The Prelude returns after 25 years to a vastly changed landscape. Car weirdness has been trending downward for decades. There was a time when unusual was usual, from fins and other outrageous design elements created to distinguish rapid-fire year-to-year model cycles all the way to segment-crossing fever dreams resulting from product planners thinking way too laterally. Cars like the Chevrolet SSR. Engineers added plenty of their own “Why the hell not?” moments, with innovations from the rotary engine to the turbodiesel V-10. And otherwise “normal” cars often had bizarre, whimsical details. Who else remembers Alfa Romeo’s ceiling-mounted electric window-switch era? Or the Pontiac Firebird Turbo Trans Am’s hood-mounted Normal/Medium/High boost lights?
This story originally appeared in Volume 35 of Road & Track. But in the dull, sensible car world of 2026, the height of weirdness has become . . . a two-door coupe. Yes, the new Honda Prelude is novel at a time when the vast majority of new models fall on the SUV spectrum. The affordable coupe was once commonplace, but this Honda is on a Venn-diagram island where two doors, front-wheel drive, and an oddball hybrid powertrain overlap.
View Price on AmazonYet there is real heritage here, and Honda deserves credit for bringing back the Prelude badge attached to something recognizable as a Prelude. It’s been 25 years since the fifth gen retired in 2001, and earlier Preludes were in the same vein as this one, combining dynamic prowess with relative affordability and snazzy tech. Previous incarnations even incorporated four-wheel steering and torque vectoring.
The new Prelude doesn’t have either of those, but it does have a clever hybrid system—the same one seen in the Civic and CR-V hybrids—that forgoes a conventional transmission for electric drive through a motor that delivers power to the front axle. This is fed by a small 1.07-kWh battery pack and a 141-hp Atkinson-cycle 2.0-liter inline-four that turns a starter-generator. With everything flowing, the peak system power is 200 hp, the same output the 2.2-liter VTEC made in the fifth-gen Prelude.
Although the new Prelude is electrically driven most of the time, the engine can directly connect to the wheels at higher speeds through an electronically controlled clutch. The big difference from the workaday Civic Hybrid is the Prelude’s ability to synthesize shifting between eight pretend gears using what is called the S+ Shift system. That’s pretty weird.
A more cynical view of the new Prelude is that it could have been called the Civic Coupe with almost equal justification. The new car’s smooth lines are clearly different from the current Civic’s body, but under the surface much is shared. That enabled Honda to take many chassis components for the Prelude straight from the Civic Type R, including the hot hatch’s dual-axis front strut suspension, adaptive dampers, and brakes, with four-pot Brembo front calipers clamping 13.8-inch rotors. Serious stopping power given that the 3242-pound coupe has about two percent more mass than a Type R hatch, which has over 50 percent more horsepower.
Prelude buyers should definitely choose the summer-tire upgrade to Continental ExtremeContact Sport 02s over the standard all-seasons. This $1200 dealer-fit option was on our test car.
Los Angeles County served as the backdrop for Richard Thompson III’s spectacular infrared portraits of the Prelude and gave us ready access to roads ideally suited for testing the car: freeways, canyons, and stuck-solid traffic. But I learned the most—and had the most fun—on Angeles Crest Highway.
The best performance cars maintain a fine balance between their abilities to generate lateral and longitudinal g-forces. Or, if you prefer, between grip and go. The Honda doesn’t; it carries too much tire for the modest amounts of thrust the powertrain can deliver, especially in uphill driving.
Most of the time this didn’t ruin the fun. The Prelude is a driver’s car in a way you probably haven’t experienced in years. It’s just not particularly fast.
Source: roadandtrack.com
