I Drive The New 2023 Honda Pilot TrailSport Off-Road Up a Challenging Mountain Trail

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Thank you hey everybody check it out in this episode of prototype hunting we just came across a flock of completely camouflaged vehicles now we’re up here in breckenridge colorado at the base of an off-road trail so someone’s doing some kind of off-road testing um but this is a pretty hard trail this is middle fork of the swan it’s like a six out of ten

On onyx so maybe we’re looking at some kind of jeep let’s see if we can get up close what’s got offroad tires got pretty decent ground clearance but it’s got the word trail sport on the side and actually for some light to you in this video i’m gonna take the all-new honda pilot trail sport up a pretty challenging trail that you wouldn’t expect it to do so

This is a pretty wild day what we’re driving here is a pre-production unit still in camouflage because they haven’t officially shown this vehicle to the world but honda invited myself and a videographer out to breckenridge colorado to showcase this vehicle’s capability now honda is a brand that has a long history of on-road engineering driving performance and

Quality but it’s not a brand that has in my mind been synonymous with off-roading in the past which is kind of funny because their power sports division like their motorcycles are side by side they’re some of the best in the world but they’ve never really gone that route with their car division until now so what we’re driving is the new honda pilot trail sport

And still a lot i don’t know about it but what i do know is that the last time i was on this trail i was in a tacoma trd pro with toyota and now i’m in a pilot that’s how confident is in this vehicle’s ability so this is a really cool little cabin along the way this is actually an old mining route so this connects breckenridge with montezuma and keystone on the

Other side of the mountain at like i don’t know 12 000 feet above tree lane it’s a really cool little trail and this little mining cabin was intact up until super recently and now i’ve come back and it’s falling down that’s a real bummer but this is a really cool trail now onyx off-road rates us as a 6 out of 10. check out onyx offroad for all your trail off-road

Navigation needs so we got the section up here where it’s gotten pretty rocky pretty gnarly we got a couple rocks probably over a foot tall um some a little bit smaller but they’re in weird spots so we’re gonna get a little bit of spotting action to get the uh pilot up this all right all of a sudden this has got real interesting real fast now it’s my turn to

Drive a priceless prototype up that mountain and we shall see what will happen i’m really nervous about this actually because there are what in the whole country and they’re trusting me with driving a pilot up a 6 out of 10 trail in colorado that’s pretty bold now they did air us down which was super nice we are down to 23 psi or so and we’re gonna try to

Keep it out of the tree keep it out of the rocks and we’ll see what i had a spotter it was a program lead for this car to two foot in a little bit oh hard on skid plates there come on pilot wow look at that that was pretty awesome that was a pilot freaking crazy this vehicle has one inch additional ground clearance compared to a standard 2023 honda pilot

And that’s great right it’s got revised suspension tuning it also has different stability bars tuned for off-road performance articulation ride quality that kind of thing out of the rocks but it extends beyond just that one inch lift it also has real underbody protection now this is the integrated skid plate so this is a beefy four millimeter thick high strength

Steel skid plate and do you see this at the front of the skid plate this is actually the recovery point rated to two times the gvwr of the vehicle and it’s nice and rounded off here so you don’t tear your recovery point now this is a really clever idea right because typically you’d have to have like a recovery point on the front of the vehicle and they have crash

Safety concerns and like pedestrian concerns but by doing it underneath all in one side unit it’s one compact package now you’re probably thinking well it’s pretty low what happens if a strap scrapes in front of the vehicle well this valence has been designed to have a little bit of a contact onto it and it’s also very cleverly this kind of flat great plastic

So you’re not going to see any scratches on there now if we come along to the side you’ll take skid is big and large and in charge you can see it down here that’s a 2.8 millimeter thick high strength steel skid and we are certainly putting it to the test now this trail if you look at onyx off-road is rated as a 6 out of 10. so this is a trail that they recommend

Strongly that you bring a vehicle with a low range out here right proper all-terrain tires um recovery points you know like this is the real deal all right so we’re really starting to climb here got some pretty significant uh uphills with some loose rocks you can move the all-wheel drive system trying to figure out what’s going on we also have these larger rocks

In the middle of the trail and this is typically where i would engage a low range in a off-road vehicle but the pilot doesn’t have one and believe it or not the torque distribution in first gear really feels pretty good which i’m very impressed with um that was kind of a cakewalk actually now of course the difficulty of not having a low range is you build a lot

Of heat up in the transmission and i’m hoping that we’re not gonna have um any major issues today but uh it’s really cool that honda’s allowing us to push these vehicles to this point oh all right now this is uh this is where things get a little bit interesting and i don’t know what the ground clearance is on this vehicle they haven’t released that spec yet i

Would figure somewhere around eight and a half nine inches i can’t believe we just took a pilot up that it’s gonna look like nothing on camera but that was a steep right turn with some fairly sizable rocks thrown in there and it did take a little bit of momentum um but not much at all and this iv tm4 system with the torque distribution in the rear end is doing an

Excellent job of kind of keeping us pointed down the trail keeping us moving where we need to go let’s talk about the design of the new 2023 honda pilot well we can’t see much because this is still ahead of the reveal and honda has gone ahead and of course incorporated all this camouflage this is like a dazzle theme so that um not only can the public not figure

Out what it looks like but of course competitors can’t figure out what it looks like but there’s a couple of things we can see so we’ve got this much more butch squared off headlight than the current generation i love these little grill openings these little squared off ribs they look fantastic large grill ducts along the base and then i think it’s fair to say

That that’s probably going to be a honda badge and it looking it’s looking pretty big as we come along to the side here check out these wheels now these wheels were specifically designed for the trail sport and i love that hum have actually gone to an 18 inch wheel so like some of its competition is claiming off-road packages but they’ll be like with a 19 or

20 inch wheel and you’re like no you just can’t do that you can’t do this stuff with a big wheel but honda is devoted to the small wheel which is fantastic and they say they’ve designed it as well to keep the spokes away from rocks and stuff and these tires this is the continental terrain contact tire now in the past hondas offer tires that look all trainee and

The sidewall but the actual tread block is not very all-terrain however this is an actual all-terrain tire but even better for a lot of folks it’s three peak snow rated which is a huge deal so here in colorado we get a lot of snow probably not a lot of a surprise but in the winter time having that three peaks no rating is an enormous deal which is fantastic got

The mirror along the side here now they did put trail sport so they’re not completely you know completely uh camouflaging it but kind of a fun thing actually is part of the camo is they want to discuss the body lines so not only is there the swirl pattern but there’s actually like a squishy padding which is fantastic it looks like we got roof rails up top got

A large rear window in the rear and then coming along back um this is pretty cool all the trail sports are going to have an integrated receiver and look how beefy the points are for the uh safety chains and that’s because these are rated to recover the vehicle and then you’ll also find a full-size spare tire with a matching wheel to complement the trail sports

So not a lot we can fully see on the outside and we’re not allowed to film the inside yet but we’ll have a full reveal coming up shortly this video is just about showing the capability honda uses a system called the rear diff has a twin clutch setup which can distribute torque left and right and i’ve had a lot of experience with the system on rollers and other

Vehicles and here we’ll play a little bit of that footage now into drive a little bit of throttle okay no problem there in normal mode good result let’s go ahead and try it in its most aggressive setting sand mode into drive foot on the throttle yep no problem whatsoever there but what’s amazing is how well it works in the real world now this pilot trailsport

Also has a mode called trail which increases the pressure on the uh the clutches in the rear diff and allows up to 75 torque distribution to either the left rear or the right rear wheel while maintaining 25 to the wheel that perhaps is in the air but what that means is that you can get the vehicle off kilter you can get air but with just a little bit of throttle

Pressure you can really get through a lot of those kind of off-camber situations with a lot of confidence and we’ve definitely been experiencing that where we get a nice deep hill 15 you know 15 18 degrees you got a hole in the right hole in the left you got the vehicle off kilter and then with just a little bit of accelerator um the the wheel in there will stop

Spinning the wheel on the ground will start engaging and then you can pull yourself out so a very useful feature we’ve been utilizing on the pilot trail sport is the trail watch camera system and there’s a set of cameras a really useful one in the front but my favorite are the ones that poke out from the side mirror so you can see what you’re going to approach

With your sidewalls it’s really really handy now let’s talk a little bit about the powertrain and the transmission um we know nothing is basically the summary there this car is still very early on in its release seven told us what’s under transmission um so it’s kind of a little bit of guesswork now here’s my prediction just from driving it it doesn’t feel

Like it’s a turbocharged four-cylinder it feels like it is a variation of a six cylinder probably um i shouldn’t say probably maybe perhaps similar to what’s in the current pilot and the transmission feels like a torque converter automatic it does not feel like it has a dual clutch and it certainly doesn’t feel like it has cvt which is a great thing foreign

Driving up this trail we made it several miles in now we’re gonna have some lunch turn around and make our way down but if you look over there that’s looking pretty ominous maybe some weather moving in there’s supposed to be a flood watch in the town of breckenridge all day today so things might get pretty interesting thank you had my chicken wrap it was

Quite good had ginger candy which they provided for those of us who are a little bit worse to wear at high altitude that stuff is bad that stuff sticks your teeth forever it’s like eating just sushi just like plop no don’t do the ginger candy but it’s starting to rain quite a bit now we’re gonna hop back in the cars and head down the mountains all right well the

Rain is really coming down now and we’re going to traverse this nice little rock section in the wet and we shall see how the pilot does that this little section just following the spotter this guy’s literally been deemed a trail boss actually by the uh that’s cool that taught him it’s pretty cool let’s get plate here so far so good feels pretty good okay that’s

The skid plate but that’s what it’s there for making it nice and easy you can hear the the slick rock kind of slipping under the tires a little bit it’s pretty good i think just like that we made it down sweet foreign we’ve had no issues a couple shifting rocks because it’s been wet but the pilot trail sport’s been killing it we also behold the same control

To activate via a button i can’t show you right here you push that button and then you then control the speed and the brake pedal so if you like drive it three miles an hour it’ll lock in at three it goes between two like 12 miles an hour which is pretty cool uh but yeah this thing has been an absolute surprise out here on the trail we made it up some pretty

Serious terrain we didn’t get any transmission overheat issues the ivtm 4 system is really pretty pretty amazing and specifically in the trail sport that has a trail mode it’s a really big deal um we were playing a little bit earlier on the way up normal trail in like an off-camera situation is pretty enormous you can really feel that extra torque pressure on

The clutches in the back so um definitely recommend the trail sport if you’re looking to do some fun stuff in your pilot out in the dirt even if it’s just to get to cool campsites the peace of mind you get from skid plates to tires or recovery points is well worth the cost of mission and they won’t tell me but i’m pretty sure it’s got a wheel transmission with a

Torque converter which makes it far more satisfying off-road than any of the stuff in the wilderness it’s just torque delivery up hills at low speeds is so much better the honda pilot transport will be hitting dealers by the end of this year now we don’t have pricing we don’t have fuel economy so be sure to stay tuned while we get all those numbers but as always

A huge thank you for watching behind the camera it’s been cool and of course tommy in front of the camera we’ll see you in the next episode foreign

Transcribed from video
I Drive The New 2023 Honda Pilot TrailSport Off-Road Up a Challenging Mountain Trail! By The Fast Lane Car