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Meet the 2019 Honda passport elite.
Now the Green Machine here is the newest member of road shows long term fleet and will be serving as the production vehicle for West Coast, San Francisco based filming crew.
Which means I'm gonna be seeing a lot of this car over the next couple of months.
So, let's get to know each other, shall we?
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Now we were already pretty familiar with the path Corba before it even show up in our garage.
And that's because a lot of its technology is shared with the rest of Honda's 2019 Lineup of trusting SUVs.
We've got a separate video about that, and its platform and power train are largely shared with one of our previous production vehicles, Honda Ridgeline pickup truck.
That means that we're working with a 3.5 liter or three v six engine that makes 280 horsepower and 260 62 pound feet of torque, which it put through a nine speed automatic transmission rather than the original line 60.
And we've got this weird electronic push button, pull lever shifter to deal with, which is gonna take some getting used to.
For now, I'm accidentally putting it in reverse every time I wanna go into drive and that's just a little bit annoying.
Now front wheel drive is standard but all wheel drive is available as an option.
And And standard on our top trim Elite Model here, that's gonna be Honda so called IVTM4 system which uses front wheel drive for most of the time that can on demand speed up to 70% of power to the rear axle and then torque vector left and right with it there.
It's pretty interesting how this has an effect on handling especially when you put it in its sport mode.
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Friends the pillar for this vehicle is pretty much identical to Honda Pilot SUV which means you've got plenty of room here on the front row.
40 inches of headroom and 40 inches of leg room which.
Which is good for our taller producers.
And with 100 cubic feet of storage space with the second row folded flat, there's plenty of room for our gear though this is a little bit of a step down from our old Mercedes metris.
We missed you Wu Tang van.
We really do.
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Now passport is about six inches shorter than the larger pilot thanks to the removal of its third row, which means our capacity for people is down to just five passengers rather than the larger pilots eight souls.
However, the passport is about an inch taller than the pilot thanks to its increased right.
Which is good if we need to do some light off roading.
However that does mean that whenever we wanna lift a pelican case a camera bag or a tripod into this thing we've got to lift it just that much higher it's a slight inconvenience.
Now we've had the passport for a while now we put about 1600 miles on it going to dozens of shooting locations with all of our gear and so far we've averaged around 22 2.5 miles per gallon combined, which is a little bit better than the EPA estimate of 21 miles per gallon combined for the all wheel drive model.
But still not a whole lot to write home about compared to some of the better performers in this class.
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2019 Honda passport starts around $33,000 for the base sport with front wheel drive, but our Elite Model here with all wheel drive and all the bells and whistles tops out at just under 45 grand.
Now trim level for trim level that's about one to $2,000 less expensive than a comparably equipped pilot And if you don't need that third row, maybe smaller is better.
You do get all the same equipment.
First impressions are quite good but only time will tell a fool like this 2019 passport as much as our previous production vehicles.
The race Rage line and the Matrix van.
But we've got plenty of time to figure it out which leaves you plenty of time to head over to theroadshow.com to check out the rest of our [UNKNOWN] vehicles including the full review.
We'll meet you there.
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