2018 Honda Odyssey: Rear Seat Erotic Entertainment Was at Your Fingertips
Who knew the well-equipped 2018 Honda Odyssey was so… titillating? An unsuspecting journalist over at Forbes saw a few more — let’s call them entertainment options — than she expected while browsing through the video selection offered via her Odyssey tester’s rear media screen.
At that point, things became a little hot under the collar at Honda.
Before discussing that special kind of alone-time entertainment, let’s talk about the car that provided it: the Honda Odyssey. For 2018, the Odyssey received a full redesign and, as expected, the changes included a number of tech and entertainment upgrades. Namely, the van is now available with a Wi-Fi hotspot, allowing music and video streaming while on the go.
The second relevant feature here is the inclusion of an EPIX entertainment app, part of a subscription service for the rear entertainment screen (which now measures over 10 inches). Here’s where things got sticky.
Reviewer Joann Muller was exploring the different kinds of fun you could have in the back seat of the Odyssey ahead of a Fourth of July road trip with her family. Bringing up the EPIX app, she browsed through the video categories, searching for the sort of family-friendly videos she knew Honda would provide for children residing in the Odyssey’s rear seats.
As her eyes scanned the available EPIX video categories, arranged alphabetically, one stuck out. See if you can tell which one:
Documentary
Erotic
Horror
As Muller tells it, “we stumbled across some rather interesting movie choices: ‘Gladiator Eroticus,’ ‘Kinky Kong,’ ‘An Erotic Werewolf in London,’ and ‘Lord of the G-Strings.'”
Muller immediately contacted her Honda PR representative regarding the smutty offerings. Caught quite by surprise, the rep snapped a photo of the questionable content and forwarded it on to other Honda employees. Post-haste, Honda and EPIX had a nice sit-down to decide how to proceed.
The automaker quickly reassured Muller that the erotic offerings she saw were not part of the Honda entertainment package. Thankfully for Honda, a key advancement found in the 2018 Odyssey proved useful for solving the eyebrow-raising issue. The model’s Wi-Fi hotspot allows for over-the-air updates, meaning Honda can push out system updates at any time to Odysseys with Wi-Fi capability. The next morning, the adult programming was absent from the tester’s entertainment options, as well as for the nearly 5,000 other families who purchased a 2018 Odyssey with a rear entertainment screen since May of this year.
Honda had apparently not received any complaints about the erotica prior to the Forbes report. If any owners noticed, they were keeping their flushed faces hidden.
[Images: Chris Tonn/The Truth About Cars; Honda]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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Chevy has the Suburban; now Honda has the Sub/Dom/Basement. We'll just stick with the EX-L, thanks.
Oh man, I was wondering what happened to my favorite movies...Damn WiFi!!!