Car_and_Driver_USA_July_2017

THREE-PAGE COMPARO
Clowns to the Left of Me,
Jokers to the Right
It’s Chevrolet Colorado vs. Honda Ridgeline in this battle of lightweight middlemen. _by Daniel Pund
THE ONLY VEHICLE-SEGMENT DESCRIPTOR in the automotive
market that might be more amorphous than “crossover” is “midsize
pickup.” The mere mention of it has our own Don Sherman
furiously scribbling numbers on scraps of paper, wild eyed and
sweating. “There’s no such thing,” he growls. And, we must admit,
he’s kind of right. Not about the temperature in the offce. He’s
dead wrong about that. But “mid-size pickup” assumes that there
is something bigger and something smaller, between which this
middle-size thing fits. There is no smaller class of pickup, though.
And every Chevrolet Colorado, Sherman’s
handwritten notes attest, exceeds the
length of the shortest Silverado. What
does it all mean, other than that we need to
arrange a remote offce for Sherman?
We don’t know. What we do know is
that two vehicles from opposite edges of
the automotive world can meet in the
maybe-you-don’t-actually-need-a-pickup
middle ground of “mid-size pickup truck.”
And so it is with the Colorado and the Ridgeline. The Chevy hails
from the world of Silverados, country songs, diesel, and brodozers.
The Honda shares a platform with a minivan. Like an actual pickup,
the Chevy is available in two bed lengths, two cab sizes, and with a
choice of three engines (one of which burns that fuel you get at
truck stops). The Honda is front-wheel drive in its base form and
can turn the sides of its bed into an enormous speaker.
So that brings us to this no-win situation starring a Colorado
LT 4WD crew cab short box and a Ridgeline RTL-E AWD. If we
104 . CAR AND DRIVER . JUL/2017
photography by MARC URBANO