Trick suspension, cozy interior – sounds like it’s all made to be paired with a slightly detuned Civic Type R engine, right? Failing that, the 1.5-litre turbo and six-speed manual from the American Civic Si would also do the trick. Well, it’s 2025 and Honda doesn’t sell many EVs, so it’s having to watch every gram of CO2. As a result, the Prelude gets the same 181bhp hybrid system as the Civic, albeit with a trick up its sleeve.
Honda’s people say it’s the best solution for this car because it has so much torque, but let’s be honest: fun things are rarely the ‘best’ solution to any given problem.
The trick to make this hybrid more exciting is eight simulated gears. Adding fake gears to a CVT or a hybrid transmission that behaves like one is nothing new – various Toyotas and Subarus do it – and the result is underwhelming. The difference is that in Honda’s hybrid system, the engine doesn’t drive the wheels except at a constant cruise; usually, it drives a generator to feed electricity to the big drive motor or the battery.
So as long as the generator is being spun quickly enough to produce enough juice, the engine can do whatever the software deems appropriate. It can be at low revs; its revs can be rising and falling; it could play a grumbly rendition of Jingle Bells (it doesn’t actually do that, because Honda’s CEO isn’t Elon Musk). More to the point, it can pretend to have the world’s fastest automatic gearbox. Because an Atkinson-cycle four-cylinder unit doesn’t in itself tend to sound very good, its sound is augmented by the speakers.
It sort of works. The sound is quite believable and the ‘gearbox’ is very active in the way it downshifts when you’re slowing for corners. Manual upshifts with the paddles are faster than with any real gearbox. The immersion is broken, however, when you try to power out of a hairpin in third and it downshifts or when you don’t make a gearchange for a few seconds and it upshifts.
There’s no locked manual mode, because that would seemingly cause trouble with the WLTP economy figure. It’s a missed opportunity, as Honda hasn’t finished the job. I found myself leaving the car in its standard mode, where it still simulates some shifts to break the CVT-style tedium but doesn’t do the whole gearbox schtick.
This powertrain will be very pleasant and economical in everyday use, and it just about does the job when you’re having fun, but there’s no doubt the chassis deserves a more exciting partner.
