2015 Honda Pilot Ex on 2040-cars

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2017 Honda Ridgeline: A sleeper or a snooze?

Ah, yes... "Baby Steps," an expression that describes gradual improvements in what preceded. Overused for sure, but it clearly describes Honda's approach to the 2017 Ridgeline. Now that the news embargo is over we will be seeing a slew of preliminary road tests. Time to dig a little deeper, examine Honda's thinking and to see where Honda might go with this new truck. Honda set a number of goals with the new Ridgeline: 1) Sell more trucks. 2) Appeal to current Ridgeline owners who are ready to trade for a new truck. 3) Sell more trucks. 4) Expand their market share by attracting new buyers who hated the styling of the old Ridgeline. 5) Sell more trucks. 6) Convince skeptics that the Ridgeline is indeed capable of doing truck tasks. 7) Sell more trucks. My take is that this new Ridgeline is about 80 percent there; as the saying goes, "Close but no cigar." I'm really curious as to how this truck might evolve. There have been rumors that a regular cab model with a long bed may be in the works. Will we see it? Who knows — but by having such a model available, it would go a long way in terms of convincing (some) critics who say it's nothing but a "Pilot with a bed." Then there's the "youth market." Honda has gone on record saying they're not interested in courting them; a huge mistake in my opinion. Hopefully they'l re-think that and offer a legit off-road model with all the requisite goodies like more ground clearance, 2-speed transfer case, skid plates, tow hooks, larger all-terrain tires —5 of them, meaning no temp spare tire! It doesn't have to be a rock-crawler, but at least give it more capability to be considered an alternative to the 4x4 competition. Another area that needs to be re-thought is that Honda is offering seven trim levels. That's crazy. Most of them are so close to one another that it makes decision-making difficult. Cut it back to three of four trim levels, max. Makes life much easier. But yes, I think this truck, even as it stands, will be a sleeper in its segment and will do reasonably well in terms of sales. I think truck customers have seen and gotten used to the old Ridgeline, and have found — for what it was intended to do, it's really a pretty good truck. This new one certainly builds upon that — and it's no longer ugly. That's all good in my book. Related Video: Image Credit: Honda Honda Truck open road

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura 1.6 EL

Drivers from Mexico or Canada who take their cars across the border into the United States may drive them legally here for one year, after which they must drive back home or go through a registration process that ranges from arduous to impossible, depending on the state. As a result, quite a few Canadian- and Mexican-market cars end up marooned and un-registerable here, and I find some of them during my junkyard travels. Today, we've got a Canada-only Acura that showed up in a Northern California boneyard recently. I'm always looking for junkyard odometers with very high final readings (right now a 631k-mile Volvo 240 holds the record), and at first glance I though I had come across a Civic sedan with nearly 450,000 miles. Then I noticed the metric speedometer and realized that I was looking at a non-US-market car. 448,538 kilometers is 278,709 miles, by the way. A look at the build tag and emissions stickers showed that this car was built and sold in Canada. I'd found a second-generation Acura EL in a Colorado junkyard a few years back, so I knew that I'd just found a first-generation EL. Like its Acura Integra contemporary, the Acura EL was based on the Honda Civic. It replaced the Integra in Canada for 1997 and production continued through 2005. It differed somewhat in appearance from the Civic and had a nicer interior but was mechanically nearly identical to the US-market Civic EX sedan. A version for the Japanese market was built in Canada and exported across the Pacific as the second-generation Honda Domani. The engine is a 1.6-liter SOHC four-banger with VTEC, rated at 127 horsepower and 107 pound-feet. This one appears to be a loaded EL Premium, with the optional four-speed automatic. List price would have been C$22,000, or about $30,676 in 2023 United States dollars (using the exchange rate for June of 1997). The decklid had an EL-only spoiler, so a local Honda expert must have bought it for a Civic sedan. Since this car was old enough to be federally legal under the 25-year rule, it could have been registered legally in some US states… but California's strict emissions regulations would have made the process too difficult to be worth undertaking on a near-300k-mile machine that isn't particularly exotic.

Acura NSX bodywork to be sheathed in zirconium e-coat, fewer paint layers

Automakers make halo cars to drum up excitement and show off what they can do, but there's more to it than that. Advanced platforms allow a company's engineers to experiment with all sorts of technologies. And in the case of the upcoming new Acura NSX, that includes new paint processes.
Speaking with Autoline in this video interview, Honda's North American Senior VP Jon Minto talked about an innovative zirconium e-coat which it's applying to the new NSX. Unlike some experimental paints developed for Formula One, however, this coating is not designed to minimize drag or enhance cooling: it's designed to be more environmentally friendly.
It's one of a few measures which Honda is implementing on the NSX before expanding it to more accessible models, along with another process that uses fewer coats to reduce energy consumption by 40 percent. Watch the interview with Autoline host John McElroy right here.