Ground Control: Another pilot as reliable as Captain Sully.
At Harry Houdini’s funeral, Broadway producers Charles Dillingham and Florenz Ziegfeld agreed to be pallbearers. As they hoisted the coffin out of the church, Dillingham said, “Ziggie, I bet you a hundred bucks he ain’t in here.”So popular was our long-term Honda Pilot Touring 4WD that, during the summer vacation months, you could likewise bet that its keys weren’t hanging on the sign-out board but were, instead, somewhere out of state. We should have called it the Honda Houdini.
Our Pilot logged its requisite 40,000 miles in 53 weeks, during which spell its 250-hp, 3.5-liter V-6 was rarely cool. The Pilot visited Ohio, New Jersey, Minnesota, both Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Hershey swap meet, Yellowstone National Park, a Kruse auction, and Manhattan Island. It also carried maybe 350 pounds’ worth of camera and camping gear to Montana in support of our “The Hard Way to Hemingway” feature [December 2009].
In Big Sky country, the Pilot bumped its way along roughly 100 miles of Forest Service roads, where we failed to knock off the chin spoiler but repeatedly scraped the twin chrome exhaust tips while exiting gullies and washouts. We never fully tested its 19-inch wading potential, but, as capabilities go, it was comforting.
Honda has blessed the Pilot with practical design cues aplenty. There’s a useful storage bin beneath the rear third of the cargo bay, cleverly proportioned so that it can still be used when the third-row seats are upright. The backlight opens independently of the rear hatch, and its wiper sweeps about 80 percent of the glass. The IP gauges are paragons of clarity, although the 50 center-stack buttons, dials, and switches are daunting, especially the identical radio volume and tuning knobs, which are confusingly mounted directly atop one another. And here’s something you don’t often see: The automatic temperature control can be set as low as 58 degrees and as high as 86 degrees.
During its life with us, the Pilot was as reliable as congressional spending. It required routine servicing four times, for oil, tire rotation, a variety of inspections, one new cabin air filter, and, strangely, two fresh loads of rear differential lubricant. Those four stops cost $566. Along the way, we replaced the front-wiper-blade inserts ($10), and the V-6 consumed but a half quart of extracurricular oil. The lone item to malfunction was a two-inch plastic trim piece, which fell off during Week One, but we’ll be damned if we can find what it was attached to. Automobiles don’t get more reliable than that.
We did, however, experience a faint, intermittent pulsing through the brake pedal, as if one rotor were mildly warped. It never rose to any appreciable level of annoyance, and, in any event, the pulsing would reliably vanish just before each servicing.
Curiously, the Pilot’s gray leather seats, fore and aft, took on a somewhat disgusting beige patina of, oh, say, the towel that hangs above the french-fry vat at Irvel’s All-U-Can-Eat. This Honda’s leather has a pebbled surface, and the interstices between pebbles apparently are uniquely talented at collecting grime. We scrubbed the cushions first with Griot’s Interior Cleaner, then Armor All Multi-Purpose Auto Cleaner, then plain old Windex. Each worked equally well, which is to say not very. The seats still look as though they should be steam-cleaned with Clorox. In addition, the liftgate’s interior plastic panel appears to have been mauled by a wolverine wielding a cheese grater.
Otherwise, the seats in the Pilot approached perfection: firm but never confining, with an aggressive lower-back bolster much appreciated by the over-50 crowd. Our pilots piloted the Pilot on dozens of 10-to-12-hour slogs. For such spells, the seats drew nothing but praise, and, on at least two occasions, we loaded the vehicle to its eight-passenger capacity. Briefly.
Other complaints? Well, the Pilot’s V-6 produces less power than five of its close competitors, a trait that occasionally drew attention during passing maneuvers and on-ramp sprints. When new, the Pilot required 7.9 seconds to get to 60 mph; a year later, it was 0.2 second quicker. Editors who deployed the Pilot as a tow vehicle—trailering, for instance, a 6-by-12-foot U-Haul box, a 600-pound catamaran, and a Honda S2000 race car—resigned themselves to leisurely motoring, with fuel economy dipping as low as 9 mpg.
The other major criticism was that the Acura MDX–based Pilot always felt, well, a little more truckish than SUVish. In part, that perception can be blamed on the slightly heavy steering. But around town, in particular, the Pilot felt a tad slow-witted, larger than its actual dimensions, and less than eager to make directional changes. Squirting in and out of holes in traffic—and zigzagging through crowded parking lots—required care and forethought.
There were also a few beefs about road noise. The Pilot’s firm suspension was adept at yielding to scabrous pavement, but the Michelin LTXs and the 17-inch wheels too audibly telegraphed their outrage with various ka-thunks and ker-blams. On the other hand, the knobby tires were terrific in the snow.
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http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/car/10q1/2009_honda_pilot_touring_4wd-long-term_road_test