2009 Honda Pilot: The Good Life

There is a time in most men’s lives when they will find themselves, suddenly, halfway between one place and another place, with two or three kids in the backseat and a load of family-sized groceries and miniature sports equipment somewhere behind them. Should you find yourself there you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ or you may not. Either way the thought will be fleeting. There are kids to pacify, groceries to unpack, and miniature sports equipment to be hosed off and hung dry. ‘Yes,’ you may have time to think, ‘this is the life.’ But most likely you will fiddle with the radio and keep on driving. You’re a busy guy.

The clever folks over at Honda know all about this. About the soccer games and big-box stores, about the busy mommies and daddies and their busy kids. For them they have created a special vehicle, the Pilot, a seven-passenger, a four-wheel drive behemoth, with a massive cargo bay and all the climate control zones and cup holders the modern family on the move could possibly require.

In the world of luxury, the purveyors of fancy things like high-priced hotel rooms and high-priced airline tickets are concerned with what they call “consistency of environment.” That is, they want their customers to feel as little friction as possible as they transition from their fancy homes to their luxurious cars to their airline seats to their feathery hotel beds. They must all feel the same, look the same, smell the same. So it is, too, with the Pilot. Everything about the car is consistent with the middle-class suburban big-box lifestyle, comfortable and adequate and reliable. From the muted cloth interior to the seven-speaker CD-changer sound system. None of it’s exciting, nothing’s fancy, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

The Pilot is a big car and it drives like a big car, only smoother. Like a really heavy Honda Accord. Fuel economy isn’t its strongest suit, but with the help of the Variable Cylinder Management system, it does alright. Whenever the Pilot’s cruising on the highway or decelerating, the green ECO light on the dash glows, indicating that two or three of the V6’s cylinders are turned off to save gas. This translates to just under 10 l/100km on the highway, and 13-14 l/100km in the city, numbers that will lighten your conscience a bit, and maybe keep the kids from getting ripped on at school for not rolling up in a Prius.

It won’t fit in a lot of those city curbside parallel parking spots, but that doesn’t really matter, since the Pilot was designed to be parked alongside other similarly large vehicles in those big parking lots that can be seen from space. The interior is as roomy as a Costco, the air conditioning powerful. The dashboard and steering wheel controls are simple, intuitive, and more than a little tacky in their styling details. The third row of seats folds perfectly flat to accommodate all mega-paks of breakfast cereal you care to purchase.

Sharp:
-Enormous cargo capacity, lots of leg room in back
-Decent fuel economy for a car of its size
-Rides as smooth as the saxophone stylings of Michael Bolton

Dull:
- Handles like a truck, which it is
- Interior details lean towards the cheap and tacky
- About as exciting as the saxophone stylings of Michael Bolton

Conclusion:
The Pilot is a good car for someone who has lots of room to park, lots of stuff and people to haul, and does most of their driving on the highway. Which is a good number of people. It does what it does well, albeit not in a great degree of style. Now stop reading this and go pick up your kids from swimming camp.