Minivan Transmissions Are Supposed to Suck; the 2018 Honda Odyssey's 10-Speed Does Not

This is not a review. The 2018 Honda Odyssey Touring will be reviewed, by me, at some point in the near future.

But this part couldn’t wait. This is breaking news. This is an alert. This deserves a chyron.

The 2018 Honda Odyssey Touring’s 10-speed automatic transmission does not suck.

Admittedly, “not sucking” sounds like a low bar. And given the transmissions that have been utilized in minivans over the years, including the six-speed automatic in my own 2015 Honda Odyssey, improving upon past minivan transmissions isn’t a difficult task.

(Full disclosure: I haven’t yet spent time with the Toyota Sienna’s new eight-speed automatic. Maybe it’s exceptional.)

But expectations for the Odyssey’s 10-speed transmission were low, not just because it sends 280 horsepower to the front wheels of a minivan, but also because the gear count is so high.

I asked Chris Tonn for his opinion while he was driving the new Odyssey in Hawaii; he had nothing bad to say. I read other reviews; criticism of the 10-speed was essentially nonexistent.

I asked the gentlemen who dropped the Odyssey off in my driveway. “To be honest, I never noticed it.” Hmm. That’s very good news. I asked Mrs. Cain, who this week took over some of the 2018 Odyssey’s testing duties given her role as the primary 2015 Odyssey driver in our family. “I don’t know,” she said, never being one to miss a chance to point out a flubbed shift in our own Odyssey. “It’s fast.”

That it is.

Having now spent plenty of time in the 2018 Honda Odyssey Touring, I too can say with great certainty that this 10-speed automatic does exactly what it’s supposed to do: make itself invisible.

In an MPV capable of hauling eight passengers in DVD-watching comfort, I don’t want to notice rapid DSG-like shifts. I don’t want to be made aware of the smoothness with which the 10-speed migrates slowly but surely from fifth into sixth. I don’t want to be cognizant of negotiations between ninth and tenth at highway speeds. I don’t want to hear the burbling crackle-and-pop downshifts I experienced in an AMG C43 Cabriolet two weeks ago. (Okay, that would actually be pretty cool.)

I don’t want to notice anything pertaining to the transmission at all.

The best minivan transmission will fade into the background. The best minivan transmission won’t even come out to take a bow. At the backstage after party, the best minivan transmission should already be in bed back at the hotel. The best minivan transmission is the stay-at-home defenceman without whom you could never win the Stanley Cup; the guy who gets traded away because his Corsi numbers were poor; the guy you miss terribly as your team struggles to make the playoffs the next year. I want my minivan transmission to disappear into forgotten Middle America, somewhere between Omaha and Wichita. The best minivan transmission is the senior Hill staffer who never leaks, who supplies exceptional briefs, and who repeatedly sees her boss elected to higher office all while never wrangling a glowing profile in the Wall Street Journal.

As I near the end of my week with the 2018 Honda Odyssey, its 10-speed automatic has, in fact, all but disappeared from view.

That’s not the way it usually works with minivan transmissions. “Catch it off guard by sneaking up behind it and tapping it on the shoulder with some throttle,” our former managing editor said of the Chrysler Pacifica last year, “it’s as likely to turn around and say hello as it is to kiss you with an enclosed fist.”

It’s not just minivans. That’s not the way it usually works with the best implementations of maxi-gear automatics, either. Even in their best implementations, such as in the C43 Cabriolet, too many gears is often too many gears with which to work.

Yet in the Honda Odyssey, which is both a minivan and the beneficiary of what’s surely an unnecessarily high number of gears, the transmission does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Unfortunately, there’s still a problem. The shifter design, no fault of the 10-speed transmission itself, is both awful and it’s here to stay. Slow to react to inputs, unnecessarily convoluted, lacking the intuitive nature of traditional shifters, and just a bit farther away from the driver than it should be, the pushbutton affair is a letdown in an exceptional interior.

That’s not the only problem, either. This top-spec Honda Canada Touring trim Odyssey is equivalent to American Honda’s Odyssey Elite. In the U.S. market, only the $45,450 Odyssey Touring and $47,610 Elite get the 10-speed automatic. (In Canada, the 10-speed is reserved for the $52,115 Odyssey Touring.) All lesser Odysseys send power to the front wheels via a nine-speed automatic.

Lower trim levels aren’t typically blessed to be members of the press fleet, but past experience with the nine-speed in the Honda Pilot doesn’t promise a sunny forecast for the less costly Odysseys.

[Images: © Timothy Cain and Honda]

Timothy Cain is a contributing analyst at The Truth About Cars and Autofocus.ca and the founder and former editor of GoodCarBadCar.net. Follow on Twitter @timcaincars.