My wife and I got jobs this summer as USFS rangers in Granite County, Montana. Before departing, we'd replaced our combination of 2018 CR-V, 2005 Element AWD, 2012 Wonderful Van, and two Honda CT90s with a CR-V Trailsport. The CR-V has now passed 5,000 miles of Montana Time™, and on this occasion a friend had asked how it was doing. So, this is an extended and hypercritical ramble on that point. 

Typical usage for the CR-V involves a 10-25 MPH crawl for the 20 miles or so from our guard station out to a highway, 70-80 MPH highway travel for a couple of hours, maybe a ~30 MPH FS dirt road or two, then a 10-25 MPH crawl up to whatever the trailhead or Forest Service rental of the day is. 

The Drivetrain

The Trailsport only comes as an all-wheel-drive hybrid. It's relatively hard to find a proper description of how the car's drivetrain works, which is kind of funny given all the references in reviews to its "CVT". It doesn't have a CVT. It has a 2.0 I-4 with two lockup clutches and two motor-generators (one traction, one generator). Depending on throttle and charge level, the car can get around in EV mode (clutches open), hybrid drive (clutches open, engine spins generator to power traction motor), and engine drive (one of the two clutches closes and the engine drives the front axle at a fixed ratio, optionally with the traction motor adding torque). 

Generally-speaking this is lovely. We'd test-driven the new Rav4 and found it substantially jerkier around town. The hybrid drive feels quite "electric", despite the engine faking shifts in the background. Power is okay, and over 5400 miles – from 80 MPH Montana highways to Bay Area stop-and-go to Idaho forest service roads – we've averaged 35.9 MPG across 21 fillups. I was used to ~21 in my Element, so this is lovely. This system incurs a cursory 1000lb tow rating – itself a "win" coming from the low-speed lockup clutch, but that wasn't a dealbreaker for us. 

Two downsides. The first is minor, on the downhill: when the regen has filled the battery, Honda is obviously not inclined to allow the car to just start freewheeling. So, the car closes a lock-up clutch and hands the absorption of the wheels' motoring force to the engine. No biggie, but it is a bit noisy. 

The second is more of a pain – the uphill. When the traction motor and engine are working together, it's absolutely fine. However, when the battery is empty (and it is not a large battery) the engine is tasked with dragging the car uphill and putting whatever other energy it can find into the battery. As a result, it's kind of a noisy dog under those circumstances. 

The upshot of all this is that for rolling hills, the system is totally adequate. For long climbs, followed by long descents, you often find yourself fluctuating between the worst of all worlds. This is not a problem unique to Honda's hybrid system, but it is a problem Honda is more locked-in to versus the competition, as they do not offer the CR-V as a plug-in hybrid with a larger battery like Toyota does with the Rav4. The downside is that whether driving from the Central Valley up the Sierra and back when at home, or driving around Montana, "long climbs and long descents" is where the car will spend a lot of time. 

The Dynamics

It handles fine. It's more fun to drive than the fifth-gen CR-V. It's way less fun to drive on a twisty road than my NA Miata with every part Flyin' Miata makes bolted on, and way more fun to drive on a twisty road than my 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 was. It's a CR-V. There's nothing objectionable about it at all, but it just is what it is.

One thing I have noticed is that it's sort of hard to place the right-hand side of the car with much confidence. This may be a personal failing, but I think I adapt to cars pretty quickly and I'm just having trouble building trust with this one. The shape of the hood, maybe? I dunno. 

Interior noise is pretty well-controlled, however. For all Honda's cost-cutting, the car does well in this regard generally, and relative to the fifth-gen CR-V. 

The Cheap One

On that note: The cost-cutting is really obvious next to the prior generation, particularly on the interior. It's not that it's bad – it's a nice interior. But if you happened to spend a lot of time in the fifth-gen CR-V, you see it. There's the big picture – no choice of interior colors or materials unless you get the Sport Touring and white white leather (for whatever reason). Sure. There's also little details. Example: the previous CR-V's cupholders each had four independent nubbins to secure cups in the middle of the cupholder. This one has only two, covering a half-circle of your cup, which push it against the exterior wall of the cupholder and can squeeze out half-empty Sprite bottles. Couple bucks saved, perhaps. Other instances of that include the removal of the "fold down rear seat" handles in the cargo compartment (which I mention in particular as a minor cut with major potential frustration), and the reintroduction of incandescent turn signals in the rear.

This is more or less fine, and for the most part it's stuff that only car dweebs will notice. So it sucks that I'm a car dweeb. I would have liked a tan/plastiwood interior like the fifth-gen CR-V had. 

The Insides

With the above said, the interior is also where the CR-V really shined when we were looking at the competition. The new Rav4 was a huge disappointment – its tech feels more modern than the Honda, but the interior is weird and tryhard. Why are there nubbins with sharp plastic corners right where the knees of a 6'2"-tall person go? Why? The CR-V is just a sensible place to be. It has knobs for volume and fan speed like the car gods intended. Everything makes sense. They didn't try to be fancy guys. 

I will note that the same applies to the Subaru Forester. The Subaru's interior looks (to me) straight-up nasty in pictures, but driving it, the ergonomics are very pleasant. It feels like the car best-designed for taller humans, with the CR-V just behind. 

Aside from the absence of color choices and evident cost-cutting noted above, my complaints are pretty limited. The black interior picks up marks from sunscreeny arms and such so easily, and (very weirdly) they stuck a "Hybrid" sticker where the key would traditionally go in a car that lacked a push-button starter. No idea why. 

On a very minor but surprisingly major note, Honda nailed the way the car increases and decreases speaker volume automatically to compensate for road noise. 

Cargo Complaining

I'm used to the Element, so this was always going to be a loser – a CT90 just cannot fit in the back (at least, not intact and vertically). It's got plenty of room for stuff, if your definition of stuff includes "three weeks of shelf-stable food from the Missoula Wal-Mart", "a heavy electric bike", "more Ikea crap than you intended to buy", and so forth. 

However: any two-box design in which the rear seats cannot be wholly removed as a function of the design deserves a note of scorn. You can of course remove them with a socket set and time, but then it's a question of airbag wiring, battery intake protection, etc. Kind of a fuss. When folded down they also have a hump at the hinge, meaning that you can't just slide stuff in, nor sleep in there without incurring weird back problems. Dumb. 

Noting the praise I had for its interior above, I'll add that sadly the cargo space is what killed the Forester for us. It may not be an Element, but the CR-V definitely has the edge over some of its competition.

Trailsport? 

The Trailsport package adds the option of a nice Ash Green, 18-inch wheels with Continental CrossContact tires, some orange lighting, front and rear floormats, and... that's it. This did not necessarily bother us – I like the green, and we'd have bought fire-roady tires anyway. To Honda's credit, the car did get an upgraded AWD system that lets it send more torque to a single wheel. However, all 2026 AWD CR-Vs got the same thing. 

It is, however, a bit lazy. Practically-speaking, I think the package should add roof-rack crossbars, the rear cargo tray and seatback protectors, and perhaps a hitch. Easy dealer-installs that they already have (the hitch is a dinky 1.25" receiver, however). The Rav4 Woodland comes with this stuff. 

Less practically, one thing it lacks is the Trail drive mode that the Pilot, Passport, and Ridgeline Trailsports have. Nobody's saying the car is an off-roader, but it does seem like a miss – most particularly because reviewers seem to put the car in Snow mode when comparing to Subarus and the like, and Snow mode is horrible on slippy dirt roads as it pathologically restricts all wheelspin. As a result, the car reviews worse than it otherwise would've. Feels like Honda's conservatism bought them an own-goal. 

I think a very low-effort Trail mode could be great – they could copy-paste the Normal mode's driving dynamics, add a compass in the gauge cluster, and turn off the EV-mode "choir", presumably after a "not Honda's fault if you hit someone" on the screen (it seems to startle wildlife). Job done. 

It's also worth observing that the sixth-gen CR-V has sort of long nose, and the approach angle suffers. I know it's a bit juvenile to suggest changes to major body panels all willy-nilly – but it's worth noting that the fuel cell CR-V gets a special bumper, and that thing is niche enough that most people will never see one. Minor bumper revisions for a volume trim line don't seem super-crazy in that regard... I'd have paid an extra $500. Could have even added a recovery point or two. 

The one omission that looks real bad is the lack of even a space-saver spare. The battery occupies the spare tire well entirely. That's the place where the package seems at-odds with itself, and fares most poorly relative to Subaru and Toyota. I'm not saying they should have done a custom tailgate that has a molded-in spare like the original CR-V (wait, yes I am), but they should have at least done a Honda-branded version of the Modern Spare space-saver or something. 

It's a CR-V. 

Yeah, I know. But it turns out you don't actually need much to go up a bunch of dirt roads. For anything up to and including BLM roads made out of 4- to 6-inch rocks, the CR-V has been totally fine. We've definitely taken some things slower than I would have in our Forest Service Ram, and put a little more thought into the drive. But we have not gotten stuck nor died.

Ultimately the Trailsport trim is a little half-baked, but the only truly offensive point is the absence of a spare.

The Wipers

Most organizations employ folks who are somehow unemployable, but who consistently hold down jobs through dark magic. Honda keeps all these folks employed in one department, where they work on windshield wipers and associated systems. They did interesting work on the CR-V, expressed in two key failures and one mild moronity:

- The sprayers for the front wipers are integrated into the wiper arms. Notionally, they dribble just in front of the advancing blade, saving water and ensuring juicy wipes. Practically, they are unable to perform the primary function of wiper squirtys: saturation of bug guts. At speed, where one is traditionally squishing bugs, they're even worse. These wipers are amazing gut-spreaders. Don't bother with the squirters, and just keep Windex or similar in the car. Apparently this necessitates the blades being weird-ass custom nightmares, too. Great work.

- As anyone who loves their car knows, you may occasionally wish to clean the windshield. This involves lifting up the wiper arms. Honda's crack team engineered the arms in such a way that if you just lift them, they will hit the hood and chip the paint. So you have to awkwardly push them up, then lift them. Also great work.

- It's less important, but a "Trailsport" whose rear wiper has a horizontal rest position has engineers who need to go outside. The rear wiper acts as a shelf on which crap builds up. Use of the rear sprayer means that this crap becomes a crust. Awesome. 

Please Shut Up

It boils down to the scientific fact that the threshold of being lame goes way down as a vehicle's pretensions increase. A Passport Trailsport or a 4Runner Trailhunter are kinda pretentious, and so you have to do lots of cool stuff with one to not be lame. By the same token, a FWD Hybrid CR-V is less pretentious than a Trailsport, and could I think have done almost all the same stuff my wife and I have done with this. And so on. Obviously, the least lame person at a trailhead is the person who got there with a Civic. But I do like Ash Green, and the thing's just nice. And sometimes that's fine. This post goes out to our neighbor in Davis who has the world's cleanest Wrangler Rubicon on 37s.