We are here with the refreshed 2019 Honda Pilot in sunny Southern California andwe don’t normally get that excited about a mid-cycle refresh is but the Pilot mightbe an exception to that because it seems that Honda has directly addressed someof the issues that we had with the Pilot and we’re hoping that it makes it muchbetter. We also had a chance to test out the Pilot in some new environments so wegot to tow with it and take it off-road for the first time. Three-row SUVs continue to grow in popularity which means that automakersare paying more attention to this segment than everr before and that makes itvery difficult to stay on top. The Pilot is the perfect example of that. In 2016it won our Three-Row SUV challenge but just one year later in 2017 against newcompetitors it slipped all the way to third. Now we have some consistent gripeswith the Pilot since 2016 and that would be powertrain, the multimedia system andthe third row. Now one of our big gripes will be Pilot has been it’s 9 speedautomatic transmission and we found it to be laggy and unresponsive both from astop and while you’re trying to pass someone. So for 2019 Honda has made a fewchanges to the transmission in order to address those things. It’s got newhardware on the inside and they’ve also changed up the programming. So forexample the Pilot now will launch in the second gear rather than first gear inmost circumstances. Honda has about halfway fixed the problems with thetransmission. The Pilot is definitely more confident from a stop. It has verylinear acceleration from low speeds but if you’re trying to accelerate pastsomeone the transmission still has trouble picking the right gear. Does itshift more fluidly? Maybe but since the transmission can’t seem to make up itsmind and pick a gear for you there’s a noticeable lag between when you hit theaccelerator pedal and that actually translates into forward motion. Our second gripe with the Pilot was it’s multimedia system. Now it used to havethe same multimedia system that you would find inthe current generation of a Honda Civic. That system was kind of miserable to use. It was overly complicated, it had too many menus and a poor structure and italso had no physical knobs for volume or tuning and an over-reliance on capacitivetouch buttons around the screen. Now in the Pilot though you’ll get a brand newmultimedia system that’s also found in the new Accord in the new Odyssey andthe first thing that it does very well is it simplifies the menu structure soyou have these large icons that allow you to switch between differentfunctions and you can also add them as shortcuts to the top of the screen foreasy access and they’re easier to grab especially when you’re driving. You alsoget a physical volume knob which we really appreciate. The system doesn’t doeverything perfectly though it is a little bit tilted too far back for mytaste and it makes it hard to reach from the driver’s seat so you have to leanforward to reach the right side of the system and the navigation app is stillnot the best. It’s a powered by Garmin and it’s a bit laggy when you’re doingthings like pinching and zooming or moving the map around. Our recommendationwould be that if you’re going to use the screen for navigation is to plug in aphone and use either Android Auto or Apple Carplay. Those integrations arepretty seamless compared to this map. Our final gripe is with the Pilot’s third rowand that hasn’t really been addressed. Since this is only a refresh and notreally a redesign which would give Honda more of a chance to change up thewheelbase of the platform. Do something could kind of expand the third row toadd some space. Now the Pilot’s third row still does have decent headroom here anddecent leg room if you’re able to negotiate with the second row passengers but theproblem is that the floor on the third row is still super high and what thatdoes is it pushes your knees and legs off the seat and it makes it not verycomfortable to sit back here for more than 10 or 15 minutes. The third row alsolacks some of the convenience features that you find in newer vehicles. Mainlythat there are no USB charge ports or 12-volt ports back here to chargedevices for passengers. The Pilot was about 50% successful inaddressing the previous problems that we have with the vehicle but at this eventwe also had a chance to try out the Pilot in two new environments: towing andoffroad. Now for towing if you equip the Pilotwith a towing package that adds a trailer hitch and a larger intercooler thatbumps up towing capacity to about five thousand pounds. We had a chance to tow afour thousand pound trailer that came complete with a Honda Civic Si race caron the back. The Pilot towed much more confidentlythough I thought it would. The powertrain didn’t seem taxed even with that largeload in the back and sometimes the suspension on vehicles like this can geta little bit tricky or a little bit confused when you’re towing that muchweight but it still rode well at highway speeds and I had enoughacceleration to pull out into traffic confidently. In addition to towing I wasalso pleasantly surprised at how well the Pilot performed off-road. Let’s talkfor a little bit about Honda’s all-wheel drive system. So we are here on anoff-road course and this is actually the first time I’ve taken a Pilot off roadwhich kind of speaks to how the car is viewed. It is you know mostly seen as afamily type crossover that doesn’t really have much capability and Hondawanted to kind of change that perception so here we are on an off-road course. Nowthere are a few things that make the pilot a more viable off-road vehiclethan you would think starting with this all-wheel drive system. It’s one of theonly cars in this class that I believe comes with a true torque vectoringsystem that’s not brake based so it actually has an electronicallycontrolled limited slip differential and what thatdoes is it’s able to send 100% of the torque that goes to the rear wheels tothe left or the right. So the system overall can send about 70 percent of thepower to the rear and then a hundred percent of that power can either besplit left or right depending on conditions. One of the things that I likeabout this system is that it’s actually pretty aggressive. You get this kind ofhandy display in the instrument panel that shows you exactly where the torqueis going and which wheels are being used and it’s fairly aggressive even like instreet driving as well as out here on an off-road course. It does a very good jobof moving power around two wheels that have it. Now we have run into this systembefore it’s pretty much the same one that you’ll find on the Honda Ridgelineand when we’ve driven that car off-road we’ve been very impressed by itstraction control in the way that it moves power around to the wheels thatyou know are gonna drive the car and the same thing is definitely true about thePilot. The Pilot is still a unibody crossover. It’s still only got abouteight inches of ground clearance and you know not a ton of suspensionflex so you’re not gonna be able to do things like crawl over big rocks or goover really kind of robust trails where you need the suspension to flex a lot. But like a dirt road or anything like this it does very well and it’s verycapable. I think it would actually surprise most people how capable thisvehicle is. The 2019 Honda Pilot is unquestionably improved. The multimediasystem is a big leap forward and the improvements to the powertrain arenoticeable. However to fully fix the vehicles issues it seems like it’s goingto need a full redesign that expands third row space and includes a newautomatic transmission. The 2019 Honda Pilot is on sale now and for moreinformation about it head over to Cars. com.
source https://cardetailingphoenix.com/index.php/2018/09/18/2019-honda-pilot-first-drive-cars-com/
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