Exclusive: The 2026 Honda Passport Has A Brilliant New Safety Feature — Here’s How It Works
The 2026 Honda Passport TrailSport was designed to be the most rugged SUV the brand has ever sold, but one part can easily break … on purpose.
Along with its all-terrain tires and skid plates and other off-road gear, the Passport TrailSport features orange recovery hooks that can be used to pull the vehicle out of trouble.
They’re engineered to support twice the Passport’s gross vehicle weight rating, which is around 8,000 pounds, but Honda says they will also “break away in the event of a front collision” in the name of crash safety. The way it does it is simply ingenious, with an emphasis on simply.
Honda said it was a patented design, so American Cars And Racing searched for the patent application and what we found was very interesting. Honda calls it a “Front Subframe Mounted Recovery Hook” and and there’s much more to it than what’s sticking out of the front of the vehicle.
The visible ring that you attach a tow cable to is actually shaped like a teardrop with a narrow rear end that accepts a vertical bolt connected to a subframe, but is partially open to the front. Behind that is a tube that a horizontal fastener fits through. The ends of the fastener protrude and fit into clips that are open to the rear, with an axis that is below the front ring.
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When the hook is pulled on, the vertical element holds it in place and moves the vehicle, but if a force is applied from the front that is “greater than a predetermined magnitude,” as in an accident, it breaks off of the post and out of the rear clips and collapses up and to the rear, instead of impaling whatever it hit.
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The application says it should “provide similar crash performance as a similar vehicle without a recovery hook assembly.”
For now, it’s only offered on the Passport TrailSport, but with Honda adding TrailSport models across its lineup of vehicles, it could be just a matter of time before it is employed more widely.
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