2024 Honda Prologue: Regular Car Reviews
Come on, Chevy. Let me see your homework. I’m Honda and I have better things to do than build an EV. I have lacrosse and national money making third base rounding club. You already did the project. Just let me copy it. You know, I’ll change it enough. So, Mrs. Lola doesn’t know. Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Ju just sign my name. I got to go. I got to go. You You’re clutch, bro. Let’s hang out. Never. Fair play to Honda. It took the owner of this car two reassurances to convince me that this Honda is a Chevy. The wheels look clean and honestly Japanese, and the tall sidewalls scream Honda practicality. But down on the door card is the mark of the beast. General Motors GM. You know, if they were a student, they would forever get B minuses in every subject except for overhead valve small block class where they got A+es. That’s a decent report card. But the teacher always squats on their okay grades in the comment section. She slides in with the ultimate chirp. Does not work up to ability. car company that ties with Toyota half the time for the number one spot for the most reliable manufacturer on our planet, choose to stoop to partnering with the automotive equivalent of a Nepo baby? GM doesn’t have to be good because its lips are permanently locked to the US government’s teeth sucking on DARPA contracts for fleet vehicles. If GM was a protagonist, it would be Van Wilder without the charm. If GM was an actor, it would be Jaden Smith. GM historically hung out with Isuzu all throughout middle school in the 80s and early 90s. So, I don’t know why Honda is in the mix now, senior year. My guess is Honda has some requirements for graduation, some EV prerequisites, and they literally don’t care because as long as they don’t get a D in whatever class that is counts. Plus, Asuzu is in vote now, just making commercial vehicles. So, GM is looking kind of lonely there. And Honda saw an opportunity. So, here we are. Honda’s final project for a class they don’t care about. Range 294 mi as long as the AC or heat is on low. Dual motors that make a total of 28 horsepower and 333 lb feet of torque with a curb weight of 5,27 lb and a gross vehicle weight rating of 6,614 lb. Well, she’s an SUV. All right. And she moves like a Honda Ridgeline with the venerable J series V6. You know, a mediumsiz engine pulling a large vehicle. Remember the hybrid Toyota 4Runner? Well, they accelerate about the same, which means this EV is about as fast as a Toyota Corolla. Sure, the EV torque bump gives you a bit more off the line, but just like all non-performance EVs, speed falls off at about 75 mph, and you can feel those electric motors struggling like a classmate playing worldclass track meat on the Nintendo Power Pad. My Kia Nairo EV does the same thing. I am fast. I am speed Sonic Spinball. Nothing’s going to stop me now. Side stitch. It’s like UD running after Otto’s bus and principal Skinner god blessing the man who invented permission slips. So the Honda prologue is not a fast electric vehicle. It’s the spiritual sister to Toyota’s fudged BZ4X project that Subaru made for them. Of these two cover band axe, I like the Honda better because it has tall tires and thick sidewalls. Hit all the potholes you want with these. Drive up on curbs. Drive through Manhattan and hit steel plates at 45 mph. Who cares? These thick rubber tires will safely deform and save your rims. The Blazer EV comes with bigger wheels and thinner tires to accommodate bigger brakes because the Chevy Blazer EV is available with 557 horsepower and 648 pound- feet of torque on the SS trim. Honda doesn’t get a performance version on their platform for this car. Now, that will change with Honda’s in-house Zero Series EVs, but as of this video, they are not out yet, but we have to talk about this in a little bit. Driving impressions. What do you got for me, Honda, not Honda? Hit it. That’s it. Yeah. I mean, it’s moving. It’s definitely moving. You got up to speed. Yeah. 211 kW. That’s it. That’s 288 horsepower. This is a car. That’s Yeah, this is a car. The thing I like about it that I’m going to probably when you’re listening to this, you you’ve heard me you’ve heard me rant about this before, but I like the big tires. I like the big fat tires. 60s. Yeah. Yeah. Chy boys. 2556019. So, you hit speed bumps, you hit curbs. If you need to go off-road, you’re not going to worry about popping these things. And you just say, “Hey, you know what? Show me my pressure. There it is. You can put it over there. Right there. And that that window on the left hand side of your speed. That is a high pressure for a thick tire. Yeah, man. Well, there it’s 42 all around. Cold pressure. So that’s what it wants. One’s 42. It’s 42 on all fours. Yeah. Teslas are the same. Really? Yeah. They’re all 42s. The Blazer EV SS is 38 42. I thought my Kia was high at 36. I’m like, oh wow, it’s over 34. Yeah, the Bolt is 38. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. All the EVs have higher pressure because of the weight. Well, it feels like a BZ4X without the cyberpunk instrument design. The ride is muted and firm with no character like any food item in Starbucks. Yum, yum, yum. I sure am eating carbohydrates and butter. You know who the Honda Prologue is for? All those entrylevel corpo kids living in those new construction Lego midrise condos, those 50 over1 buildings in King of Prussia down by the REI and the Roadrunner Sports. I’m getting I’m getting so specific here to the greater Philadelphia area. You’re boxed in by US 202, I276, the Skookul Expressway, and US 422. You’re there in your little corpo fortress made up with made up of capri pants, boba tea for breakfast, entitlement for lunch, and faux small town vibes at night. All the buildings are new, trying to look old, and all your condos are new, but hollow court doors always tell the truth. It’s your own little Westworld in greater Philadelphia. The good life trademark. So your authentic life is about as real as this Honda. Okay, for people in the rest of the country who don’t know what I’m talking about, we’re talking about Sodto Soapa. Actually, no. Phoenixville, Pennsylvania is Sodto Soapa. The Kop Condos is just private equity paradise. 2024 Honda prologue for the man whose favorite game is Starfield. Honda prologue for the man whose favorite game is Satisfactory. The fake Honda for the man whose favorite game is Google Maps. How is it possible to make a car this boring? This car makes drying paint look like Avengers: Endgame. Getting General Motors to do your homework for you is like copying off the kid who picks his nose and sticks it under the desk. I get that Honda was trying to get into the EV market without taking money and resources away from the Zero Series deployment. and partnering with one of the American big three offers more North American penetration than Johnny Sins. But even by the standards of a badge engineered Excel spreadsheet, you think Honda would try harder than this. It’s like somebody asked Chat GPT to design a car for Taylor Swift. The Prologue is an EV Blazer. They’re both built in the same factory in Mexico. They both run on the GM Ultimum platform and they both have a lot of tech disguised as not a lot of tech. and both can use the Tesla charging infrastructure. But for the prologue, you have to kind of lie. Our volunteer Adam from the YouTube channel Adam’s Everything EV says that if you get an adapter and then go into the Tesla app and you have to say that you have a Blazer EV before it’ll let you charge, but it’ll be slower than some of its competition due to the lower pack voltage. It takes about 35 minutes to go from 20% to 80%. Whereas a Hyundai Ionic 5 will go 10 to 80 in 20 minutes. And the KVE EV6 will do it in 18. And a Tesla Model Y varies. It’ll do it between 15 and 30. But the argument for the prologue is that this was never designed to replace or even compete with top-of-the-line EVs in terms of range or features. You get lane keep assist, but not lane centering. And you get Google Assistant and Apple CarPlay. And for a lot of people, that’s enough. But the Google Assistant isn’t always helpful. As Adam showed us, the assistant can’t tell you your charging percentage. And in fact, you can’t even see what your percentage is unless you’re plugged in or you interact with the car while it’s shut off. And in some cases, you don’t even get exact measurements. It just sort of ballparks it. What’s with this babysized rear wiper? The manual charge port door is fine. My key is manual. But why does it not get a light to help you aim? Honda Prologue, a CRV that went to school for graphic design and never finished. This is not Honda’s first EV attempt. It had experimented with low volume battery electric sales with stuff like the EV Honda Fit and the Honda Clarity. And before that, there was the very rare first gen Honda CRV EV. But here’s the deal. There’s a reason it’s called the Prologue. Because this car is setting the table for the Zero Series, Honda’s in-house line of level three automated electric cars. The prologue is here just as a loss leader to get Honda established in that space before the Zero Series drops. Honda isn’t even hiding this since they’re offering lease terms that are designed to reel you into a prologue but not keep you there. Yes, the federal tax credit is gone, but supposedly Honda is still passing it on to leases as a capitalized cost reduction to make your monthly payments lower. There are also lease cash from Honda Financial Services that offers cash incentives that are applied directly to the lease payment. And honestly, I have to wonder when this actually starts paying off for Honda because at some point, you’re just undervaluing your own product, right? I mean, with these Honda leases, you are paying the cost of the car’s depreciation, not its full value. It makes sense that this is considered attractive when you consider that in July, it was reported that 1.5 Americans have a car payment over $1,000 a month. The idea of being able to get a new car while paying a sum that’s significantly lower than the actual value of the car seems like the sort of thing that makes sense for a consumer, right? But what about Honda? Well, these very, very cheap leases make sense for a company for a couple of reasons. For instance, Honda has something called the money factor, which is basically their own method of determining the interest rate. And these lease terms themselves are based on values Honda themselves determine. And if the lease turns are attractive enough, they can juice demand for a car, drawing in more customers and raising the car’s value in the market. But more than that, what makes these leases so profitable for Honda is how they get people through the door and into the Honda ecosystem. Because these terms are designed to redirect you into the Zero series, and they were strategically built to function this way. A 24-month or 36-month lease on a 2024 or 2025 Honda prologue is designed to end when the Zero series is available. In that sense, the Prologue remains entry level at best and actively disposable at worst. A product whose obsolescence was planned well in advance of its creation. That’s why there’s no performance version on this. That’s why it only has basic options. That’s why it looks as plain as possible. That’s why the GM partnership continues to pay dividends because it keeps production costs low. When you don’t have to focus on R&D, you can take your time to focus on things like design. And I don’t mean this digital librarian appearance on the outside. Not that this exterior looks equal parts fragile, breakable, and stainable in any way you can’t wash out. No, it’s really like the exterior and interior represents Honda’s overall design approach. What they called the man maximum machine minimum ideology, which is focus on maximizing space for the occupants and minimizing the amount of spaces taken up by the car’s components. Of course, it’s limited to what they can do here because GM made the car, but that they can at least make the inside as roomy as possible. And I kind of like it. It feels like a response to the idea that electric cars need to express their futurism through difference. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trendy and no one would buy them. Forgetting that familiarity isn’t the enemy. They did it again. GM can’t stop doing the Omni. It’s straight from a Chevys seat. Well, every single Chevy in the 70s and 80s had the Omni stock. They didn’t have to do this. They could have put buttons anywhere else, but they just had to. I hate it. In a word, the Honda Prologue is approachable. It’s a stray dog you’re not afraid to take home and keep for yourself. It looks friendly. It looks harmless. It looks It looks like a more rounded version of the SUVs Honda already makes, but with an ebadge slapped on there, because I guess they didn’t think people would know it was an EV without it. But anything the E badge would tell you is also easily communicated with the blandly futuristic design. There has to be some sort of middle ground between the crypto origami of the cybert truck and the sexless futurism of a world where everybody is smoothed down there. This looks like a waiting room for an alien taking a test for space herpes. I guess it comes down to the question of whether a car should be graded on a curve because it never tried to be more of what you were expecting it would be. Honda didn’t build this to blow minds and so they didn’t build it. But then I didn’t come into this expecting my mind to be blown either. I didn’t expect the Honda S2000 and I certainly didn’t expect the prelude which something like a prologue. I get it. Prelude prologue. I see what you’re doing there. But I guess I figured that if Honda would put their badge on something, they at least would make it feel like a Honda. Oh,
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This week on Regular Car Reviews, Brian drives the 2024 Honda Prologue Touring! It’s the first time ever on this channel for the Prologue, Honda’s first fully-electric SUV! Is it a sign of good things to come, or a grim warning for the future?
00:00 intro
1:15 Giveaway Ad
2:23 GM and Honda’s relationship
5:58 Driving impressions
7:10 But why?
9:13 Oh well
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