Honda Ridgeline

The Ridgeline is an impressive new mid-sized truck offering from Honda. Rather than going with the normal body-on-frame structure, Honda has created a unit-body truck with an integrated box frame. The result is a truck with a fully-independent suspension and an abundance of clever and useful storage. Ridgeline's bed is 5 ft long and features a load floor that allows 4x8 sheets of plywood to sit flat. The tailgate can be lowered in a traditional truck fashion, or swung open to one side allowing more access to the bed.


A pickup truck has been the missing link in Honda's U.S. lineup. It's easy to understand why this is the last major segment for the cautious automaker to dip a tire into. Having no V-8 engines, solid rear axles, or body-on-frame vehicles among any of its other offerings, Honda couldn't readily do a traditional-style pickup. So it had to do something different. Now it has. Honda claims it started with a clean sheet of paper, but it was one with the faint outline of the Pilot on it. Like the Pilot, the new Ridgeline pickup uses unibody construction, a transverse-mounted 3.5-liter V-6, and four-wheel-independent suspension-not typical pickup hardware. The Ridgeline also defies convention in that it offers only one cab configuration (four-door), one bed length (five feet), and one powertrain (a 24-valve SOHC V-6, five-speed automatic, and on-demand four-wheel drive).