But the main reason you buy a mini van is to move people and products. To this end, the Honda is well equipped. The third-row seat folds into the floor, a feature that has been copied by most other companies outside of Chrysler. The best news for me is that when the seat is up you have a handy storage well for groceries and other objects that could tip and roll under seats on other vans. Honda also offers hooks for plastic bags and small cargo nets. The trade off for the floor hidden rear seat is that the spare tire has been placed under the second row passenger seats and is a space saver. The other trade off is that even if you use the provided rear seat pull-up strap to remove the third seat from the floor it requires more leverage and strength a person may have. Please check this out if before you buy because it is not an easy task for some.
Loading the van was swift. The low lift-over height is excellent. The power sliding doors are easy to operate and you can close them either with the key or very well placed buttons on the dash. Unlike some vans, the doors stop immediately when they hit an obstruction. I would never order a van without these power doors. I also would have liked it more if Honda had offered a powered rear hatch such as Chrysler does, but as we said at the beginning, Honda's van lacks many offerings the competition considers important. After driving two cars with this feature, the Chrysler Town and Country and the Lexus 330 RX, I can tell you from a woman's point of view that once you get used to power rear deck lids they are irreplaceable.
Dad's view: There was significant wind and tire noise in our test model and I noted that the tires squealed excessively when cornering at average speeds. Thus, the first thing I would do after buying this Odyssey is upgrade the tires. Next, I would spend considerable time learning how to use the column-mounted shifter. If you like to shift for yourself, the strange path that is required by the shift linkage to move it from gear to gear is not intuitive.