Honda Ridgeline forgoes steel for composite bed

Honda Motor Co. knows that breaking into the U.S. pickup market this year will be tough. That's why the Ridgeline pickup sports a different technology for its cargo bed.

Instead of the standard steel-panel cargo bed, the Ridgeline features a standard rock-hard molded composite box that sits on top of three steel crossbeams.

Gary Flint, chief engineer at Honda R&D Americas Inc., says the bed allows Honda to boast a workhorse cargo area that gives customers features the Big 3 don't have. Among them: corrosion resistance, a nonslip surface, a lockable storage area under the bed and a concealed spare tire.

"If anything, maybe we went a little overboard in overengineering it," Flint admits.

The project was a case of marketing issues driving design, which in turn drove technology.

To build a pickup with a trunk beneath the bed, Honda's engineers knew they shouldn't work in steel. A standard pickup bed requires hundreds of steel parts welded together. Adding to that the complexity of an attached steel trunk with moving panels, locks and hinges would have been too expensive with too great a risk for malfunction.

Honda's composite bed - with all of its associated parts - consists of fewer than 10 pieces, Flint says.

Ironically, the seeds of Honda's technological solution came from General Motors.

Honda R&D spent five years tearing down and examining all the competing trucks sold in the United States. The one that caught engineers' fancy was the Chevrolet Silverado/GMC Sierra.

Their model came with an optional factory-installed molded composite cargo bed of the type that the Ridgeline now uses.

GM gave its dealers the option of marketing that bed or selling their truck customers a less expensive aftermarket cargo liner as an attempt to add aftermarket profits. But dealers ordered few of the factory-installed composite beds, and GM dropped the program two years ago.

That left GM's bed supplier, Meridian Automotive Systems Inc. of Dearborn, Mich., with a creative but essentially unwanted technology. Honda has signed Meridian as a supplier.

The material comes together like an automotive lasagna. It starts with a polyethylene film. On that is dispersed a layer of mixed polyester and vinyl resin.

On top of that goes chopped fiberglass to a thickness of 40 percent by weight. And on top of that is another layer of plastic film with another later of resin.

The material is then flattened and baked at 280 degrees Fahrenheit and extruded into a bed.

"This isn't the most cost-efficient way to make a bed," Flint admits. "If you're knocking out 900,000 trucks a year, steel would be cheaper. But that's not our volume target."

He estimates that, pound-for-pound, the composite material probably is three times more expensive than steel.

The Ridgeline goes on sale in March. It will be built in Alliston, Ontario.

You may e-mail Lindsay Chappell at