Last Hurrah--A Base Hit, or hitting one out of the park?

A Quick Drive in a 2014 Ridgeline SE.
McMurray, PA
I recently got to spend some time in one of the more unique Honda cars--or any car, for that matter--on the market today. Honda announced this past fall that they would be making a Special Edition of this year's Ridgeline truck. I call it a "Last Hurrah" or in football terms a "Hail Mary," since the truck never really caught on with American buyers. To back that up, just 17,723 Ridgeline trucks left dealer lots last year, which for the most part has been falling since the truck's 2006 launch, according to goodcarbadcar.net. Not a very convincing number, if you place that next to a sales champ like the Accord, which sells itself well over 300,000 units every year.
Anyway, I put a few miles on it for a road test on the road and in the street, and felt this Last Hurrah Truck deserved an article about it, since Honda also announced it will be going out of production for a little while, until it unveils a bigger, more capable and hopefully more powerful one in the coming years.
Looking at it, it still feels like an over sized Pilot that mated with something from Frigidaire, and I guess the Ridgey was the lovechild from this, with some genes elsewhere along the line too. Honda has always been about innovative solutions to the problems of the car business, but even 8 years after its launch, it still looks goofy, or funky, or almost stylish, or something. Imagine a jacked up Kia Soul, without the dancing hampsters, or the hype, or the young demographic surrounding the Soul, made into a stretch limo, but without the full bar, or any alcohol, or chauffeur, or anything that would really make you think of a limousine 'cept the size of it. No, we have to remember it really is a leather-wrapped, kind of 4x4 capable car-based truck, not a Raptor, not an HD or a Ram or whatever you think of when the word "truck" comes to mind. And no, a manly diesel isn't available either. No, it is the Ridgeline SE, in its loaded SE glory, sporting the fancy 6 spoke wheels from the current Touring trim from the Pilot, standard light colored leather seats, still using the In-Bed Trunk, composite bed, ya da, ya da. It may not be exquisite or dirty or especially "manly," but is still the neighborhood friendly (read: harmless) truck that you probably either forgot about or never heard of in the first same place. 

This cult vehicle, like all of Honda's often cars and SUVs that draw up a caricature, sports a--you guessed it--VTEC powered engine, just like everything else in the stable that Honda has made since the early 2000s. I won't annihilate everyone's mind with unnecessary specs or numbers or outputs and the like, because I could do that. Nope, its a V6 that makes less power than most of today's competition, if you could call them that (just don't call them "colleagues"). No, it drives about the same as any Honda van or Pilot or anything does or would or probably will ever have. Nothing exciting there, not even a manual mode for the tranny. Oh well.

I could go on about how it drives, how its not really nimble and how the steering doesn't feel like anything, and how it seems to have the words "vanilla" inscribed on the truck's under carriage, but I'll rather end my article about my brief drive in what will hopefully be an efficient, powerful, torquey, diesel (hey, a kid can dream, right?) and almost definitely automatic trucks of the future. Ford has been looking into the gazing ball for a while now, and its Super Duty hits the mark with its capability and future lightweight F-150 full sizers, but Honda has been just fine with a "just fine" hauler, but who knows? Maybe all this time they have been scheming to take over the truck market with a swing that could one day hit the ball out of the park.

8-Jan-2014