Gary Flint, project manager for Honda, came to Boston in February to give a presentation on how the automaker's new Ridgeline pickup truck came into being.
When the actual truck came to town last month, it was an opportunity to compare theory and reality.
First, the Ridgeline is an intriguing vehicle, but it's not a traditional ''working" pickup. Rather, it's more like a big brother to Subaru's car-based Baja.
That's hardly a drawback for the 99 percent of us who don't need a heavy-duty workhorse, but instead view the pickup as passenger car that can carry stuff. In this market, Honda seems to have found an unfilled niche.
The Ridgeline's 3.5-liter V-6, the only engine offered, puts out 255 horsepower and moves this hefty (4,500-pound) vehicle more than adequately. Likewise, the driving experience is comforting with good visibility, predictable handling, and strong brakes.
The verdict: It's carlike and reassuring to operate (stability control is standard). It's a Honda, albeit a big one, meaning dependability, quality and reliability should be considered built-in until proven otherwise.
If there's a place where the Ridgeline falls short, it's the exterior styling, resembling a robot cartoon from the front, and slab-sided. Instead of bed rails, the body line slopes downward from the rear door line to the tailgate, a styling cue that reminds one of the Avalanche, Chevy's full-size crew-cab pickup that markets its own versatility.
Honda, with 1.2 million vehicles sold last year, was well aware that the truck market accounted for more than half of all vehicles sold in the United States. And Honda didn't have a pickup truck in its lineup, even though 500,000 of its sales were considered ''light trucks" -- Elements, Pilots, CR-Vs, and Odysseys.
Flint's design team aimed the Ridgeline at the family market, providing five-passenger comfort, towing capability, a ''dirty" cargo area in the cargo bed, and secure storage areas. Gone was the traditional ''three-box" pickup-truck design of engine compartment, passenger cabin, and bed.
In its place came what Flint's people termed an ''integrated closed-box frame with unibody construction." A simpler description: a unibody with enough additional cross-bracing on the bottom to approximate the rigidity of a typical ''body-on-frame" truck, while maintaining carlike handling and ride.
The Ridgeline folks also did away with the amazingly complex decisions that face pickup buyers.
Example: Do you want a regular cab, king cab, or crew cab? Short bed or long bed? Which trim line? (There are usually four to six.) Do you want the V-6, or one of several V-8s?
Honda has gone simple. There's one body style (four-doors crew cab), a outside ''dirty cargo area" (the 4x5-foot bed), one V-6 engine, three trim levels. There's the base RL, middle RTS, and posh RTL (leather, heated seats, XM radio, dual-zone climate control.)
The Ridgeline, with 8.2 inches of ground clearance and independent suspension at all four corners (no truck-standard rigid rear axle here), should get you anywhere there's a road, paved or otherwise. Our biggest test was parking it on a steep, once-grassy hillside, during April monsoons. It sank a bit in three hours, but extricated itself and went through aptly named ''driving" rainstorms without hesitation.
The bed isn't set up for the US standard of holding a 4x8-foot sheet of plywood or wallboard. It will haul them home from the hardware store with the tailgate down. Said bed also has a composite lining that's dent- and rust-proof.
Honda's philosophy seems to be: a pickup for the driver, carlike comfort for the passengers.
Flint's design mission? Accomplished in an accomplished manner.
GALLERIES 
