With the press of a button on the infotainment screen, a camera’s slightly fish-eyed view of the second and third rows can be pulled up – and zoomed in on. Bases should be covered for all the detritus of typical family life.Ĭabin Watch, meanwhile, is slightly less loud and a little more surreptitious. Seat-back pockets, cubbies in doors, shelves, and bins seem to be just about everywhere. There are cupholders everywhere I didn’t count them but can’t imagine a family of six running out of beverage space quickly. The rest of the packaging, though more conventional in functionality, is equally well thought-out. The slides also allow parents of young children to position a car seat right in the center of the vehicle – presumably in arm’s reach if you need to hand off cheerios, grab a bottle, or wipe a nose.įor parents of multiple kids with car seats, the ability to access that back row without having to unbuckle something, or climb in through the tailgate, also feels like a huge win. Basically, this means you can open a big channel to the back seats with just one hand, for dead simple access to the ample third row. A lever mounted on the door-sides of the middle row allows each chair to be moved, and locked, to one of eight different inboard locations. And the new Magic Slide seats are almost certainly going to be more useful on a trip-by-trip basis than even their prestidigitator forebears.

In fact, if I were to judge the entire minivan segment on the way its furniture moves around to allow flexibility to passengers and cargo, the Odyssey might earn best-in-class honors without my typing another word.įor 2018, the magic show has extended to the second-row captain’s chairs, too. All-new for 2018, I was unable to find a piece of this fifth-generation Odyssey that points to an abatement of that success. Odyssey has succeeded – wildly succeeded – because of clever engineering lavished on how the stuff inside the cabin works, without ignoring the greasy bits that make any vehicle go down the road well, or poorly.

Honda has, for decades now, made one of the very most useful boxes on wheels that money can buy – it’s called the Odyssey, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Useful for hauling around kids useful for hauling around tires for your race car ( or being a race car) useful for calm commuting with visibility over a sea of traffic. Tall boxes on wheels are, as logic dictates, damned useful. Talk to anyone who cares a lot about driving, and there’s a better-than-average chance they’ve owned or appreciated a minivan at some point in their lives. The old trope that minivans are detestable to the car-interested doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.

2018 honda odesi