Gadgetory

the Honda Odyssey it's been a big hit for the company in a very tight battle of minivans and for 2014 against a number of tech and engineering upgrades sums of won some ridiculous let's drive this 2014 Odyssey Touring elite top of the stack and check the tech now identifying a 14 Odysseys not too hard because they've done a mid cycle revision aluminum hood different lines around the face quite a few different feature lines on the body what happened here and there's a vast gutter back here for the slider hinge more visually than you normally see on minivans and then it all kind of comes to this unpleasant end so if you do like this it's kind of an attractive minivan now inside the Odyssey it feels like a minivan should it's spacious it's got my favorite thing about minivans armrest I love these and you've got the full stack head unit in this car because it's a Touring elite that means we have navigation standard for example they've made some improvements in the look of the map the logic of using it hasn't changed but the look is at least a little more on par with a 2014 model year car see my video on the fit evie to see how I feel about the previous generation this is getting a little better what I also like is they seem to have cleaned up some of the logic here where when you do an address on this vehicle it shows up only in one place on some previous Honda's with this split-screen duo you had keyboards on both still gets a man that's going on with things like radio that don't really sync up they're not on the same screen of selections and as you move one around the other one doesn't track this is an excessively complicated system that looks good I like the idea of a local touch control panel but they've got to simplify I'll point this out this is one of the very few Honda's that has HD radio and it's included standard because it's high trim lots of Honda's are missing that if you care now as you can here we've got rear camera and sonar standard in this vehicle and I've got a multi angle on that camera I can get an extreme down view a wide view and a mid view and you've got distance bars as well that's important in a big vehicle like this that is typically owned by someone who has children Aires and the neighbors kids running around in the driveway in the front yards that's a big deal in terms of more interesting audio sources you've got some hard drive space 16 gigabytes you'll never use and you've also got Pandora and AHA as you're streaming apps that's it for connected car in this vehicle now back here is a wonderland of entertainment technology standard on the touring elite is this Giganta super wide drop-down LCD screen and this wireless remote that goes with it you can split this guy to have one screen or two you can choose an HDMI for example on the other side DVD from the deck up there on one side and of course you get nothing on one side because nothing ever works that well does it for some reason the HDMI port is way back in the third row hooked up to that and then I came in through Apple's adapter to an iPad but I get nothing and your kids are gonna be really mad when this doesn't work so if you're really counting on this being your solution to long road trips bring your mobile and your cable and make sure this is gonna work for you real buggy for us now minivans I don't need them good if you can't carry lots of stuff in it right so let's see what this Odyssey does in that respect we have power doors everywhere as you probably noticed too on the side on this big old tailgate back here here's a big old storage well when you've got it in three row configuration lots of you have asked how easy is it to move seats on these minivans well here's how they do it on this guy you pull this strap pull the whole seat down you can lift those seats forward and remove them in the second row and if when you get these down there cover with all kinds of filth that your kids didn't tell you they were putting back there you're in luck because the Touring elite comes with if you heard about it the vacuum cleaner now under the hood is pretty garden-variety Honda stuff and that's not a bad thing three and a half liter v6 sitting sidesaddle no tricky stuff no direct injection no turbo something like that obviously the numbers 248 horse 250 foot-pounds of torque this vehicle weighs something around 4,600 pounds in this trim yet it gets 260 and a little over seven and a half seconds that's pretty good while still delivering 1928 mpg which is also pretty good a lot of quieting and noise vibration and harshness technologies here for example this engine sits on active engine mounts it sort of intelligently counteract the engine's own weird harmonics to cancel them out before they get transferred into the body shell inside the car you've got active noise cancellation as well as I mentioned front-wheel drive only on this guy 6-speed automatic that's also new this year you want all-wheel drive go shop somewhere else now under way you've got a variety of technologies helping you drive this big ol thing there's lane departure warning tech you've also got a collision mitigation warning again it's passive but it's gonna blink this big old brake light right there on the dash if you're closing on someone in front and about to hit them and on this Touring elite top model only you've got passive blind spot tech from some lately the bitty little warning lights over in the mirror that I don't find it very useful The Odyssey drives better than a whole bunch of smaller sedan and coupe cars that we get in here it's got a responsive powertrain the suspension is firm enough without being hard I found this vehicle perfectly Pleasant if not nice to drive if I have any grave since that the steering is over assisted especially at freeway levels it actually makes it a little more laborious to drive not less okay pricing our Odyssey is pretty easy because we have a touring elite just about everything's included at about 45 3 delivered now on top of that the only option will get you further seen that style is remote start for 400 more installed it the dealer by the way so I wear it somewhere a little shy of 46,000 dollars you buy an odyssey because it's perhaps the best driving of its class and has handsome looks to my eye the technology is good if not great I've still got some issues of that navigation system that split screen interface and as you can see we had to fight with that rear screen and didn't get what we wanted out of it