Can the Honda Ridgeline really take nearly 20 years and 200K miles of wear and tear?
Whether you buy a new truck right now or you bought one many, many years ago, the one key item to longevity is maintenance. At least, that’s my usual response when folks reach out asking about which truck is the “most reliable” over the years. That can be a tricky question to answer, since “it depends” is not the most satisfying response, and we don’t typically have trucks long enough to really get a sense of how they hold up. When we buy used trucks like this 2008 Honda Ridgeline, however, we can (at least vicariously) get an idea how something fares over decades and hundreds of thousands of miles of use.
Now, the Honda Ridgeline first emerged as a concept back in 2005. At the time, it was a pretty radical idea, since it’s a unibody pickup built at a time where the company’s most heavy-duty “truck” was the Pilot SUV. And like the Pilot, the Ridgeline debuted with a V6 engine under the hood, and has had one ever since. There’s no bed bolted to the frame, however, and there are no leaf springs, no conventional locking differentials and no shift-on-the-fly four-wheel drive system. Instead, what we’re looking at here is an all-wheel drive “sports utility truck” years before that concept became a bit more popular with pickups like the Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz.
Of course, how well a truck holds up over time is something of a relative term, as I mentioned, since two of the same trucks from the same year can hugely differ depending on how owners handled upkeep. This particular Ridgeline, however, still feels solid after nearly two decades and 200,000 miles of use over the years.
Check out more in the video below, where Andre covers the history, powertrain, interior and just how well (or not) this Ridgeline drives today:
