Many of those good and weird ideas remain in the new generation, but Honda reversed course significantly on the one that it most blames for the Ridgeline’s subpar sales: exterior design. Toyota continued churning out the Tacoma, General Motors kept on building the Chevrolet Colorado and the GMC Canyon, and the Ridgeline faded into obscurity, tumbling from 50,193 sales in 2006 to a low of 9759 in 2011 before getting canned after the 2014 model year.īut the Ridgeline was a good idea-a good idea packed with weird ideas: the dual-action tailgate, the in-bed trunk, the flying-buttress cab, and the dramatically sloping edge topping each bedside. GMC’s erstwhile chief told us then that he expected the entire compact-truck market to go unibody.īut after the tumult of that year, the automakers backpedaled to the safety of familiarity. In barely over a month at the beginning of 2008, Toyota and then GMC debuted similarly conceived unibody pickup concepts. That Honda’s reimagined pickup seated five far more comfortably than any of its crew-cab contemporaries and rode incomparably better should have kick-started a revolution. We named it a comparison-test winner, then ordered one for 40,000 miles of fawning. There could not have been a better occasion to bring out a more civilized, more efficient pickup. It made its debut in 2005, just as gas prices were transitioning from “Whoa, this is getting a little expensive,” to “WTCrap is going on here?!” Not only was it not ahead of its time, it was one of the timeliest automotive introductions in history. It’s not as if the first-generation Honda Ridgeline was ahead of its time.
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