2024 Honda Odyssey

Got kids? You need a minivan like the 2024 Honda Odyssey, especially if they're little and you're loading them into and out of child safety seats. Those sliding side doors will save your back, and minivans like the 2024 Odyssey have so much cargo space there is no need to pack light, or even with care. Just throw your stuff in and go. When you think about it, minivans are the ultimate active lifestyle vehicles, ready for whatever, whenever, unless it requires rock crawling or water fording. And you're not really planning to do any of that, are you?

Admittedly, Honda might be overselling its Magic Slide second-row seats. There's nothing magic about them. But they're terrific. You can slide the center seating section closer to the front seats to put a child closer to parents, or you can remove and store that section. Removing it turns the bench-style seat into two individual chairs. Alternatively, you can slide one of them over to create a large pass-through to the third-row seat, or you can slide them both toward the middle to put children closer to the middle of the minivan, where they're safer in a collision. So while they're not magic, Honda could easily call them Awesome Slide seats.

Few alternatives to the Odyssey exist, and each one offers something you can't get with the Honda. For example, the Chrysler Pacifica offers available all-wheel drive or a plug-in hybrid powertrain. The Kia Carnival has a sense of style and lounge-style second-row seating. The Toyota Sienna has a standard hybrid powertrain and available all-wheel drive. But we like the Odyssey, as you'll see by reading the Edmunds Expert Rating below.

Your parents are visiting from out of town to spend a week with you and the grandkids. The six of you are headed for a day at the beach, with dinner after. But taking two vehicles runs counter to the idea of family togetherness, which is why you might be glad you bought a minivan like the Honda Odyssey.

When Honda last redesigned the Odyssey for the 2018 model year, we added one to our One-Year Road Test fleet, putting 20,000 miles on the minivan in a year's time. The Odyssey hasn't changed much since then, so our findings still apply to the 2024 model.

We like having minivans around. They're excellent family vehicles, and they're unquestionably handy for hauling.

"I just used the Odyssey to pick up a twin mattress. With the third-row seats already folded flat, I only needed to tilt up the center section of the second row to slide the mattress all the way in. It was a perfect fit. I didn't even have to remove the two child seats that were installed in the outboard positions of that second row. So easy," said Mike Schmidt, associate director of vehicle testing operations.

Plus, Schmidt's kids get excited when they see the Odyssey in his driveway. "Aside from the rear entertainment headsets, they are big on the sliding doors. The handles are easy enough for my 4-year-old to pull," he said. "And with the auto-open feature, that's all she needs to get in. Press a button and the doors close. In my experience as a parent, any time you ask a kid to push a button, you're going to get a favorable response."

In addition to lugging bedding in the Odyssey, we traveled extensively throughout California and Nevada in it. Our heavily urban driving resulted in an average lifetime fuel economy just below 21 mpg overall. We find the onboard mpg meter tends to estimate 1%-2% higher than our actual fuel economy during city-heavy fills. We've seen it range as high as 5% over long highway drives.