Honda Pilot vs. Ford Explorer: All-New 3-Row SUV Takes on a Segment Stalwart

Ford is adamant its new Explorer is worth a look for shoppers considering a new SUV, especially those interested in the Honda Pilot. One might think they’re right to assume their brand-spanking-new SUV is a proper contender for one of the class leaders. After all, the Pilot is nearly five years old, and the Explorer is just six months into its life cycle. But what Honda got right half a decade ago, Ford struggled with in the new Explorer.

But before we get to the ground Ford still has to make up against Honda, we’ll start with what the Explorer does better than the Pilot. The first of which is interior space. The Explorer is a physically bigger car than the Pilot—longer by a couple of inches and slightly wider. As a result, it has more interior room and more cargo room—18.2 cubic feet to 16.0 cubic feet with the third row folded up. The third row itself, while not as easy to climb into, feels more spacious and will have less trouble containing your tiny tots for the school run.

The seating position in the Explorer is better than the Pilot’s, too. The new Explorer is one of a very small number of SUVs where you feel as though you’re sitting in it, not on it. The Pilot’s seating position is far too high. You feel more like the captain of an airliner than the driver of a car. I repeatedly tried to lower the driver’s seat despite knowing full well it was already as low as it was going to get.

The Ford is also slightly less expensive than the Honda. Our Explorer XLT rang up at $47,715 as tested. The Pilot Black Edition we used for this test was $50,740. However, if you skip the Black Edition package, which only adds some black badging and tinted windows, you can get all of the equipment in an all-wheel-drive Pilot Elite for $49,340. That’s how we’d spec it, anyway.

In contrast to our top-shelf Pilot, the XLT trim is the entry-level Explorer and far more expensive variants exist. The top-level Platinum’s price can be pushed north of $60,000, and there is even a sporty ST trim for those who value power over, well, value.

Unfortunately for the Ford, this is where its slim lead over the Honda runs out. The rest of the Explorer falls well short of the mark that Honda set with the Pilot nearly five years ago when it was an SUV of the Year finalist. The Explorer’s first major pitfall? An obvious lack of interior quality.

Ford’s problems become apparent the minute you crack the door open. At first glance, the interior is simply a bland mix of black plastics, but upon closer inspection, larger problems come into focus. A series of mismatched panels, plastics that creak while the car is in motion, and exposed wires in the driver’s side footwell speak to both a poor choice of materials and a lack of quality control from Ford.

Even though the leatherette on the seats and steering wheel is vegan, they both look and feel more like rubber than leather. Despite the Ford’s superior seating position, the seats are neither supportive nor comfortable; instead, they feel like lumpy pillows that were thrown together in the shape of a chair. Road test editor Chris Walton called them “gooey.”

The quality issues Ford suffers extend to its non-physical components, too. Sync 3, Ford’s infotainment system, is well-organized and clear, but the response to touch is slow, and its animations are laggy. Switching to Apple CarPlay doesn’t remedy the problem, either. In my time with the Explorer, CarPlay crashed six times—most frequently after startup. Features editor Christian Seabaugh reported the same issue as well. The processor Ford installed in the base infotainment unit feels constantly strained and could certainly use an upgrade—soon.

The Explorer’s driver’s side wing mirror creates an undue amount of wind noise that whistles through the cabin, and a suspected panel gap at the base of the windshield near the driver let even more wind noise in at speed. Under load, the engine’s gruff intake noise penetrates the cabin, and it’s so loud I initially thought a window had flown open. Quiet and cosseting the Ford is not.

Seabaugh put it best when he said, “Gosh, this is the most disappointing new vehicle I’ve driven since the Ford Ranger. I can’t believe an all-new, from-the-ground-up vehicle could feel so cheap and old. There’s not any one thing wrong with the Explorer; it’s more like everything is wrong.”

By contrast, the Pilot exudes quality inside. The leathers feel like actual leather and don’t have an air of cheapness about them, either. The seats themselves are both comfortable and supportive, and the adjustable armrest is hugely appreciated—still too high, though. There are no squeaks or rattles in the Pilot’s cabin, and it is by far the quieter vehicle on the road. Even at 70 mph, conversations at a normal volume are perfectly audible.

There are some scratchy plastics here, too. (There are always scratchy plastics, look hard enough and you’ll find them in almost any car.) That said, most of the nasty stuff is hidden below your beltline and well out of view. There is a finished quality to the Honda’s inside that is missing in the Ford. There are also much better storage solutions in the Pilot.

The console between the driver and passenger is truly massive—large enough to fit a purse, multiple bottles of water, tablets, or a smattering of other miscellaneous items one may not want floating around the cabin. The storage solutions in the Ford are adequate, but you won’t be able to fit as much stuff in the center console as you will in the Honda.

The lid for the bin just beneath the infotainment cluster in the Explorer we tested was heinously cheap. Both the quality of the material itself and its movement/action felt as though it belonged in a Focus from 10 years ago. However, a few weeks after we tested that specific Explorer, I had the chance to step inside another one. To my surprise, that same cheap piece of plastic now felt much more solid and sturdy. It may seem small, but this should serve as evidence to support the idea that Ford’s quality control needs work.

The infotainment system in the refreshed Pilot is clear, easy to use, and doesn’t lag at all. In fact, the system’s interface is so user-friendly I almost considered using it over CarPlay. But when I decided against that and plugged my phone in, CarPlay worked seamlessly.

The Honda is also a much better car to drive. The V-6 in the Pilot has less power and torque than the EcoBoost I-4 in the Explorer, but on the road, you’d never know it. In our performance testing, the Pilot was 0.6 second quicker to 60 mph than the Explorer—6.2 seconds versus 6.8 seconds, respectively. We’ll chalk it up to gearing. Although the transmission in the Pilot is nowhere near perfect, we suspect it’s better at keeping the engine within its power band than the 10-speed in the Ford. The result is the Pilot delivers better acceleration both off the line and in gear.

That difference is noticeable on the road, and though outright performance figures do not a good SUV make, the extra oomph will no doubt help when merging onto highways or scooting through gaps in traffic—especially when filled with people and gear. The Honda feels both more eager and more accelerative than the Explorer. The EcoBoost engine in the Explorer struggled to deal with all 4,367 pounds of the car, and it wheezes along the road until you really put your foot into it. Only then does the I-4 come to life, but only for a moment before dying back down well before its 6,500-rpm redline.

The Pilot, despite its bigger engine and lower claimed fuel economy numbers, was actually more efficient as we tested the cars. Honda says the Pilot will do 19/26/22 mpg while Ford claims the smaller I-4 in the Explorer can manage a slightly better 20/27/23 mpg. Those two sets of numbers are so close you might think it doesn’t matter, and one mpg is normally pretty negligible.

However, while we were out and about testing the two SUVs, we got some very different numbers. In what we call “observed” fuel economy, the Pilot blew the Explorer out of the water. The Honda averaged 21.2 mpg across all of our driving—right on par with Honda’s estimates. The Ford, on the other hand, averaged 18.9 mpg, well short of the 23 combined mpg claimed for the Explorer. Downsizing and turbocharging don’t work when your transmission is as clunky and reluctant as Ford’s was here, and the mpg numbers show that perfectly.

The problems with the Honda on the road amount to overly light steering and a brake pedal that requires too much effort to get any stopping power at all. The brakes on the Ford, while sudden in their action, still require less guessing than the Pilot’s do. The steering on the Ford is just as light and lacking in feel, but the calibration in the Pilot is just more intuitive than it is in the Explorer. The Ford is difficult to accurately place on the road, whereas the Honda is not. Honestly, we don’t like either system, but we’d happily take the Pilot in this case.

The second rows of both cars are easy to use, easy to hop in and out of, and at this price also come with heating. Both offer an adequate number of cupholders, but the Honda’s seats were yet again more comfortable and supportive than the Ford’s. The Pilot’s second row also offers a roof-mounted DVD player, though we don’t know how many toddlers will even know what a DVD is these days, let alone use it over their iPad. Still, if you appreciate such interior niceties, it’s something the Pilot offers at this price that the Ford does not.

To sum things up, Ford had plenty of time to overtake the top-quality Pilot by building a better Explorer. But as is, it feels only half-finished, with questionable build quality and quality control issues hurting its chances against the SUV stalwart that is the Pilot. The Explorer will need some serious improvements to match the old Honda. But let’s not forget, this is the company that was the first to abandon the car in the North American market to focus on SUVs. Even so, the new Explorer is a swing and a miss from Ford, while the Pilot, remains a stand-up double.

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Source: WORLD NEWS