Honda is betting its best momentum in the Passport nameplate’s history on a thirty-second TV spot and a freshened SUV. The “Base to Captain” campaign, launching today, puts the 2027 Honda Passport TrailSport at the center of a family road trip that, through the eyes of a young explorer, becomes an interplanetary mission. It is a lot of creative weight to put on a 1.38-inch suspension lift. Fortunately, the truck itself has earned the spotlight.
The 2027 Passport TrailSport arrives at dealerships later this week carrying a reengineered suspension that pushes ground clearance to 9.65 inches, improving approach, departure, and breakover angles over the prior setup. TrailWatch cameras and a heated steering wheel move to standard equipment on all TrailSport trims. Honda has not announced MSRP changes for the 2027 model year beyond what was shared at the initial product reveal.
The sales context behind the campaign is worth understanding. The fourth-generation Passport debuted for model year 2026 and reversed a difficult stretch: Honda sold 32,527 Passports in 2024, then watched that number climb to 55,231 units in 2025, a gain of nearly 70 percent. TrailSport trims have driven that recovery, accounting for more than 80 percent of current sales. Honda is pushing the brand campaign into NFL and college football broadcasts, NBA, WNBA, and NHL programming, plus digital placements on CBSSports.com and social platforms. That kind of media spend signals confidence in the product cycle, not just the ad.
The spot also works as a trailer for Honda’s broader ambitions. It features the Honda Base Station Prototype, a towable RV concept developed by Honda’s U.S. R&D team aimed at extending what the Passport can do once it gets somewhere remote. Beyond the automotive world, the campaign gestures at Honda’s space research program, including a 2025 launch and landing test of an experimental reusable rocket and ongoing work on regenerative fuel cell systems intended to support a sustained human presence on the Moon. Whether any of that lands as brand credibility or reads as a non-sequitur depends entirely on execution, and this campaign leans hard into the idea that the same curiosity powering a kid’s backseat imagination drives the engineers as well.
Honda bundles the Passport TrailSport into a broader TrailSport family alongside the Pilot TrailSport, Ridgeline TrailSport, and CR-V TrailSport, all of which appear in the campaign. The Passport occupies the middle of Honda’s truck-based SUV range, sitting above the CR-V and below the Pilot, and targets buyers who might otherwise cross-shop the Toyota 4Runner or Ford Bronco. Toyota moved 67,001 4Runners through September 2025 before sales dropped 40 percent for the year, a gap Honda’s product team would like to fill.
The Passport nameplate has had a complicated run since its 2019 return as a two-row SUV. Getting to record sales in year one of the redesign, then backing it up with a suspension upgrade significant enough to merit its own campaign, is a more coherent product strategy than Honda has managed with this nameplate in some time. The campaign arrives while the product is still fresh. That combination is rarer than it should be.
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
