![]() | Auto Market Review |
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Week Peek: Honda Pilot
The Background So, you can imagine I had high hopes for the Pilot. Overall, I was rather impressed with it, but only when I forgot about the MDX which told me how much better this platform can be. Instead, I kept trucks like the Dodge Durango, Chevy TrailBlazer XL and Ford Explorer in mind. The Jeep Grand Cherokee could give the Pilot a run for its money, although it is a smaller vehicle (even after the 2005 model bows featuring a larger wheelbase and cabin), and has never exhibited half the build quality of the Pilot. So, keeping this competitive set in mind, the Pilot is great. The problem is, the Pilot's top price puts it into an area where a Mercedes ML350 could be purchased. If you need space, the ML would be easily beaten by the Pilot. However, it also puts you within spitting distance of the MDX. And I don't know that the Pilot could ever beat the MDX. I Could (and Did) Get Used to This Flight of the Navigator Second, the system just could not keep up with me. No, I wasn't driving like a bat out of hell. I was driving the speed limit on a Main Street situation in the middle of a small New England town. It wanted me to make a left at an intersection, but did not tell me to do so. It merely highlighted the turn in the map as it did with the rest of the route. Some of you may be thinking the street turned left and kept the same name, but it did not. It changed from Main Street to Montvale at this turn, and it was not a fork but a full turn. The issue was that the nav did not realize I had passed the intersection. After I passed it, without so much as a throat clearing from the lovely female voice of the nav or a message on screen, it displayed the "Recalculating Route" message. It didn't even tell me that I had screwed up. It did this twice, both times adding five or more minutes to my trip, and, in one case, making me late. One time, it did not miss a turn per se, but decided not to tell me that my destination had arrived. I just happened to look at the nav screen as I went down the road to notice that it was recalculating. The Mercedes COMAND navigation system tells you, when safe, to try to make a U-turn if you pass a turn or destination. If you don't look at the screen on the Pilot, you'd never know until far further down the road (perhaps at the next intersection) when it tells you to take some new turn. The TL's navigation has a much clearer set of instructions and knows far better where the car is. It counts down the feet to a turn, which the also Pilot does. The problem is, the TL is right, and the Pilot isn't. In my experience, the Pilot nav was probably 20-50 feet off, consistently, not hitting zero feet until the turn until after I had made it. So, if you don't absolutely need it, the nav in the Pilot could be avoided (and money saved). Otherwise, did I have any complaints? Well, the Pilot is bland. It just sort of, well, is...it just exists. It's there, you see it, but it looks so uninspired. The MDX has some personality, but the Pilot just looks like a sort of bulbous SUV from Anycar who makes those generic cars for brochures and ads. Also, and this may be a marketing move to help preserve the luxury of the MDX, you can't get a Pilot with a sunroof. There was a lot of gray in the car I drove, and it would have really made the interior livelier and, honestly, less depressing had there been a little light from above. Also, I'm not a huge fan of the HVAC and radio controls, especially the radio. The gauge cluster is easy to read and looks great, and the other interior bits and storage compartments are great, but changing the radio station, using the CD player, and changing something other than the temperature on the HVAC required far too much looking for someone getting lost by a bad navigation unit. Sure, these things fade with time as you get used to a car and its controls, but in this case, the screen for the HVAC and radio are pretty far down, and the knobs are all too similar, so one really needs to look at each button or knob, and figure out which of the screens that's too far down to see, HVAC or radio, you are messing with, and then interpret what it says. This could be a function of the nav screen occupying the prime real estate in the center stack, but, from my time in an Odyssey, I was not surprised. While the radio screen is higher up in the Odyssey (at least the one without the nav), it's hard to see during the day due to small numbers and a seemingly low resolution two-color LCD. The Pilot's is surely bigger, but it's tucked further down in the stack, so it's not necessarily easier to see. The Final Review |
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