The Ridgeline has a 63” bed.
84” with the gate down.
But common building materials are 96” long.
Both my F-150 and Excursion, and even my wife’s minivan can carry 8 foot long materials with the rear closed up.
Today, walking out of Home Depot, the reason for the short bed was painfully obvious.
Answer after the jump…..
It appears that the Ridgeline is designed to fit into a parking space. (And by “fit” I mean fill perfectly.) In order to get three more feet in the bed, you’d either have to sacrifice the back seat, or move the back bumper back three-ish feet. Either move would make the lovely little NART less practical.
My F-150 was a single cab, the Excursion & minivan only have 8 foot of cargo space when in two seater mode.
And the two Fords don’t really fit in parking spaces, I used to put the back bumpers over the sidewalk to get the front end out of traffic.
Ridgeline buyers probably aren’t buying sheets of plywood or sheet rock on a regular basis. But when I do, that last foot will be out past the gate, wearing a red flag.
So a bit more research reveals that the Ridgeline is 210″ from bumper to bumper. A standard American parking space is 216″ long. So the engineers could give us six more inches in the bed (Beavis laugh – “he said six more inches in bed”).
If the bedsides and tailgate were six inches taller, we could have 96″ with the gate lowered. While raising the gunwales of the bed six inches seems extreme, lowering the bed floor six inches could be done fairly easily, I think.
Delete the trunk. Mount the spare tire under the rear of the bed like every other pickup. Then lower the bed floor to where the spare currently sits. Of course deleting the trunk would remove the one feature that no other midsize truck can claim, so I think that’s a non-starter with the upper level management types at Honda.
Modern Anachronist 