A couple of weeks ago, I trucked the whole family up to Michigan’s weird-ass Upper Peninsula so they could goof around in the woods while I helped crew for an ARA Rally Team, Blind Deer Rally Sport. (Crewing is mostly sitting around waiting, punctuated with some driving and a couple of hours of wrenching over the course of the weekend for anyone who’s interested.) Because charging infrastructure in the Upper Peninsula is somewhat lacking, I left my Rivian at home in favor of the Odyssey that Honda had conveniently offered me. It may be the last car that I write about here as Jalopnik has been sold and I will not continuing with the site under its new ownership.
The last time I drove a Honda Odyssey in a professional capacity, I said something about how modern Americans probably have more access to information about what’s going on the world, how things work and what they can do to make everything a little better/easier than any group of people who have walked the earth. But the fact that they mostly ignore it makes them in a sense, the dumbest people in history. If I remember correctly, that point was deleted from the story that got published on the site. Luckily, that’s still true all these years later. Americans, and I don’t know if this has always been the case, make decisions mostly by feel, not based on evidence or reasoning. If they were thinking things through, more of them would be driving a car like the Odyssey.
I tested the Elite model, which is the top trim level. With destination, it’s $52,275, pretty close to the price of the average new car in America. Even the base EX-L gets a leather interior and that’s available at $43,315 with destination. Yes, that’s a decent amount of money, but I can’t think of an SUV or Crossover that delivers anything close to this kind of comfort, utility or usability at that price.
There are some things I’d change about Honda’s minivan, but fundamentally, it is a minivan, which means it will do just about every single thing a driver will ask their car to do. It swallows a massive amount of cargo, will schlep seven people in comfort and return decent fuel economy. If you’re reading this site, you know that.
You may also know that this Odyssey Elite has a drop down screen and Bluetooth headphones for back seat passengers, an onboard vacuum and incredible “magic slide” seats. If you were to start with a blank sheet of paper and a list of desired attributes for the perfect family car, you’d probably end up with something just like this.
I was pretty high on this Odyssey when it was introduced, and not a ton has changed with this refresh. The front and rear fascias have been refreshed, screens enlarged, etc. But it’s still a fundamentally excellent machine, fit for its purpose.
It is not, however, perfect. The steering is a little overboosted, it tends to wander a little on the freeway. It’s not exactly fast, and the suspension can judder over rough surfaces. I also found that the screen and headphones were a source of discord from my kids. Usually they’re content napping, looking out the window or yapping about school and the historical roots of the 9/11 terror attacks. But, with the screen, there was a lot of debate about what they’d watch and whose turn it was to pick. The bluetooth headphones were just another thing for a motion sick Mom to fiddle with. But, your experience with the new, larger screen and its improved resolution may be different than mine. There is a designated area in the center console with a built in HDMI port so you can bring your Prime stick or Roku with you, which is nice.
It’s part of my job to evaluate driver assist systems, but most of the time they’re so annoying that I end up turning them off before too long. I didn’t make it home from taking delivery in the Rivian before pulling over to start toggling things off. But in the Odyssey, the Honda Sensing suite was unobtrusive and helpful when it needed to be.
In my previous Odyssey review, I said it was one of the only cars my kids were sad to give back. The kids are bigger now, but it’s still true. Every time I drove them to school in it, and over the course of 10+ hours driving, they were excited about the Odyssey. Now that they’re old enough to think about this stuff and offer their opinions, I asked them what they liked so much about it. Obviously the screen came up, but a couple things surprised me. They loved the second row captains chairs and said it was easy to reach their stuff on their own. They said the large side windows next to those chairs made it unusually easy to see out of the car. They said they liked being able to see the map on center screen on the dash and it helped them understand how much longer the road trip was going to take. Finally, they said they liked that the doors (and likely the lower load floor compared to my Rivian) made it easy to get in and out, even with their backpacks on.
There are two major considerations I think about every time I review a car. The first one is whether the car delivers what the automaker intended. I think the Odyssey, lightly refreshed here, is a great example. It’s very thoughtfully designed to deliver exactly what a family needs from a car and I think it does exactly what Honda intended. The second consideration is whether the end user, the car’s owner will feel like they got what they wanted and expected. For a family car I can’t imagine wanting or expecting anything more than the Odyssey delivers.
