Test drive Honda Ridgeline 2005 - 2009 pickup

The prince is in the mud!

Honda went crazy. Violated the laws of the automotive industry. Old dogma has forgotten once and for all. And they became so insolent that they created perhaps one of the best pickups in the world.
 
I say to you: it doesn’t happen! Honda Ridgeline passengers are talking peacefully, falling apart on the back sofa. And why are they not asking them to let them out rather and never again invite how it was in Ford Ranger? Why does the front passenger enthusiastically twist the pens of a separate climate, and the sounds made by a first -class audio system are pouring into the ears?
Where, damn it, in a pickup of the best, after a tractor, a friend of the American farmer, gray corrugated skin, pulled out at the junction of neat stitches? And the racing combination of devices with a silver well packaged in a silver well for what is it?
Medical history
Honda insanity dates from 2004, and in the medical record it was marked by the SEMA exhibition (Las Vegas, USA). It was there that the pre -production sample of the Ridgeline SUV was represented, which was supposed to glorify the roofs of the American pijes.
This is the next year, the US National Road Safety Administration (NHTSA) will announce that the car was the world's first four-door pickup, which received five stars for safety both in the lateral and frontal crash tests. A little later, the same organization will call Honda Ridgeline the most undistorted, and a year later the car will be recognized as an ideal pickup in the opinion of the residents of 50 states, and at the same time the best car in the Truck of the Year 2006 category.
All this will be later, and then, four years ago, the Hondians first encroached on the segment of full -sized SUVs with an open cargo platform.
Today, these machines seep a thin stream to our market in search of connoisseurs of unusual equipment. Among which we were.
Size matters
We are shunning in the city. Because they are afraid. This monster is only such a leather-root-friendly leather. Outside he is a rock. More precisely, a mountain range, if you translate the name literally. More than five meters of straight lines and sharp corners. Almost three tons of steel, supported by the power of six cylinders, set at an angle to each other.
Each of the four 17-inch wheels in a single jerk can convey a total moment of 342 nm, and with a slip of the black giant from the place, leaving the neighbors in the stream in mild confusion. But you do not immediately recognize the avid athlete in Ridgeline.
Have you had to drive a locomotive? No? Then welcome to the world where the size matters.
Honda Ridgeline dimensions will not be given right away. Only the road and roofs of neighboring cars are visible from the driver's seat. It is impossible to find out that it is in front of the wheels of the wheels that capable of turning the crankcase that can turn the crankcase: the hood is too high. I will have to remember that it ends somewhere one and a half meters from the windshield, after which it passes into the radiator grill.
The rear bumper is even in the area incomprehensible to the senses for the senses, but due to a sufficiently large window, it turned out to be completely tolerant during maneuvering.
But you can get a job in a driver’s place without any problems: the salon the size of a small refrigerator allows almost unlimited movements inside. But imposingly, in American, it is not interesting to sit behind the wheel. It is necessary to get together, mobilize internal reserves and discard the prejudices about the slowness and the overweight of pickups.
Honda Ridgeline does not just start moving, it shoots. From a traffic light, I’m leaving with a bass roar, it seems that the car is pressed against the road and is ready to grind asphalt up to the first cosmic with huge wheels, without dumping the pace. The electronic coupling unloads the rear axle, connecting it only when the front is slipping, and from this acceleration is even easier. There is not the slightest shaking a powerful suspension has quite comfortable settings, and the smoothness of the Honda course is simply magnificent.
I enter into corners without the slightest rolls as if not heavyweight under me, but the middle class, embroidered in the German engineering offices. Rama Ridgeline is integrated into the power structure of the body, which added the latter to twisting.
In addition to everything, the pickup suspension is independent in a circle! That is why, when turning the steering wheel, the back is so reluctant to slip from the trajectory: the profile of the road skillfully works out a multi -link. Only at high speeds does a heavy car begin to swim slightly along the road, as if cooling the ardent of a heated driver.
Miles and Fahrenheytes
Fascinated by piloting, I do not immediately look at the speedometer. What is there? Only 80, moreover, the temperature in the cabin, according to the liquid crystal window, under 70 degrees ... What happened? Meet: the legacy of American citizenship Ridgeline. Get a physics textbook for the fifth grade from the shelf and remember how to transfer to the SI Miles, Fahrenheita, and if you decide to climb under the hood and inch at the same time.
Get used to: Americanism will wait for you further. This is me about incredible sizes of the handle of doors and armchairs, completely deprived of lateral support. And also about the lever of the machine gun, which is on the steering column, and uncomfortable light bulbs of the box, almost always blocked by a massive steering wheel.
But what is the spirit! A mixture of Japanese technology and American charisma! Such a car needs to be breathed, they need to admire, and sometimes (in the most extreme cases) use for its intended purpose: transport goods outside the roads. True, it is difficult to imagine in the back of Honda Ridgeline concrete blocks with protruding reinforcement, scratching plastic sheathing, but a couple of motorcycles will fit for sure. Plus, under the floor, an additional cargo compartment was lurked, locked with a key.
Unfortunately, this bright and memorable car has no place in the show rooms of Russian official dealers of pickups only for the United States, where Honda had every chance to seriously settle in a new class.
For each competitors, the car has a special trump card in the sleeve. It will easily furnish someone in handling, someone can’t keep up with Honda Ridgeline in power and design only can be convinced that for the ability to carry out small cargo transportation with great comfort and unusual pathos should be laid out for almost one and a half million.

The car is provided for the test company S-Neva.

Text: Alexander Mikhailov
Photo: Roman Ostanin

 

A source: Wheel magazine [June 2008]