Earlier this month, Honda, along with Nissan and Mitsubishi, announced an expansion of the initial Honda-Nissan partnership to include Mitsubishi. Together, the three Japanese automakers will share costs for all-electric vehicles and related software. Many are wondering what will happen to the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, of course.
Some believe this is the beginning of the end for this latest partnership. Others don't think twice: VW and Ford have purposeful partnerships and haven't merged or acquired each other, for example. Toyota also works with BMW on the GR Supra and Z4, and there are other partnerships of this kind. Of course, everyone is thinking about what could come of the Honda-Nissan-Mitsubishi MOU.
Some believe Honda will be the first to cash in, especially in the parallel universes of vehicular CGI, where the fictional realm of automotive digital content creators is hard at work trying to decipher what comes next. Some pixel masters, like TheolettoThey gave the all-new Mitsubishi Triton (L200) a shakeup at Honda in an attempt to make the latter brand more relevant in America's midsize pickup industry.
Others, like the good people of Car Q channel on YouTube, aim to shock and awe the audience with a potential styling of their vision for the new Honda Ridgeline, albeit with a gimmick. Seeing how, after the first six months of the year, the only monocoque pickup in the midsize sector is not faring very well against either the smaller Ford Maverick or the comparable Toyota Tacoma and its rivals, the resident pixel maestro proceeded to imagine an unofficial and hypothetical third generation of the Honda Ridgeline.
Their take, which should be taken with a grain of salt since there’s nothing official from the Japanese automaker yet, ditches the chiseled look of the second-generation model, which has been around since 2016. Instead, their CGI creation features a futuristic yet rugged design with pronounced fenders, a separate cargo bed, and an all-electric powertrain to make it “more powerful, more robust, and more efficient!” According to them, the third-generation Honda Ridgeline should go all-electric to try to establish dominance in the zero-emissions midsize niche from the start.
So, what do you think? Honda could succeed if it were bold enough to attack the currently non-existent industry before everyone else, including Electric vehicle truck experts like Rivian? Or do you think Honda will eventually give up on the Ridgeline project and pull the midsize monocoque pickup truck off the market altogether?
