Take me to the Pilot

Cars are getting harder to characterize. Many of today’s SUVs are really cars under their "off-road" skin, suggesting that it’s the visual cues that really matter for many buyers.

The Honda Pilot, for instance, started life as a Honda Accord. Add a minivan body and it’s the Odyssey. Add VTM-4 all-wheel-drive and the standard boxy shape and it’s an SUV, available either as the Pilot or the Acura MDX.

Appearances matter to me, but practicality matters more. For my family reunion trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I needed to haul at least seven people, plus the growing pile of luggage necessary for a week at the beach. (We missed the hurricane by two days, thanks for asking.)

I first lined up a humungous Toyota Sequoia, which definitely would have been up to the task. Unfortunately, somebody left it out in the rain and the interior got ruined. The Pilot was a last-minute substitution (thank you, Scott MacMillan) and it did even better, thanks to a significant advantage in fuel efficiency (17/22 mpg vs. 14/17). Things like that matter when you’re driving 800 miles round-trip.

The plan was that my family of four would meet my brother (family of three) at Washington’s National Airport for the second leg of the trip down to the Banks. With just the four of us, we had tons of room, though using the third seat cuts down dramatically on storage space. We got everything into three bags, which stacked up nearly to the ceiling.

As these things happen, my brother’s flight was canceled and our rendezvous point became Norfolk, Va., the next morning. Seven people plus luggage would have been very tight in the Pilot, but luckily we were able to hook up with my other brother in Williamsburg and offload several pieces. (Why don’t they ever talk about the third seat/luggage problem in SUV reviews?)

The Pilot lacked the DVD player my two girls (10 and 7) pined for, but it more than made up for it with a navigation system that Automobile magazine describes as possessing "one of the most user-friendly interfaces in the industry." I’m hopeless with these things, but my wife, Mary Ann, programs them like a hacker. We lacked good directions to Duck, N.C., and weren’t even sure there actually was a Duck, but the computer assured us it existed.

The GPS failed us only once, directing us onto a North Carolina side road that led to nothing more interesting than Cousin Zeke’s barn. A seductive female voice gave us adequate warning to make key turns, and a neat little "road" graphic marked off the distance to exits in feet.

When we went off the designated route, the system politely suggested making a U-turn to correct our obvious mistake. Like most GPS systems, the Pilot’s navigation DVD favored major highways to time-saving back roads, but it never got us lost.

The Pilot traveled full up to miniature golf games and to the national Kitty Hawk monument (which John Kerry coincidentally invoked during his speech that same night). For an SUV, it’s not bad on the road. Thanks to the VTM-4 system, the Pilot travels in front-wheel-drive most of the time, only switching to four-wheel power when extra traction is really needed.

As a class, SUVs suffer from poor rear visibility, and that provided us with our only anxious moments during the trip. (The Infiniti FX-45, under test now, is far worse in this regard. More on that in a later column.) The Pilot is quite comfortable, with plenty of the bins and cupholders that make long trips bearable.

We arrived back home, travel strained but not too sore, and with all of our gear intact (even the boogie boards on the roof). All in all, the Pilot did its job admirably.