2026 Honda Passport TrailSport Is A Diamond At Roughing It

“Well then! Things got a little bit slippery back there,” our affable off-roading instructor said after I nearly dumped a 2026 Honda Passport TrailSport Elite into the Puerto Rican jungle within the first few moments of our 90-minute off-road adventure. Myself and a small convoy of journalists were following a lead car on a dirt, sand, mud and standing water track that wound from the top of a verdant jungle peak all the way down to a beach pummeled by a storm-surging Caribbean sea. A sudden squall had left the fresh-cut trail sloppy and muddy. I went into this drive not knowing much about off-roading, but I’d leave with a brand new appreciation for things like approach angles and underbody protection.

There really isn’t any unibody full-size SUV that I would consider nimble when off-roading, but the Passport certainly gets the job done. Redesigned from the tread of its chonky custom-designed tires to its reinforced roof rails, the new Passport TrailSport is Honda’s attempt to take a classic ’90s body-on-frame rebadging king of SUVs and turn it into a unibody family hauler that reaches to live up to its original off-roader bona fides. The 2026 Passport is a successful reinvention of Honda’s trail-ready SUV, but whether all that capability will just end up as parking lot theater, only time will tell.

Full Disclosure: Honda took us to Puerto Rico to drive the new Passport in a place sunnier and more interesting than Detroit. They paid for my flight, meals, gas and my stay at a nice spot right on the beach.

The PR folks (that’s public relations, not Puerto Ricans) called the new Passport burly, buff and broad-shouldered. People say the same thing of me, but I don’t think they mean I’m cute. However the new Passport is indeed a square-jawed cutie, like a lumberjack with a skincare routine. In fact, it’s probably one of the best designs to come from Honda in a long time. It’s definitely tougher and more trail-ready than the mild outgoing generation of Passport, and the squared-off headlights and Jalopnik-bright orange accents look great.

But as a group of us journalists stood around baking in the jungle heat following the challenging 90 minute off-road course, a PR rep excitedly pointed out a space in the cargo area capable of holding two gallons of milk, and the improved anchor points for car seats. Ah, I thought, there it is.

The real purpose of the Honda Passport is to be a comfortable vehicle for folks who like to look rugged. The Passport didn’t just get trail cameras and tow hooks– its seats are plusher and the carpet is even thicker. From the popularity of vehicles like the Toyota 4Runner and (formerly) anything by Jeep, that’s a segment that is no small potatoes. Heck, maybe future buyers have a gravel road or two they need to tackle on the way to the lake house. That’s justification enough to pick up a beautifully designed truck. But as a dedicated off-roader? The Passport TrailSport is just too big, and too expensive, to make sense. While on the off-roading course, my Passport brushed up against some tree branches and I had a mild heart attack that I’d scratched a brand new $53,900 car. I can’t imagine the palpitations I’d feel if I actually owned the vehicle and all my mistakes along with it.

There are three trim levels for the redesigned Passport: RTL, TrailSport and TrailSport Elite. No matter how fancy you get your TrailSport, they all come with an all-aluminum DOHC 3.5-liter V6 engine making 285 horsepower, paired with a 10-speed automatic transmission. The RTL earns the best MPG rating with 19 mpg in the city and 25 on the highway for a combined 21 mpg. The two TrailSports lose only a little of that efficiency at 18 city, 23 highway and 20 combined. The RTL starts at $46,200 including destination, just a couple grand more than the outgoing model. The more rugged Passport TrailSport sees a slight bump from $46,450 to $49,900, and the Elite, which adds nicer features, comes in at $53,900.

Honda offers the Passport in eight colors, but two are specific to the TrailSport — the very nice Ash Green Metallic and Sunset Orange. As we need more green and orange cars in the world, I can’t help but love these colors, and both are fantastic in person. The TrailSport’s orange details really pop no matter what body color you opt for. The rest of the colors are Honda’s standard array of three grays, a white, a red and a blue. “PASSPORT” stamped both in the front fascia and in the steel tailgate, which continues to be my favorite kind of badging. Move up to the TrailSport and you can get the stamped nameplate outlined in white, which looks particularly sick with the set of powder-coated white 18-inch steelies on an orange body.

On the RTL you get subdued black rockers and grill and some metallic silver details on the front and back, which Honda calls “skid garnishes,” but the TrailSport has design changes that Honda certainly made to encourage its owners to take the SUV off road. Some of the design changes to the two TrailSport models are functional, like moving the standard LED fog lights to a higher position, hiding the exhaust tips and designing the 18-inch wheels to use sunken valve stems — all which protect these precious parts from damage. Different bumpers give it a decreased front overhang, and even the all-terrain tires are specifically designed in a partnership with General Tire for the TrailSport.

The Passport TrailSport also comes with exposed tow hooks (a first for Honda) and an 0.5-inch steel skid plate on the front end. The Elite has TrailWatch cameras showing both front end and side views, and you get displays showing the vehicle’s pitch and roll, a hold-and-grab hill assist and brake hold, so it certainly has the tools to off road. Will anyone use it for that? Probably not. But that doesn’t really matter does it? The powder-coated orange tow hooks, the TrailSport badge with its bright orange accents, the amber daytime running lights all announce to the world this is a car owned by a person who can Go Places and Do Things, even if those places are mostly daycare pickup and those things are little league games.

The Passport can tow 5,000 pounds, and the TrailSport’s front and rear recovery hooks can hold over 14,000 pounds — the weight of three Passports, as Honda demonstrated by hanging some from a crane. The recovery points are also smooth, to allow a soft shackle to be used. The TrailSport also gets Hill Descent Control, which can guide the TrailSport down a hill up to 12 mph. While a dozen miles an hour doesn’t seem fast, once you’re seemingly hanging vertical over jungle mud, cautious is the name of the game

You also get Honda’s second-gen all-wheel drive system with seven drive modes — Normal, Eco, Sand and Snow, plus new modes Sport, Trail and Tow — to keep your car sure-footed on uneven ground. I got a lot of use out of the Sand setting on Puerto Rico’s beaches, which allows for quicker throttle response and allows even more wheel slip to keep things moving. No matter how dry or wet the sand, TrailSport never lost its footing.

I didn’t get to take the TrailSport out in Sport mode unfortunately. While driving in Puerto Rico is definitely a sport (potentially a full contact one if you don’t keep your wits about you) the two-lane roads winding around the island didn’t lend themselves to fast and aggressive driving, and we didn’t get anywhere near a freeway. Ditto on the Tow mode, but Trail we used extensively, which allowed the car to slip when it needed to and apply the brakes until traction was gained again by at least two tires. When one side of the rear axle lost traction Trail mode recognized the problem and increased torque and drive force to the wheel with the most traction, while maintaining torque potential in the low traction wheel. Honda turned tilted us all over the place to show off this trail torque logic, and it worked aces. Even a novice like me could feel the give-and-take of traction and torque.

If shoppers go with the TrailSport Elite they get the four exterior TrailWatch cameras, which provide a 360-degree view of everything happening outside of your Passport. Drivers can toggle between views with just a press of a button at the end of the windshield wiper stalk. If the cameras get dirty or, like they did on our drive, obscured by water droplets, a front camera washer can clean up the view for you. Such is the nature of seeing around your car in the wet. 

I especially appreciated the orange overlay on the screen that let me direct the tires exactly where they needed to go. You get a Front Wide View, which provides a forward view from a low vantage point. To say that driving a car forward while all you’re staring at is sky is difficult is an understatement. As someone who still, to this day, will turn around and check behind her despite what the backup camera says, I had to learn to stop worrying and trust the cameras. It turns out, even the most intense driving becomes more accessible if you do. I may have been staring at nothing but blue sky out my windshield, but the TrailWatch promised there was ground enough to catch me underneath. The Side Views on both the left and the right were great when traveling through thick brush (or, you know, sliding into it). We drove Passports with the HPD Package, which came with the rock sliders, a front scuff plate, very cool 18-inch wheels and plenty of decals and emblems announcing its off-readiness to the world.

Thick steel skid plates designed by Honda Powersport engineers who create similar plates for Honda motorcycles, ATVs and side-by-sides protect the oil pan, transmission and gas tank. I certainly knocked around enough to hear the skid plates take some punches, but it kept going. The team displayed some very scuffed-up skid plates that seemed to have been through the absolute ringer — they were plates that had traversed test sites at Moab and in the sands at Glamis, California over 15 times and still held true. The front skid plate measures 0.2 inch thick while the fuel tank is protected by a 0.1-inch-thick hunk of steel.

I’ve found Honda passenger compartments fairly loud in the past, though the company has made great strides in cutting down on road noise in the cabin. I was concerned when I took the Passport TrailSport out for a road test that the beefy custom tires might make for an unpleasant experience but the active noise cancellation has improved leaps and bounds in the last seven years. Everything from acoustic spray foam to sealed fenders full of foam to thicker carpeting and harder-strength steel all contributes to the quieter ride. Honda says its slightly increased wheelbase also helped cut down on road noise. The new Passport TrailSport comes with a rack-and-pinion steering assisted by electric power system that can keep anyone with a pulse on the road or trail, whatever your druthers. I found the Passport TrailSport remarkably limber with a tight turning radius and sharp response to driver inputs.

The interior is a big improvement over the last-gen Passport. The seats in the TrailSport Elite are leaps and bounds better, meant to center the occupants’ spine over their hips to reduce fatigue on long drives. Even after banging around the off-road obstacle courses I didn’t feel tired or sore. These seats are synthetic leather in the TrailSport with contrast stitching, or a more subdued cloth in the RTL. The TrailSport Elite, which is what we took off-roading, adds a very nice patterned perforation to allow a cooling element to do its work. The interior remains uncluttered by excessive screens, with a 10.2-inch gauge display and one of those embedded-in-the-dash iPads looking screens measuring 12.3 inches. In the TrailSport, the center screen has pitch and roll off-road readouts that allows drivers to keep an eye on how rough your going really is. Honda also added a compass and elevation change recorder for when you are truly off the beaten path; the elevation recorder was particularly fun to watch as we traveled from mountain top to literally sea level. And don’t worry, CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, though Honda runs its infotainment on The Google. The interior gives drivers plenty of real knobs to mess around with, and the dash on the passenger side comes with a large shelf great for keeping all the little things you need on a road trip close at hand. The storage tray in front of the shifter allows space for two smartphones, but only one can charge wirelessly at a time.

Like any off-roader trying to snag the disaffected Jeep customer, the Passport TrailSport comes with a wide array of manufacturer-offered accessories. A plastic folding table — always a crowd favorite — can serve as a cargo divider holding up to 44 pounds worth of stuff and comes with a cool topographical map of Honda’s Baja racing teams’ test track impressed on the black plastic. You can set the divider to hinge upwards to access your stuff in the back as well. The table legs screw on easily and, while Honda declined to give the table a weight rating, they did tell a story about a zoftig engineer standing on it to ensure its strength for any future tailgating or car camping. There’s also space for a full size spare in the back with the Full Size Spare Kit. The entire extra wheel and tire sits upright in the cargo area and is kept safe with its own cover and straps, easily removed when not hitting the trails. 

Of course, Honda also offers all the safety bells and whistles drivers require from modern cars, Available features include adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, collision mitigation braking, forward collision warning, road departure mitigation, lane departure warning, blind spot warning and a brand new Traffic Jam Assist and Traffic Jam Recognition. Those traffic jam systems work in concert with the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist with low-speed follow to take the stop-start stress of driving through thick traffic off of the driver from speeds of 0 mph all the way to 45 mph. Really, this is as much self-driving as I really want from my vehicle.

There’s nothing wrong with buying a truck just because it looks cool, especially when it looks this cool. But it would be a shame to let the 2026 Honda Passport languish in front of a Target without using all the bells and whistles meant to make it a more capable vehicle. If you can stomach getting your brand new SUV a little scratched up, the redesigned Passport is a diamond at roughing it.