Is honda Retarded!

I might have to get a KTM.

What in the &^%$ are they thinking? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer or what??

jeffd said:

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer or what??

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Exactly. Honda knows how to play the game.

JuliusPleaser said:

Exactly. Honda knows how to play the game.

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Uh Huh ... Honda wants the birkenstock crowd to buy their high bred (bread?) car and drive it to the bus stops to catch the bus to the urban transit station that will carry them to the mall where they can watch Imax Films of the wilderness ...

And in the meantime, they can keep an eye on the largest and most vocal off-road vehicle opposition - while making them feel like they care.

My guess is that the automotive and motorcycle business lines are run separately. Different chains of command, different goals, etc. So the auto guys want to sell hybrids and aren't concerned or consider that the motorcycle guys would like to see the SC go away.

In general though, I don't think there is enough support for supporting the psort from a legal perspective on the parts of the manufacturers. At least it is not visible to me if they are doing anything.

Where's the lobbying $$? Where's the promotion of the posrt ot the general public? They have a stake in this issue and other than sponsoring races and telling poeple to ride responsibly in their ads in MC mags, they don't weem to do much else. Maybe they give the BRC big bucks, but I htink they could be more vocal.

Just my opinion.

Mag

The Sierra Club link goes to the corporate website - it features the entire Honda product line.

It's not like Honda is trying to hide anything.

Immature response, but true...

Hmmmmm... I have lived my entire life in urban and suburban parts of CA, and now I ride motorcycles on the street and the dirt. Well, I've seen this long enough in my life that I don't need to justify my following comments: 1) More people should be riding motorcycles and scooters for commuting; 2) The auto makers have their heads up thier a**es - we need more hybrid commuter cars than we have available, and I want a hybrid pickup!; 3) The oil companies suck and we should fight back by not using too much gas for commuting; 4) Our recreational motorcycles are being martyred for no reason while commuters cars are pumping out all the smog and wasting all the gas - OHV emmisions are miniscule in comparison; 5) SUV's suck, waste gas, are too heavy (destroying the asphalt, killing others in accidents), too big (cannot see around them, killing others in accidents), tip over too easy(accident prone), and should not be used for commuting or going grocery shopping - if you need room, get a minivan.

I'm all for hybrid cars and trucks - If I could afford one, and if the automakers would make one, I'd have a hybrid pickup for sure! Save the money and gas for my dirtbike instead! :aj:

By the way, I love the wilderness, and I am in support of birth control and reduced urban sprawl. Urban sprawl will ultimately be the death of our sport, and the Sierra club does oppose urban sprawl.
B.

Have to respond to a few of those points
1. I would agree if cell phones did not exist...as long as people are driving with cell phones to their ear, people in cars will be killing more people on bikes than SUVs will ever kill.
2. Agree...only if it means same or more power than available gas/diesel pickups.
3. we shouldn't commute at all. jobs suck. we should be burning the gas up going 4WDing.
4. I totally agree with you. The most obvious obsurdity of this point is banning/restricting snowmobiles in Yellowstone when the same roads in the park in the summer are full of trucks and motorhomes.
5. BULL. SUVs are great. Minivans and critter cars suck. You put your family in a tiny hybrid, I'll put mine in a massive SUV. The affect of SUVs on asphalt that semis, dump trucks, trash trucks, and busses travel on as well is minimal if not non-existent. What about pickups, should people not commute in them either? Is everyone that wants a pickup then supposed to buy a commuter car also? The accident data is also propaganda-ized. Recently there was a national story about how an SUV ran up onto the sidewalk and killed several people sitting on a bench. Like a Camry wouldn't have killed them all also? It wouldn't had made anything more than local news had it been a Camry.

The Sierra club may support a few things I agree with, but they are diametrically opposed to just about everything else.

One thing I found odd is that Honda comes out with a pickup with a bed too small to haul dirtbikes in without letting them sit out on the tailgate.

It is all liberal hippy B.S., and at the end the good guys will end up on top because the liberal hippy people are weak from not eating meat and they are too afraid of guns, wich the crazy conservative have many, I may have one or two or twelve myself and I definitly enjoy a steak.

binthedirtnow said:

... 2) The auto makers have their heads up thier a**es - we need more hybrid commuter cars than we have available, and I want a hybrid pickup!;

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We don't need more hybrids. They're too expensive and complicated. They are NOT the future. We need a much simpler alternative to fossil fuels instead of just increasing the MPG of the gas engines we have.

binthedirtnow said:

3) The oil companies suck and we should fight back by not using too much gas for commuting;

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Won't do any good. Won't even make a dent. Like I stated above, we need alternatives to gas engines.

Cars don't kill people... people kill people. This whole "SUV = Death and Destruction" is crap. You need to come to terms with the fact that a gas burning engine is still a gas burning engine... regardless of the size of vehicle it's in.

Ryan

The oil companies still suck because they will try to control our alternatives to fossil fuels - they already have. Hey bring on hydogen fuels, anything else, but I don't see that happening anytime soon - too much money taken away from the petroleum processing industries. Heck, the govt's just trying to find more oil, not other fuels, so give me a hybrid car so I don't need to play by their rules so much. :laugh:

The auto makers need to pull their heads out and pump out those hybrids so they'll get cheaper and there'll be used ones on the market in the years to come. But who knows if they will... :bang:

When you have to share the roads with a lot of them everyday in places where they are not needed, you will see how much SUV's suck. They suck when you have to sit behind them and breath the excessive exhaust smoke, and you can't see anything beyond their rr window and tail lights, and when you watch them pump $60 worth of gas :nener: (that's alot more crap in the air than my $20 full tank) in their tanks. We'll see where it ends up. They are dangerous to all the others they are involved in a collision with, not so much to the driver of the SUV.....

Hybrid cars are a good step in the right direction - a mountain cannot be moved all at once, it must be taken one stone at a time.

And lastly, I don't think you've spent the last 40 years in CA to see what I've seen - a lot of problems in CA are still up and coming to middle america. I watched the county I grew up in become blanketed with homes and infested with automobiles in about 7 years. Even when I was younger, on many summer days, I would have to spend the late afternoons sitting inside wheezing and drinking cold water because my lungs hurt too badly to take a deep breath. So, why would you expect me to have even the smallest bit if sympathy for so many millions of oversized and uneccesary automobiles that use up too much fuel and make my lungs hurt? I don't. No one needs a Porsche SUV..... :|

Let me keep my little motorcycles. :ride: And give me my hybrid pickup. Soon.
B.

binthedirtnow said:

I watched the county I grew up in become blanketed with homes and infested with automobiles in about 7 years.

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I live in one of the fastest growing counties in the Nation (El Paso County, CO) so I have a little taste of what you mean. In two years, the traffic on my way to work has become so bad, I have to leave 15 minutes earlier than I used to. It takes me 35 minutes to get to work instead of 20... and I only travel 10 miles. :bang:

binthedirtnow said:

Let me keep my little motorcycles. :ride: And give me my hybrid pickup. Soon. B.

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That hybrid pickup is just as dangerous to other cars as an SUV. I'm not trying to be nit-picky at all :cool: , but it's the height of the SUV's that make them dangerous to cars. A 4x4 pickup has the same bumper height as an SUV.

I'm just not buying into the hybrids. I've always learned that the best answer is always the simplest answer. Hybrids are only more fuel efficient than gas engines when you don't have to accelerate. The gas engine always runs when the vehicle needs power, then turns off when the vehicle only needs enough power to maintain speed. If you're in stop and go traffic, there's not much difference between hybrids and other vehicles.

I just wish I was smart enough to invent magnetic hovercrafts. No gas, no pollution, no EPA breathing down your neck, no tires or wheels to buy and balance, no maintenance. One of these days... :boss:

Ryan

My dream car: a jacked up turbo-diesel Excursion - - but only until they decide to make one based on the new F650 pickup chassis, then I'd upgrade.

A hybrid pickup would have been useful as a teenager when I had to shut off my engine and coast the last mile home at 2am so my parents wouldn't hear me getting in so late.

I'll stick with my bikes...

I try to ride my bikes for commuting and such as often as possible. That way I know I'm treading as lightly as possible. And the bike's a lot more fun to ride than driving the car. It's been a long time since I've seen any new cars that look like they're really worth a damn for practicality. So, you can now buy a hybrid p/u?? Are they huge?? If they are, that's stupid, the auto makers have built the wrong thing. Why do we all need so many huge cars? I want a small pickup that I can camp in and haul a bike in the bed and pull a small trailer - not any of this giant junk. I've never needed 4wd either - most of the time you just need 2wd and a lot of attitude :aj: , that's how they do it in baja CA. Even back when I had big trucks, I never needed them. Just harder to work on and keep the gas tank full. I'm in the midst of car shopping right now and have decided to go back to either a late '80's nissan or mazda pickup, or one of those weird shaped toyota vans - all three very good sets of wheels from my personal experience.
B.

The honda "truck" is not a truck at all. it's unibody and AWD. its not intended for dirtbikers, its for city people who think trucks look cool and are convenient for hauling sodas home from costco.
SUVs are only a problem when people who don't need them drive them. Soccer moms with 2 kids should be driving sedans, or compact pickups or minivans if they need room.

The Ridgeline does have at least one cool feature...a built in trunk under the bed (that could easily be filled with ice and beverages.

tiggywiggy said:

The honda "truck" is not a truck at all. it's unibody and AWD. its not intended for dirtbikers, its for city people who think trucks look cool and are convenient for hauling sodas home from costco.
SUVs are only a problem when people who don't need them drive them. Soccer moms with 2 kids should be driving sedans, or compact pickups or minivans if they need room.

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they show it hauling a couple CRF's in the commercial, silly ;)

and I love how people tell other people what they should be driving. Free country, man. I'll drive a damn Mack B-model the eight blocks to work if I want to.

XRpredator said:

and I love how people tell other people what they should be driving.

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yep, but they would be pissed if someone suggested that they not ride dirtbikes.

Oddly enough, I don't think that the goals of the offroad community and the Sierra Club are fundamentally different in many regards. I wish that the issues hadn't been so polarized so that the off-road community immediately views any trail closure or environmental protection as an affront to the entire sport; and I wish the Sierra Club didn't view off-roaders as wilderness destroying rednecks. I did pick up the Sierra Club newsletter while waiting for a meeting and saw the "louder, more powerful pipe" thread inside, so maybe there is some hope.