2026
Honda Prelude

If you can put up with its stiff ride, the Prelude is a surprisingly practical daily driver. It has one of the most refined hybrid systems on the market, with such a smooth blend between electric-only and hybrid operation that it’s hard to tell when the engine kicks on and off without specifically listening for it.

While Honda programmed a faux-shift pattern to keep the engine from droning at one rev speed indefinitely, it’s a pretty quiet system unless you turn on S+ Shift mode (more on that later) or really pin the throttle down. Power delivery is linear and predictable, with decent acceleration off the line. Throttle tuning becomes more aggressive in the sportier drive modes, with Sport mode offering the most responsive pedal feel. The Prelude loses a bit of steam at higher speeds, but it never feels totally inadequate power-wise.

What the Prelude’s powertrain lacks in punchy highway acceleration, it makes up for in great fuel economy. Efficiency and balanced around-town performance were standout features of this powertrain in the Civic Hybrid, and we expect it to score well in Prelude form. Even some of our more aggressive drivers noted fuel economy upwards of 35 mpg in the Prelude, with others reaching into the 40s.

All the chassis components and trick adaptive suspension technology borrowed from the Civic Type R make for superb, confidence-inspiring handling, which is one of the best parts about the Prelude. Drivers can adjust the aggressiveness of suspension damping, steering feel, and throttle response through the Prelude’s three drive modes. A simple console-mounted switch lets you select either Comfort, GT, or Sport mode, with Comfort offering a smoother ride and Sport being tuned for optimized handling.

Low body roll and a well-balanced chassis make the Prelude fun to throw into corners. Its front, dual-axis strut suspension was designed to minimize torque steer (that sensation of the car pulling in one direction when there’s too much power for the front tires to handle), and it shows. It’s easy to control, too, with quick, light steering that isn’t so twitchy as to be a handful, and offers decent feedback about the road surface and the tires’ grip level.

“It feels glued to the road going around sweeping corners with some speed,” said one tester. “Unless you’re pushing harder than you should be on a public road, you’d have no idea it’s front-wheel drive from the balance of it.”

Despite the fact that the Prelude’s huge Civic Type R brakes are overkill for a 200-hp hybrid, these brakes aren’t overly grabby, noisy, or otherwise awkward to use. Braking force is predictable—the harder the pedal is pressed, the more braking force is applied—and easy to modulate using the pedal.

The Prelude’s well-tuned brake pedal seamlessly blends regenerative braking (where it recaptures energy for the hybrid system to use as the car slows) with the friction braking force of the brake calipers clamping down on those big ol’ saucers.

With S+ Shift off, the paddle shifters can be used to adjust the amount of regenerative braking. There are six levels of regenerative braking intensity to choose from using the paddle shifters, and holding the left paddle for a few seconds keeps your desired regen level the same until you turn off the car. While we felt as though six levels were more than any car really needs in terms of adjustability, some of us liked the ease of using the paddles for this.

In a sea of poorly designed touchscreen interfaces and hard-to-use touch-sensitive panels, Honda’s interiors are full of straightforward physical buttons, knobs, and switches, making them a breath of fresh air. We’re living in grim times when a car having regular turn-signal and wiper stalks, a glove box that opens with a normal handle, and climate controls that don’t require multiple onscreen menus to use is increasingly rare. Honda deserves credit for resisting these awful trends that make cars more distracting to use.

The dashboard design is almost identical to the Civic’s, and while some of us felt as if Honda could have done something more unique and special, it’s hard to complain about it from a usability standpoint. All of the climate controls are in a simple array of knobs and buttons. While much of the stereo controls are onscreen, there is still a physical volume knob and separate buttons to flip through radio stations or tracks. The steering wheel also has a number of easy-to-use physical controls for commonly accessed features.

There are even dedicated buttons to turn off a couple of features that many cars leave on by default: auto-dimming mirrors and the wireless phone-charging pad. Being able to turn the wireless charging pad off allows the cubby to store other items, which is an added bonus.

Even features on the center touchscreen are fairly easy to navigate, with large menu tiles and icons. The Prelude has Google built-in infotainment, with Google Maps and Google’s voice assistant; wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay also come standard if you prefer those interfaces. The voice assistant can’t control many of the car’s features through conversational speech, but it can for navigation directions. However, with this many physical controls, you don’t need to tell the car that you’re cold with your voice—you can just reach over and turn the temperature knob up.

With very few exceptions—we’re looking at you, door handles—the Prelude feels solidly put together. Buttons make satisfying clicks, and knobs have clearly defined detents. While we’re not sure the trimmings are worth the price, the Prelude at least feels like it will hold together well.

These hit a sweet spot for most of our testers, striking a nice balance between support and softness. The lone weak point is a relatively flat seatback that lacks any lumbar-support adjustment, but for the most part, these look and feel really nice. The seats’ bolsters were enough to keep our testers from moving around too much through corners, but not so aggressive that they made getting in and out of the car more difficult. The leather feels nice and soft, and the perforation pattern and the two-tone colorway feel appropriate in a more upmarket vehicle.

Although they are manually operated, the wide range of adjustments for both the seats and the steering wheel made it easy to find a good seating position that allowed for a clear view of both the road ahead and the driver’s instrument panel. The armrests are also nicely padded and at a comfortable height, though one of our testers felt the armrest atop the center console could have been further forward.

Getting into and out of a low-slung coupe is always going to be a bit of a challenge, between having to squat down to reach the bottom cushion and, for taller drivers, having to duck under the angle of the roof line. Still, the Prelude’s slightly wider interior and large footwell make it a lot easier to live with than smaller coupes.

There’s little intrusion into the footwell from the center console, giving front-row occupants plenty of space to spread out and get comfortable. If other coupes feel too cramped, this one might be the right size for you—and that alone may be a selling point for some buyers.

Narrow windshield pillars, giant side windows, and low, door-mounted mirrors make it easy to see out of the front of the car. Even though the seating position is low, as expected in a sporty car, most of us had no problem seeing over the hood, either.

The Prelude’s hatchback design has a fairly wide opening, and while the high lift-over to put items in is less than ideal, we were impressed with the amount of space in the cargo area, especially with the 60/40-split rear bench folded down. One tester even carried a toilet he purchased—in pieces, but it’s still impressive to fit one back there. Another easily fit three cases of water, groceries, and a ceiling fan. There should be plenty of space for two people’s luggage for a weekend trip.

There’s no spare tire, but there is a circle-shaped hole like there should have been one underneath the cargo floor. It’s relatively shallow, but at least it provides an option for more private storage without having to buy the $150 cargo cover Honda sells. (As for flat tires, there is a repair kit.)

On their own, the Civic Hybrid’s powertrain and the Civic Type R’s suspension and braking tech are fabulous. Both are well-suited to their stated purposes: frugal fuel consumption and maximum driving pleasure, respectively. Honda says they retuned these parts-bin components when they put them into the Prelude, which is marketed as a more luxurious, less aggressive grand tourer, but they still stood out as a sharp contradiction in our Prelude.

“Given the suspension, I would expect more. More power, more pleasant noises, and a real transmission would be welcomed,” said one tester. “They built half of a driver’s car, but left out an engaging powertrain, which is a shame.”

For all of Honda’s relatively simple and straightforward user-interface decisions, the Prelude has some of the worst flush-mounted, pop-out door handles we’ve seen.

While manufacturers often cite small improvements to a car’s aerodynamics (and thus, fuel efficiency) to justify this styling decision, we’re not a fan since they can freeze over in cold weather and don’t always reliably pop out.

These pop-out handles are one of the few components that feel flimsy and cheap, and worse yet, they pop back in after a while, even with the key in the car. While none of us got locked out, opening the door after filling up with gas entailed a bunch of awkward hand contortions to push in one side of the handle enough to pop out the other side. Sometimes it opened fairly freely, but once it made me pry with enough force that I felt like I was breaking into the car.

That wasn’t the only example of strange pop-out behavior we encountered. The handles pop out when they sense the key approaching the car, but don’t actually unlock the door, which often forced us to pull the handle twice: once to unlock the car, and a second time to actually open the door.

Honda historically used its more upmarket Prelude to debut new innovations, such as a moonroof, an antilock brake system, and four-wheel steering. For the 2026 Prelude, Honda’s new, shiny feature is the S+ shift system, which left us less than impressed.

The Prelude doesn’t have a traditional transmission, as it primarily uses an electric motor to drive the front wheels, with the engine able to directly power the wheels through a lockup clutch at highway speeds. Honda still simulates a shift pattern with its engine revs, anyway, which makes it feel more familiar and keeps it from droning monotonously, which some of our testers appreciated.

S+ Shift, which is a mode that’s separate from the three regular driving modes and given its own large button on the center console, is where the Prelude’s fake shifts go off the rails. S+ Shift allows the driver to use the paddle shifters to flip through eight simulated gears, but it frustratingly won’t let you stay in one “gear” if it doesn’t want to.

“As soon as you approach the ‘redline,’ it shifts up for you, and if you brake hard, it even downshifts for you,” said one tester. “Isn’t the whole point of the paddles supposed to be for me to be able to choose when I want to shift?”

S+ Shift also increases the engine sound that’s pumped into the cabin, which really only made the Prelude’s buzzy engine note more pronounced and annoying. Aggressive acceleration seems to result in a larger increase in noise than in actual power output. The other way it tries to feel convincing is with a slight jerk when you make a paddle shift that mimics the physical sensation of going from one gear to the next. For some testers, this was too slight to feel realistic, plus it all felt bizarre with the hybrid system.

“The fake shifting from the S+ mode gets a little funny with the hybrid system because downshifts are sometimes followed by the engine shutting off, which is kind of counterintuitive,” said Alex Knizek, Consumer Reports’ Director of Auto Test Development.

Most of us played with S+ Shift a handful of times, then resigned it to gimmick status.

For a car positioned as a more upmarket vehicle with a price tag to match, some items are conspicuously missing from the spec sheet. You can’t get ventilated seats, a heated steering wheel, a power-opening liftgate, a rear wiper, or a surround view camera. Lumbar support isn’t the only thing missing from the seats, either—they’re completely manual, with no option for power adjustability. The Prelude only comes in one real trim level, too, so you can’t even add these things through an options package.

The Prelude is a 2+2 coupe, and its back seat is for small children at best. An especially glaring example of Honda only halfway committing to a nicer interior, the rear bench is upholstered in cloth, and in our car, they don’t even match the white and blue front seats! The other interior upholstery option is black leather, which at least lets these blend in better, but doesn’t change the fact that a dramatically cheaper-looking back seat snuck into this car.

As far as space goes, legroom is fairly tight, but headroom under the dramatically raked coupe roof is even worse. One shorter tester at 5 feet 4 inches hit her head on the side pillar when seated in the back.

Climbing into the back seat is also a tight squeeze. Because the Prelude doesn’t come with power seats, the front seats have to be manually adjusted to move out of the way, and it’s still quite a narrow path. The back seat is really best suited for small cargo or as a barrier to keep whatever you’ve put inside the rear hatch from sliding too far forward.

The thick rear pillars and angled roof create gigantic blind spots around the rear corners of the car. Several of us had to really crane our heads around to see behind us, and even then, we had only limited visibility.

The view directly out the rear window isn’t too bad, but there’s no rear wiper if it rains, and that still won’t give you the bumper-height view of the backup camera. That camera—the only camera available for the Prelude—is fairly low-resolution compared to other backup cameras we’ve tested.

Like a lot of our other dislikes, it can get the job done, but it doesn’t seem to belong in a higher-priced model. We would have liked to see better image quality and some sort of front-camera view to aid in parking, if not an available surround view camera.

While the hybrid system that powers it is pretty quiet if you’re not driving too aggressively or engaging S+ Shift, the Prelude isn’t as well isolated from road, wind, and tire noise as we’d like in a more upmarket model. The tire choice isn’t helping, as Consumer Reports tested a Civic with the same stock Goodyear tires that was loud as well.

According to the EPA, the Prelude is rated for 44/47/41 combined/city/highway, which is incredible for a sporty model, but we want to know if it’s that good in real life. Consumer Reports will run its own fuel economy testing soon to see if our experience matches that figure—and how it compares to the Civic Hybrid, which the EPA rated at 49/50/47 respectively.

The Prelude’s fantastic handling comes at the expense of ride quality, and many of our testers found it a bit too stiff for a car marketed as a grand tourer, even in its softest Comfort driving mode. It had noticeably stiffer bump absorption than our Civic Hybrid on our test facility’s rough evaluation surfaces.

Despite that, the adaptive dampers make the Prelude more livable and stable over bumps than many more focused sports cars, as its less aggressive modes do a decent job of smoothing out smaller road imperfections and even larger undulations. Still, rougher roads and harsher bumps are really jarring and noisy regardless of the settings. Opinions among the Consumer Reports staff were split as to whether this was livable or not, so it’s something we’ll pay attention to as we continue testing the car.

Who’s buying it

Between its high price and unclear purpose, this is a question we all had after driving it: Who is the Prelude for? Is it for buyers looking for more of a sports car, or for an efficient coupe? Is nostalgia for the name playing any factor here, even though a powertrain with this little top-end oomph is the all but polar opposite of Honda’s beloved VTEC engines? Or does its sleek, sporty looks reel in fans regardless?

Consumer Reports’ staff kept comparing it to the Civic Hybrid, which has many of the same high points as the Prelude, but at a much more reasonable price. For us, there isn’t enough of an improvement in things like handling, features, or braking to justify paying more for the Prelude.

Will Honda keep the Prelude as is for its lifespan, or will it make the car’s purpose more coherent over time? And will that price stay as is or drop more in line with competing coupes and the less track-focused models in the Civic lineup?

Safety and Driver Assistance Systems

The Prelude comes standard with the full Honda Sensing suite of active safety and driver assistance features, which includes automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, blind spot warning, rear cross traffic warning, adaptive cruise control, lane centering assistance, lane departure warning, lane keeping assistance, automatic high beams, and traffic sign recognition.

Additionally, the new Prelude comes equipped with a post-collision braking system that applies the brakes to slow the car after a crash to lessen any collisions that may follow.