And I've read that Honda did a lot to maximize the Ridgeline's ability to do truck-like things. It'll haul and tow more poundage than the Pilot courtesy of a beefed-up frame and transmission.

Problem is, I got behind the wheel and the Ridgeline simply does not have the proper feel of a truck. Mind you, I wouldn't expect it to feel coarse or rough. Refinement is present and plenty welcome. But the feel and sound of the powertrain and steering are almost unbelievably car-like. It feels very much like a Pilot with some inches added to the wheelbase and a pinch of firmness added to the suspension. Which is pretty much what it is. I just expected more of a massive, heavy-duty "feel." Not the usual Honda daintiness.

To put it bluntly, I expected the Honda Ridgeline to drive like it looks. And it just doesn't. Like the Pilot, this is a thoroughly boring vehicle to drive. I'm hardly a pickup kind of guy, but there's something fun about driving the things. They just feel so tough, even the relatively smooth and refined ones (such as the Avalanche). Now I wouldn't suggest that you close your eyes while driving, but if for some foolish reason you did in the Ridgeline you'd have no idea you were in a truck. Forget the closing your eyes bit. Even with open eyes you'd have no idea, since that rugged-looking (but hollow-feeling) dash is out of your direct line of sight. If you want to know you're driving a truck you'd better stop the car, get out, and look at it.

I guess I should toss out some less dramatized impressions of what the Ridgeline is like to drive. Acceleration is easily adequate courtesy of the strong, smooth V6. It doesn't feel at all like a truck engine, with purely car-like noises and responses to the throttle, but it moves the Ridgeline sprightly enough. This isn't the sort of vehicle you feel like taking to the stoplight gran prix at any rate. (I don't personally understand the attraction of hyper-powerful pickups like the Dodge Ram SRT.)

Handling as I've said is very car-like. The steering is a little higher in effort than the Pilot's thoroughly numb unit, a good thing. The suspension is a bit firmer than in the SUV, so there is less lean and more composure in moderately hard turns, also a good thing. I didn't drive the Ridgeline like a sports car because it's not one, so I cannot comment on its behavior "at the limit." The ride is smooth (the independent rear suspension helps here) and noise levels are perhaps the lowest I've experienced in a pickup. Like the Avalanche but unlike other pickups, the bed is not a separate unit from the cab. This no doubt contributes to the refined car-like nature of the "truck."

I have not driven a compact pickup in recent memory. But, assuming these drive much like their big brothers, the Ridgeline drives much more like a car. This has positive and negative aspects. It is easier to drive, and possesses higher on-road capabilities, but it is also more boring.

Honda Ridgeline Price Comparisons and Pricing

For quick, up-to-date pricing, and especially user-specified price comparisons, check out the website I created: www.truedelta.com. Why yet another vehicle pricing website? Well, I personally lacked the patience to keep using the others. They were too slow and required too much effort, especially when trying to compare prices. So I taught myself some programming and created a site where there is no need to dig through option packages, prerequisites, and the like one by one -- the TrueDelta algorithm figures these out for you in one swift pass.

For example, equipped with leather, sunroof, and other features on the high-end Ridgeline RTL I drove an Avalanche 4WD lists for about $3,000 more. Compare lower-end trims and the Honda's advantage widens to $4,200. And these figures include a $3,500 rebate on the Chevy. The Avalanche is larger, with more cargo capacity and off-road ability, but this is a wider gap than I expected. GM has been raising prices a smidge every couple of months in an attempt to compensate for ever-larger rebates, and this practice seems to have gotten out of hand.

The toughest price comparison for the Ridgeline is actually in-house. The Ridgeline is to the Pilot as the Avalanche is to the Tahoe. However, while an Avalanche is about $2,500 less than the Tahoe after adjusting for feature differences, the Ridgeline is between $300 and $1000 (low- and high-end trims, respectively) MORE expensive than the Pilot. Other manufacturers tend to follow the GM logic. Honda is pretty much alone in thinking people will pay more for a pickup than an SUV. Time will tell if they know something everyone else does not.

Last Words

When I saw the Ridgeline at the recent Detroit auto show I thought, "More interesting and truck-like than I expected, with some innovative features. Maybe they'll pull it off." But now that I've driven it I cannot get over the huge mismatch between the styling and driving experience.

Maybe I'm not being entirely fair in comparing the Ridgeline to the full-size trucks I've driven, as Honda is positioning it as a midsize truck. But dimensionally it's in between the two, about the length of an Colorado crew cab or Explorer Sport Trac but nearly as wide as an Avalanche. And, returning to the styling once more, it looks much larger than the Colorado or Explorer Sport Trac.

At any rate, I suspect many pickup buyers will want a more truck-like feel. But I really don't know. I'm very interested in seeing how well and to whom this thing sells. The strong growth in pickup sales suggests many are sold to people who've never owned one before. These people, who have fewer preconceptions of how a pickup should feel, are quite likely those Honda is aiming for.

In the end, while I admire the Ridgeline's car-like driveability I find it boring to drive. Recommended, but only for those who actually prefer this lack of character and who don't need a longer bed.

A Note on Honda RidgelineReliability

I cannot practically cover reliability within the context of this review. However, many people are interested in such information, so I've started collecting my own data. Results, once they are available, will be posted to my site, www.truedelta.com, with updates every three months.

Unlike other sources, TrueDelta will clearly identify what difference it will make if you buy Ridgeline rather than another vehicle by providing "times in the shop" and "days in the shop" stats (among others). You will be able to specify the number of years, annual miles, and types of repairs to include in Honda Ridgeline reliability comparisons.

Before I can report results, I need data on all cars--not just the Ridgeline--from people like you. To encourage participation, those who help provide the data will receive free access to the site's reliability information. Non-participants will have to pay an access fee.

For the details, and to sign up, visit www.truedelta.com.

A link to this website and alphabetized links to my other vehicle reviews can be found on my profile page.

Some of my reviews of related vehicles:
Chevrolet Avalanche review
Dodge Ram review
Ford F-150 review
Honda Pilot review

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 33155
Model and Options: RTL with sunroof