Below an image of a silver Prelude "concept" car—Honda calls nearly any car a prototype or concept until about five minutes before that vehicle goes on sale, so this is basically a production-spec Prelude—the company included the first images of the Prelude's interior.
This specific example is a Japanese-market right-hand-drive car; the U.S.-market version will have the steering wheel on the correct side.
Our Most Acura-te Look Inside Yet
Until now, every Prelude Honda has put on display at shows and such has had deeply tinted or entirely blacked-out windows, so we've been left guessing what the sporty hybrid coupe's cabin might look like. Wonder no more.If you had guessed the Prelude would share interior bits with the Civic, give yourself a cookie. In many ways, the Prelude is simply a new-age Civic coupe, albeit positioned as a more premium and sporty offering than the mainstream Civic.
With the caveat that the Prelude interior you see here may not be entirely final, or what you'll experience when the Prelude is introduced to our market in late 2025 or early 2026, a few things jump out to us.
First, while the interior is derived from the Civic's, it has some elements borrowed from the Acura Integra, another compact car based on the current-generation Civic platform.
Like the Acura, the Prelude ditches the Civic's classy, full-width metal ventwork (which hides the four air vents) in favor of a more conventional quadrant of vents that live on the left, center, and right of the dashboard. The entire dash, in fact, looks cribbed directly from the Integra, including the digital gauge cluster and tablet-style touchscreen.
A Higher-Grade Honda
The materials used throughout also appear to match the Acura's higher-grade stuff, which we'd expect; although regular Civic cabins are extremely nice, they have less soft-touch and leathery bits.Things get interesting down in the center console, where there is a smattering of parts-bin Honda controls from other models, including the pushbutton/pull-tab gear selector and the current Civic's drive mode selector tab and electronic parking brake switch. But we also spy something new: a round glossy black button labeled "S+".
We've already popped enthusiasts' balloons with the news that, no, the Prelude won't bring back Honda's unusual hybrid-powertrain-with-a-manual-transmission layout.
(Past Honda hybrids have offered the combo, including early Civic hybrids as well as the original Insight.) With no stick shift on offer, there is still hope that Honda will find a way to make the Prelude's hybrid setup interesting.
That's where that S+ button comes into play—we figure Honda will tune the hybrid to "fake" up- and downshifts of a transmission even more aggressively than it does for the Civic Hybrid, even though the Prelude won't have a traditional transmission at all.
This all comes down to software trickery. Like the Civic Hybrid, the Prelude will use a gas four-cylinder engine as, essentially, a generator, feeding power to the battery and larger of the hybrid system's two electric motors via the smaller starter/generator.
While the gas engine can clutch into a single-speed drive and power the wheels during full throttle runs or at higher speeds (like on the highway) when it's more efficient to do so, most of the time motivation will come from the electric motor.
On the Civic Hybrid, Honda tunes the engine to briefly torque-dip, or ease up a little, during acceleration to lend the powertrain the sensation of gearshifts like you get in a typical automatic transmission.
The dip is unnecessary for the car's functionality, of course, but having it avoids the engine droning too out of sync with vehicle speed and acceleration, an unsatisfying byproduct of using it for generator duty.
For the Prelude's S+ function, expect the engine's play-acting of shifts to get more pronounced, but we're still waiting on final details from Honda.
As for the shift paddles behind the steering wheel, they could offer driver control over these faux shifts or simply control the electric motor's regen levels as they do in the Civic and Accord hybrids.
Back Seat Takes a Back Seat
While we've yet to try the Prelude's interior out for ourselves, one thing in-person experience is unlikely to change our opinion on is the back seat. Look at the photo above—the front seatback appears to be very, very close to the back seat's backrest.The tiny quarter windows, thick rear roof pillar, and fast roofline crowd the back seat from all other directions, too, suggesting that the Prelude's back seat won't be a very pleasant place to hang out for even short trips.
We see seatbelts back there for at least two passengers, but figure on only children fitting there. Other coupes of this size aren't any better, really; the Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ are likewise inhospitable to rear-seat riders.
On the upside, the Prelude's trunk is likely to be of decent size, if only because the Civic's 15-cubic-foot cavern (and the hatch's even more voluminous space) are reminders that Honda is quite good at packaging stowage space.
We'll find out more about the production Prelude's innards when the full, U.S.-market model arrives later this year, but this Japanese-market "concept" sure offers a clear preview.
Source: motortends.com
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