The Honda Ridgeline Decides to Get with the Times

The 2021 Honda Ridgeline will look a lot more like a truck.

Honda has a lot going for it. The venerable automaker has a decades-long reputation for dependability and durability. It continues to sell lots of cars in the United States. The Accord and Civic still sell in the U.S. despite the American market’s shift toward trucks and crossovers.

Nonetheless, Honda has realized that if it wants to keep up with current car-buying trends in the States, it needs to gives some of its models a little facelift.

The Honda Ridgeline is a good place to start. The Ridgeline, Honda’s unibody midsize pickup truck, is a practical vehicle that honestly looks like a Honda CR-V with a truck bed. The recent Ridgeline design clearly ripped off the CR-V’s front façade, hardly even attempting to give it the air of chunky ruggedness that has been all the rage among makers of American trucks.

That all changes with the 2021 Honda Ridgeline.

Honda has finally decided to add some aggressive, blocky aesthetics to the Ridgeline, bringing it in line with the competition. There’s a big, rectangular grille and less-rounded wheel wells. It’s still quite obviously a Honda – the headlights stay pretty true to the automaker’s current design language – but now it appears ready to make a real run at the competitive light truck market.

The HPD trim package adds even more to the appearance, including the stylish bronze-colored wheels and obligatory HPD graphics. The interior likewise has gotten a revamp, although Motortrend reports that it remains as functional and practical as Ridgeline owners have come to expect.

What isn’t getting updated? Well, the rest of the Ridgeline. Honda is sticking with the 3.5-liter V6 mated to an automatic transmission, and the Ridgeline remains a unibody truck. By all accounts, that’s a smart move – the Ridgeline itself was a good vehicle, it just didn’t look like it was prepared to compete with Ford, Chevy, or Ram.

The Ridgeline’s lack of traditional “truck-like” features earned it some snickers in the past from truck purists. No V8? No locking differential? It really is a CR-V with a truck bed!

But Honda believes that the Ridgeline is every bit as rugged and durable as the other midsize trucks on the market. It’s not a rock crawler, but it absolutely is a capable adventure vehicle. Thus, Honda is aiming to improve its image as a serious maker of off-road vehicles, and that’s starting with the Ridgeline. The Honda Pilot and Honda Passport likewise are getting updates to better compete in the American market.

It remains to be seen whether this push will be successful. But in the meantime, the design updates are a welcome change.