2026 Honda Passport TrailSport

[AKROVER]

We were tentatively planning to go skiing with our neighbor on Friday so on Thursday I finally looked at a project I had been meaning to tackle for a long time. When we bought the truck, the dealer was non-negotiable on the inclusion of numerous Honda accessories. This was their way of padding their profit on this new model. One of those accessories was a nearly $1K roof platform. The roof platform was cool, and I knew I wasn't in a negotiating position on the first of these Passports out the door in Rapid City, so I paid the price. The funny thing is that they didn't have the roof platform in stock and then couldn't even get it. After a few months of trying, they gave me back my thousand dollars, but that left me with roof rails and no crossbars. I have had the same Yakima crossbars for over 25 years, and I have attached those crossbars to at least six different cars in that time. I have bike racks and ski racks that mount on those bars, and they also work great for kayaks, but none of my existing mounts worked with this new vehicle. I can buy simple crossbars from Honda for an exorbitant price, but I could see how Honda built the rails with mounting bolts for the crossbars. It only took a simple setup to adapt parts of my existing crossbar mounts to bolt onto fabricated brackets that then bolt to the rails on the Passport. It took some time and about $17 in hardware to put this together. We didn't end up going skiing on Friday, but I did test drive the setup. There is a little bit of wind noise at 70mph, but that is pretty minor, particularly when I close the cover on the panoramic sunroof which quiets things down a bit. The assembly might be one of the more solid mountings I have had for a roof rack. My brackets are shiny aluminum, so they do stand out against the nearly black rails, but they are mounted on the inside so this actually all looks pretty good from the side of the vehicle. Below is the view from inside the rails with one of my ski racks mounted on the crossbars with a set of skis in the rack for the test drive. I have a second set of wider crossbars that I can put on which will overhang the side of the vehicle. Those longer bars are useful for putting two kayaks side-by-side on the roof, but they can be a slight hazard with their overhang. This vehicle is tall enough that I shouldn't be banging my head on the longer bars if I use them, but taller people might accidently slam into them.