- 6 weeks ago
We pit two rugged crossovers against each other to see which one really delivers on its off-road promise. The 2026 Honda Passport TrailSport Elite and the 2026 GMC Terrain AT4 both claim legit trail upgrades—not just tough looks. We take them on-road and off-road to find out which SUV best balances everyday comfort with real adventure capability.
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MotorTranscript
00:01Why am I going so gentle when we know how this thing off-roads?
00:05So if I do it like that...
00:09You'll have to talk louder! You're all the way over there!
00:22I suppose you're wondering why I asked you out here today
00:25with two seemingly very different vehicles for comparison.
00:28I am and I was scratching my head the whole way here.
00:31This is a GMC Terrain in the new for 2026 AT4 trim
00:36and this is a Honda Passport in the new for 2026 Trailsport Elite trim.
00:41And these are both trims that are meant to go off-road.
00:44Not just off-road appearance, but actual hardware upgrades
00:47that will make them better able to drive off-road while preserving their on-road character.
00:51And we thought this was interesting, Billy and I, because just a few years ago
00:55you would think about taking a crossover off-road.
00:57I mean, maybe some dirt roads, but no, these things promise serious adventure.
01:01So, Billy, tell us about the differences between these vehicles
01:03and how we're going to judge it.
01:04The AT4 has a 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine
01:08and an eight-speed automatic transmission.
01:10The Honda outguns it with a 3.5-liter V6 and a 10-speed auto.
01:15Both cars have all-wheel drive, as you'd expect from off-road crossovers.
01:19So, we're going to judge these cars by our of-the-year criteria.
01:22Those criteria are advancement in design, engineering excellence, efficiency,
01:27performance of intended function, safety, and value.
01:30Oh, yes. Anyway, these are cars of two different classes
01:33with a price difference of $10,000?
01:35$10,000, yeah.
01:36About $10,000.
01:37But they are both trying to do the same thing.
01:39We want to see how well they accomplish it.
01:41So, why don't we start with the GMC?
01:43Sounds great, Aaron.
01:47You may have to speak up a little bit.
01:49Over the din of this engine.
01:51Because, yeah, there is a lot of din in the GMC terrain.
01:56For those of you playing our home game,
01:59Billy and I have obviously already discussed these vehicles a lot.
02:02And I think I might be a little bit more of a fan of the terrain than you are.
02:07Would that be accurate?
02:09It's accurate.
02:10And I don't dislike this vehicle by any stretch.
02:13But I do find some things about it to be objectionable.
02:16They get some things right.
02:17The big screen's beautiful.
02:19They work really well.
02:20The interior is laid out pretty intuitively.
02:23I love how they've made use of the screen because it's so easy.
02:26You can have a big giant map.
02:28You can have this nice three-part screen.
02:30You can have your Android Auto.
02:31And then all your climate controls are down here.
02:33I think just as easy to use as the hard controls in the Honda.
02:36That's my opinion.
02:37The interior is not as ornate, perhaps, as the passports.
02:42But the materials are nice, wouldn't you say?
02:43Yes.
02:44The materials are all bolted together pretty well.
02:46There's some hard plastics that I'm not a fan of for a brand that's ostensibly a little bit premium.
02:52But I do like the physical switch gear for some of the controls that they have.
02:55I like the vertical orientation of the screen.
02:57It uses the space really well.
03:00And, you know, coming out of my Blazer EV long-termer,
03:02many of the GM componentry is familiar to me.
03:06But it works.
03:07I think a lot of people who come to GMCs are coming from elsewhere in the General Motors family.
03:13And you're right.
03:14That's not a good look if you decide you're going to spend an extra X number $1,000 for the GMC model instead of the Chevrolet.
03:20You should not see anything that looks familiar.
03:22Like, you go from a Ford to a Lincoln completely different.
03:26One of the things that annoys me is you can't really get a good lane centering system unless you buy Super Cruise,
03:32which is the best lane centering system in the universe.
03:35The lane centering is almost non-existent on this part.
03:38Almost non-existent.
03:39But, you know, here's one of the things I don't like.
03:41We come up on a corner and you give it a little bit of brakes going into the corner.
03:44The body does some discombobulated things that are very unsettling if you're driving the car with a modicum of pace.
03:52Driving on the fast curvy roads.
03:54Well, I wasn't even driving fast because I didn't know.
03:57You know, it's got off-road tires.
03:58I didn't know how much grip I would have going into the curves.
04:01And so I'm approaching, you know, the sharp right-hander.
04:05And I just am adjusting my speed a little bit while the wheels turn.
04:09And then the whole body seemed to step out of place.
04:12And it leaned over itself, it felt like.
04:15Just that sensation of the body losing control over the wheels is not something you'd want.
04:20Especially when a crossover like this, they generally drive like cars.
04:23And that was very un-car-like behavior.
04:25Un-car-like, yeah.
04:26Because the car feels fine and stable at high speeds.
04:30And then I came into one corner, gave it a little break.
04:32And then as I was turning in, I was braking.
04:33And the whole body kind of went, ah!
04:35You know?
04:36And a lot of people are going to say, well, nobody's going to ever drive a train like that.
04:40But the thing is, you know, if we're out on this desert road and, I don't know, a roadrunner darts out in front of us.
04:47And we have to suddenly brake and turn.
04:49Oh, gosh.
04:50Yeah.
04:51That feels terrible.
04:52Even for a passenger seat.
04:53Exactly, yeah.
04:54You are going to run into that.
04:55And the car is not going to lose control.
04:57It has stability control.
04:58And it's going to go in the direction you point it.
05:00But it really can erode a driver's confidence on what the car can do.
05:05OK.
05:06So now we're in terrain mode, which is exclusive to the AT4 trim.
05:09Let's talk a little bit about the nature of off-roading.
05:12Yeah.
05:13Because there's lots of degrees of off-roading, right?
05:15There's soft-roading.
05:16There's over-landing.
05:17There's proper rock crawling.
05:19And then, I guess, desert running.
05:21And then there's ice driving.
05:22So there's a lot of different ways you can off-road.
05:24You know, and the thing you have to remember is most of these things will go way farther off-road than most people think.
05:29Right.
05:30A real intelligence of the all-wheel drive system.
05:32The ability to get traction down.
05:34Because that's the thing.
05:35Even if you're not going over big rocks, it's just little stuff like this.
05:37You can hit a patch of sand.
05:39One wheel spins.
05:40If you don't have a good all-wheel drive system, that's it.
05:42You're going nowhere.
05:43Yeah, and you're going to need help.
05:45It's going to be a very expensive tow.
05:47You know, this is a unibody as opposed to, you know, the more traditional off-roaders, which are body on frame.
05:53And sometimes you get some rattling and shimmies from that.
05:56But we're not getting anything close to that in this little compact.
06:00What's nice is you just had to dodge around a little plant because, you know, tread lightly.
06:04And the small size of this thing, I think, is an advantage.
06:07I think I'm going to have a harder time squeezing the passport through some of these narrow little trails.
06:11That's a great point.
06:12I mean, having a small footprint off-road is really nice because you can squeeze onto a smaller trail.
06:17Sometimes having that long wheelbase can be used, though, you know, for ride quality and whatnot.
06:21For ride quality, but then, you know, but it increases when you have to go over something.
06:25Generally for off-road, for off-road, Billy, smaller is better.
06:29Oh, here we go.
06:30Okay, this is a little bit of a challenge.
06:31This is a little bit more of a challenge.
06:33And, you know, I try to have mechanical sympathy when it comes to these things.
06:37However, the AT4 does come with underbody protection just in case, you know, you're feeling less sympathetic.
06:43But no, I mean, this is pretty good.
06:46It's not, like, ultra-challenging, but we're clear, which is nice.
06:49If we were going camping out here, we'd have the clearance to do it.
06:52You'd have the, and you'd have the place to yourself.
06:54And those skid plates are nice because, and there we go, we just used one.
06:57There we go.
06:58Yes, we did.
06:59And they are nice because one little puncture of something important, and it's a very expensive tow.
07:04So, if I can explain, because I don't think, I don't know if they can be seen in the cameras.
07:08Like, we're going over some things where there's some big ups and downs and things like that.
07:12Often with these models, I don't know, you can correct me if it's the case for these things, for this car.
07:16Often with these models, they'll change the front end a little bit to have a little better clearance under the front end,
07:20better approach angle, better departure angle.
07:22This does have better approach and departure than the base car, that's true.
07:25And it sounds to me like it's, it's just, it's just going, it's not.
07:29Yeah, I'm basically holding the throttle still, and it's just walking over everything, no problem.
07:34So, I'm off throttle right now, and it's like just kind of naturally walking us down with like,
07:39it seems like it's figured out that it needs to like descent control.
07:42That's always figuring it out is the right words.
07:44Like, you know, in the old days, 50 years ago when you off-road, you'd just locked all the differentials,
07:48and just kind of powered through.
07:51And now with the all-wheel drive systems, you've got the technique down, Billy.
07:54You come to something tough and a little throttle and just let it figure it out.
07:58And the really good systems will do it.
08:00The good systems will just get the power to the right place and keep moving.
08:04And the bad systems will fill your nostrils with the smell of disintegrating clutchbacks.
08:09That's right.
08:13That sounds good.
08:14It sounds amazing.
08:15Three and a half liters, they actually fully redesigned the engine to be lighter, smaller, but same displacement.
08:22So, therefore, being slightly more efficient than it had been as well.
08:25You make a good point that it's kind of nice that somebody's putting money into a big V6,
08:29and auto manufacturers have gotten away from the 6s with the turbo 4s.
08:32But the fact is that we saw in the terrain, it takes a certain amount of fuel to move a certain size of vehicle.
08:37So these naturally aspirated 6s don't necessarily use a whole lot more fuel because those little turbo 4s are displacement on demand.
08:43You know, it's a much larger car and it's a much larger engine, and yet it's not really using that much more fuel to get the job done.
08:53And it feels easy breezy and just under strained.
08:57This V6 in this car is a very pleasant thing to have.
09:00It's refined.
09:01It's not the quickest.
09:02No, it's not the quickest, but it sounds good.
09:06So, Billy, young William.
09:09Yes, Aaron.
09:10Since our initial looping, you have been inclined to prefer the Passport, have you not?
09:15I do.
09:16I like the way it drives.
09:18It has the Honda pleasantness that we have come to expect from older Hondas.
09:23The steering feel is just fantastic.
09:25It's super direct, comes to center really nicely.
09:29Oh, I didn't make the Billy face when you did that.
09:33Aside from that quirk that we saw in the GMC,
09:35I was actually kind of surprised by how similar the two are.
09:40To me, it felt like they benchmarked the same vehicle.
09:42But that's something when you consider the Passport is so much bigger and feels like a wider car, but doesn't drive like a wider car.
09:48You know, you just feel like you understand the dimensions of it underneath you.
09:52Yeah, there really is a lot of space in here, and that can be nice, you know, for a long road trip.
09:57We started talking about what a good car this is for road tripping with all the storage space.
10:00Yes.
10:01And that width too, I mean, no matter how much you love your significant other, it's nice to have a little extra elbow room, isn't it?
10:07Yeah, you know, it's like you're close enough, but not, you know, not a completely different postcode.
10:12The ride in this is a little firmer, I think.
10:14It is a little firmer, but, you know, it doesn't give up too much over the road going Passport,
10:20which we, in our first test, we really loved how, despite having off road tires, it performs similarly, which is great.
10:27I mean, you don't want that compromise if you do slap on off road tires and put on, you know, off road suspension.
10:33You don't want to have to give up that much.
10:35So it's the best of both worlds.
10:37You know, considering that Trail Sport by Honda's own admission started off as an appearance package,
10:42and they said they were going to make a functional one, and the delay was worth it.
10:46It was definitely worth it.
10:47They kind of warmed their way into it, and then they came to a point where they're like,
10:51okay, we've come far enough where this is the appropriate amount of trail sportiness.
10:56Yeah, exactly.
11:07Look, so the old Trail Sport was kind of a half-based...
11:11It was not. It was an appearance package.
11:12Yes.
11:13And even Honda was pretty upfront about the fact that it was just an appearance package.
11:17But Honda's taking it much, much further this time around.
11:20Proper off-road armor, a true off-road tuned suspension, proper off-road drive modes.
11:26They've gone a lot farther with this car, and not to mention that the styling looks fantastic.
11:31I think, you know, talk about Motor Trend's love of advancement in design.
11:34This car really does push the envelope for the midsize off-roading segment.
11:40Although I can already feel it's absorbing these kind of uneven...
11:44What do you want to call this? Rocks?
11:46Yeah.
11:47It's not really gravel.
11:48No, it's more than gravel.
11:49I feel a little more confident moving a little bit quicker.
11:51No, this is doing all right.
11:52But you know what?
11:53We do speed up a little bit more.
11:54That's the thing.
11:55You always start off slow when you're off-road, and then you get used to it.
11:57Next thing you know, you're bombing down.
11:58You're bombing on the trail.
11:59Stuff like this at 60 miles an hour.
12:00So I really want to get to some of those tougher sections down the road a little bit.
12:05You know, I thought the GMC handled so well.
12:07And here we're coming into some rubber stuff.
12:09These are some of the tire-killing rocks here.
12:12But we have that same tire, same brand of tire.
12:15Now this is where I thought, well, you know what?
12:18Okay.
12:19So this is this little narrow section, and I said, okay, it's nice to have a small vehicle like the GMC,
12:24but you know what?
12:25This nice camera display really helps.
12:26It does help.
12:27There's no problem.
12:28It's nice that it keeps it up there, too, and doesn't yell at you, complain.
12:32Yeah.
12:33Yeah.
12:34Oh my gosh.
12:35Parking sensors when you're off-roading is like the worst buzzkill ever.
12:39The engine's pretty quiet, too, at this low speed.
12:43It's very…
12:44It better be.
12:45It's a V6.
12:46It's supposed to be quiet.
12:47There we go.
12:48Our first little impacts.
12:49You know what?
12:50I think it's hitting those jolts a little harder than the GMC.
12:54No, I think it's absorbing it really well.
12:56It is.
12:57I don't know.
12:58I felt a little more jolted around.
12:59I thought it controlled the compression very well for this being a larger car.
13:04And it is a lot larger.
13:06But so far, you know the GMC drives a little big anyway.
13:10I noticed that about the terrain on the road.
13:12Did you notice that?
13:13Even though it's narrower, it felt like it took up as much of the road as this thing does.
13:16I think it's because on the GMC you see so much of the hood at all times.
13:19Yeah.
13:20It's kind of an optical illusion.
13:21But I mean, so much of the way cars drive is affected by our perception.
13:25So here we go.
13:26We're getting a little tricky over here.
13:27Yeah, just a little slightly good.
13:30And you know what?
13:31I'm having the same experience that you had, I think, in the terrain.
13:35Is that a little bit of throttle and just let it sort it out and away it goes.
13:39See, I think we're bouncing around a lot more.
13:41I think we're getting a lot more body motion than we were in the GMC.
13:46I can't see where I'm going and that's where this camera is kind of nice.
13:49Because the hood is long and yeah, this thing's doing nicely.
13:52This gets back into, I think, where people might not realize just how far off-road you can go with these SUVs.
14:00You know, they're not just cars with big bodies on them.
14:04You know, at our first test when we put it through its paces, we were also surprised at how little it gives to the non-off-road version.
14:14It gives up very little performance, you know, in terms of braking, acceleration, which is often a problem with these cars is that you lose a little bit.
14:21But this is a very, the compromise is limited, which is great.
14:33We just finished driving the GMC Terrain AT4 and the Honda Passport Trail Sport Elite on and off the road.
14:39So, Aaron, what do you think about this GMC?
14:42Well, I like the terrain.
14:44I thought it rode comfortably.
14:46I was impressed with how well it did off-road.
14:48I think we both were.
14:49Had really good grip with that all-wheel drive system.
14:51And, of course, I love that infotainment system.
14:54I raved about that.
14:55I like all the choices it gives you.
14:57I think it's a really fantastic way to interact with the vehicle.
15:01But, of course, we found that weird handling quirk.
15:04Wait, I want you to make the face again.
15:05Okay, ready?
15:06Brake!
15:07Yeah, there was that.
15:08Yeah, there was that.
15:09There was that.
15:10That was a little scary.
15:11Could have had a little bit more power, I think.
15:13And, of course, it's a smaller vehicle, though I thought the back seat was pretty roomy.
15:16I mean, all in all, you know, considering you're trying to make a crossover that can go off-road but still do everyday crossover things,
15:23I think, for the most part, the GMC Terrain AT4 did a really good job.
15:28However...
15:29However, the Honda Passport did almost everything better.
15:33It's a much nicer vehicle to drive with better body control, nicer handling, better on-center steering feel.
15:39This is just a solidly engineered Honda.
15:42And it really goes back to the days when Honda knew exactly what they were doing when tuning their cars.
15:47This is a real return to form for the brand.
15:49Also, the interior packaging is excellent.
15:51The material choices are fantastic.
15:53It feels upscale and premium for the price.
15:56It's got lots of storage cubbies like double-decker door pockets and four pockets in the trunk, too.
16:02There's just a lot of places to put your stuff when you're on a road trip.
16:05And that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing in a car like this.
16:08And then when it's time to go off-road, you've got the ground clearance.
16:11You've got the all-wheel drive capability.
16:13And you've got the underplating in case you bump into something.
16:16But let's not forget, Billy, Passport is a class up.
16:19It's a larger vehicle.
16:20It also has a price tag that is how many thousands of dollars higher?
16:23It's $10,000.
16:24$10,000 higher.
16:25$10,000.
16:26Now, you expect to pay more for a larger and more capable vehicle.
16:30So it's hard to say, well, is it $10,000 worth of better?
16:33It's more car.
16:34But do we think that the advantages it has, if we compare how well they do against their own segments, how do we think the Passport does?
16:41Well, if you were driving a screen, then the GMC would absolutely be my choice.
16:46However, the physical driving properties of this vehicle just make it a better experience, both on the road and off the road, as we found out today.
16:53Yeah, I hate to say it. God, I hate to put these words together, but I'm going to say it.
16:57Billy, you are right.
17:00The Passport just does the job that little bit better.
17:03I think it's worth the extra money.
17:05And I think we agree, this GMC Terrain, probably the best GMC product I've driven in years, if not ever.
17:11But even so, I think the winner of this comparison is...
17:15The Honda Passport Trailsport Elite.
17:18For more about the GMC Terrain, the Honda Passport, and all things automotive, please visit us on the web at MotorTrend.com.
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