The Honda Ridgeline has faced ‘fake truck’ accusations for its entire production run. Even after Honda beefed up the model for its second generation, the unibody pickup has never really earned acceptance from the truck community. But the original designer of the Honda Ridgeline said the model was never really supposed to be a pickup in the traditional sense.
“I don’t want to call it a truck because it wasn’t really designed to be a truck, but everybody thinks it is,” Don Herner, a retired Honda designer who worked on the first-generation Ridgeline, said in a video by YouTuber Jack Bontatibus that was brought to broader attention by The Drive.
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The video, which features Herner walking around a first-generation Ridgeline, dives deep into the history of Honda’s bedded machine. Herner claims the Ridgeline wasn’t a directive from above, but was instead the result of boredom at Honda’s design studio. After approaching Dave Marek, American Honda’s longtime R&D executive advisor, for permission, Herner and a team of designers began sketching both a mid-size pickup and a compact SUV.
“We started sketching a bunch of different vehicles. And, out of that initial sketch phase, the Ridgeline came out and also the RDX came out of that unplanned, initial impromptu sketch phase,” Herner said in the video. “Eventually one of the market managers came down and was like, ‘Hey Don, what are you guys doing down here?’ So he took all the stuff that we’d done downstairs, brought it upstairs to the executives, and then he kind of got the ball rolling on the executive side.”
The designers had dreamed big, fitting imaginary 35-inch tires and off-road wheels in their sketches. But Honda’s engineering team reportedly had a different idea. Instead of off-road-focused rubber, the engineers wanted to fit smaller wheels and tires—even smaller than the 245mm section tires and 17-inch wheels that the Ridgeline arrived with. And there was a reason for such a departure from the dimensions of a typical mid-size truck.
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“This never really started out to be a truck project, per se, because Honda doesn’t make a transmission robust enough to turn gigantic wheels and tires. We were calling it internally the ‘advanced capabilities vehicle,’” Herner explained. “The target for this was, SUV interior size. Our competitors at the time were the [Toyota] Tacoma and a Ford truck…this has a lot more interior space, a lot more legroom, and a lot more couple distance than the Tacoma did at the time.”
Interior packaging was Honda’s biggest focus with the Ridgeline, and Herner said that Honda executives actually examined the interior before the exterior as the Ridgeline got closer to production. Honda wanted as much room as possible inside the Ridgeline, a different approach than the bed-focused design of many older trucks. Speaking of, the first-generation Ridgeline was also criticized for its short, 1100-pound load limit bed—but Herner said the fiberglass bed was meant to take a beating.
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“The bed was made to be super, super robust. They overloaded it through computer-aided engineering. .. the entire suspension crushed all the way to the ground and popped back up. The idea was it would survive that kind of a pounding,” Herner said.
Honda even considered partnering with Nike on the project. Herner said that Honda approached Nike’s All Condition Gear (ACG) wing to co-brand the pickup with the footwear brand, and designers even went to Beaverton, Oregon, to visit Nike’s headquarters. Ultimately, the partnership didn’t work out, but the Ridgeline enjoyed a 20-year lifecycle anyway. While production of the second-generation Ridgeline is currently paused, Honda is preparing for a third-generation Ridgeline in 2028 with even more off-road chops.
A New York transplant hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Emmet White has a passion for anything that goes: cars, bicycles, planes, and motorcycles. After learning to ride at 17, Emmet worked in the motorcycle industry before joining Autoweek in 2022 and Road & Track in 2024. The woes of alternate side parking have kept his fleet moderate, with a 2014 Volkswagen Jetta GLI and a BMW 318i E30 street parked in his Queens community.