Honda Built This Extreme Trail-Ready Pilot to Teach Its Employees How to Off-Road

The 2026 Honda Passport TrailSport was trotted out for the media (myself included) to test drive for the first time last month. The automaker had a demo course cut through some undeveloped land in Puerto Rico to showcase the SUV’s off-road capabilities, and parked off to the side there, I saw this particularly badass steel-bumper’ed Honda Pilot. I got a closer look and some insight into its development from Honda’s people, because come on—this thing is sweet.

Honda’s push into off-roady production vehicles and the birth of the TrailSport subbrand are relatively recent phenomena. The short version of its origin story is that enthusiastic engineers fitted aggressive tires on some of Honda’s AWD SUVs, put executives in the passenger seats, and impressed them with the capabilities of Honda’s powertrains. In 2022, I went out to Colorado to test drive a Pilot TrailSport prototype and came away reasonably impressed myself.

Consumers seem to be liking these vehicles too, as Honda quickly grew the TrailSport family to include cool versions of the Ridgeline pickup truck and, of course, the new Passport.

The existence of this aggressive-looking Pilot mule came about for two main reasons: Honda’s engineers’ desire to keep seeing how far they can push the brand’s platforms off-road, and the company’s need to familiarize more of its staff with dirt driving.

Off-road performance development at Honda happens in a few different departments concurrently. Its powersports division is always cooking up improvements to dirt bikes, adventure bikes, and UTVs, while its Baja racing team, run by Jeff Proctor and J Sport, pushes its engines to extremes and puts the Honda brand on desert racers’ radar. Learnings from those worlds helped inform aspects like driving mode calibrations and skid plate thickness requirements.

One particular guy at Honda, Pete Langseth, is in charge of collecting intel and insight from those and other departments to see what can be efficiently applied to production vehicles. He also trains Honda employees in off-road driving. I caught up with him for a minute at the new Passport launch, where he told me his duties are widely varied but his main title is “Project Leader for Off-Road Development.” The Pilot in these pictures, and at least one other like it, are rigs he uses in his driving tutorials. Apparently, those classes are very popular—no kidding, right?

Alas, he also assured me not to expect steel bumpers, a winch mount, or swing-out tire carriers like what we can see here on Honda’s factory options list any time soon. But the new Passport TrailSport does have a longer list of accessories than Honda’s ever offered, and the brand does plan to keep adding to customer choices there. This fully kitted-out rig is still cool to see—and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that something this extreme could appear through the aftermarket.

The powertrain is apparently stock; the only significant mods are the ones you can see bolted to the exterior.

That outfit that I mentioned earlier, J Sport, is already offering lift kits, roof racks, heavy-duty skid plates, and other such accessories for the Honda Passport, Ridgeline, Pilot, and even CR-V. Since the company is working closely with Honda, I don’t think it’s outrageous to imagine that owners might be able to put together a package like this for themselves, through J Sport’s catalog.

The equipment on this particular Pilot mule was made by Honda’s internal fabrication team. They did a bang-up job, too. Not only is the fitment great, but they even integrated the OEM parking sensors.

I wonder how much the weight of those bumpers tax the factory suspension and what kind of fuel economy penalty they add. Honda’s people didn’t have specifics on that.

A stealth winch mount option for the new Passport and Pilot would certainly be cool, but I would be happiest to see a rear tire carrier option. Most consumers won’t want to deal with one because it’s annoying to open two things any time you want to get into the trunk, but for off-road enthusiasts, a rear tire carrier is a great way to save the space taken up by a full-size spare which is essential to carry while wheeling.

At any rate, for now, I hope you enjoy these pictures of what has to be the meanest Honda Pilot on Earth.

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