Honda Prelude Review 2025: Price, specs & boot space

If you're after an attractive coupe that isn't expensive to buy and won't have ruinously expensive fuel consumption and hefty insurance bills, we reckon so. Ideally, you'll be able to keep an open mind as to what a sports car can be like, as the Prelude is slower than a lot of family hatchbacks, let alone other performance cars. 

This is an easy one, as you don't have a choice in terms of the engine or the trim level. All Preludes come with a 2.0-litre hybrid engine and in 'Advance' trim level. 

Not many, really, with the market shifting away from coupes. Most two-door cars still on sale are of a more premium persuasion, with the only option around the same price as the Prelude being the BMW 2 Series. The entry-level 220i costs a similar amount and offers comparable (albeit slightly better) straight-line performance, but it's a very different sort of car from the Prelude, which treads its own path. 

Mechanically, the Prelude shares a lot with the Honda Civic, and isn't much more costly than a top-spec version of the hatchback. We can't help but wonder if some Honda dealers might try to upsell prospective Civic owners who don't necessarily need that car's practicality, and we'd totally get the temptation to upgrade.

Much like the Civic, the Prelude feels solid in terms of its build quality, but also reasonably premium thanks to a nice array of soft-touch materials. There are more buttons that we've become accustomed to these days, given the current obsession of sticking loads of functions into a touchscreen, and pleasingly, all of these physical controls give off a feeling of quality, particularly the rotary climate controls. 

It's this that lets the Prelude's cabin down a bit. The 10.2-inch touchscreen-based system isn't massive by modern standards, and both its graphics and colour schemes are basic. And while it's good that you get wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as standard, we weren't massively impressed with the integration of Google Maps when using the former. 

You can't just shift the map around with your fingers, pinch to zoom and so on, as is usually the case. Instead, you need to press a button to bring up an adjustment screen and nudge the map around with some arrows, a bit like using an in-built sat-nav from around 2005. It's naff, really. 

Responsiveness from the screen is OK, though, and the menu system is simple enough to get your head around. We also like the punchy Bose sound system, which is exclusive to the Prelude.

Coupes aren't exactly known for their practicality, but even so, the Prelude's 269-litre boot is pretty small, especially when a BMW 2 Series has a far more generous 390 litres of load volume. A hatchback-style opening will make it easier to load than the BMW's saloon-style arrangement in some respects, but then again, there's a quite a high lip in the Prelude, which could be awkward when chucking in anything heavy and or bulky. 

The rear seat bench folds to increase this to 663 if loading to the windowline, or 760 litres if you load to the roof. The Prelude is probably better like that anyway, as the rear seats aren't much use for anyone apart from smaller kids. Taller young-uns and all but the shortest of adults will find that headroom is extremely limited thanks to the car's heavily sloped roofline, and legroom isn't great either.

The Prelude is only available with a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder hybrid engine shared with the Civic. It's an unusual engine that lacks a gearbox, with the engine spending a lot of the time merely topping up a 1kWh battery pack, which in turn drives the front wheels via a powerful electric motor. The engine can also directly drive the car via a smaller electrical generator, for instance, at cruising speeds for better fuel economy. 

This doesn't sound like the most thrilling starting point for a sports car, so Honda has worked some engineering magic to liven things up. Normally, this powertrain responds in a sort of 'elastic' manner, much like a continuously variable transmission (CVT), with the revs spiking under full acceleration. But here, there are eight simulated gear ratios that manage the engine speed in the way you'd expect, were there actually a bunch of cogs between the engine and the wheels. When you're shifting up, the sensation can be pretty uncanny, although there are occasions – particularly during downshifts – that you can see through the ruse. On the whole, it's extremely clever. 

The hybrid powertrain makes 203PS, making for a 0-62mph time of 8.2 seconds. Which isn't very quick, especially when even the cheapest version of the BMW 2 Series manages the same in 7.5 seconds. The Prelude feels brisker than you might imagine, though, helped by its 315Nm of torque coming in instantaneously from the electric motor. 

If you're on a really twisty road, 203PS does actually feel enough. There are still times when you are left wanting for a bit more poke, though. We're not suggesting Honda should have shoved a Civic Type R engine under the bonnet and jacked up the price accordingly, but something like 250PS or so might have been nice.

There are also times when you won't even get the full 203PS output. On particularly hilly, demanding roads that leave the battery at a low state of charge, the Prelude appears to limit its power, feeling especially sluggish as a consequence.

The Prelude is nicely hushed at speed, with wind and road noise kept to a relative minimum. The four-cylinder engine is smooth, too, and never passes any unpleasant vibrations into the cabin. It helps that in urban driving situations, the hybrid battery is big enough to let the engine shut off entirely, making for an even more relaxing time behind the wheel. 

The Honda Prelude doesn't yet have a Euro NCAP rating, and it wouldn't be a surprise if it won't ever get tested by the safety body, being a relatively low-volume model. For whatever it's worth, the structurally similar Civic, a car that comes with an identical set of safety systems, was rated at five stars out of five in 2022.

As standard, the Prelude comes with blind spot detection, lane assistance, a driver attention monitor, autonomous emergency braking, traffic sign recognition, a cross-traffic monitor, adaptive cruise control and a driver attention monitor. 

Honda's warranty is nothing special, lasting the bare minimum three years, but for more miles than some at 90,000. You should be less likely to need the warranty, anyway, with Honda having a well-deserved reputation for reliability. In the most recent HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index survey, Honda placed fourth out of 33 brands for reliability, with less than 6% of owners reporting that they've experienced an issue with their car. 

The Prelude's insurance group hadn't been confirmed at the time of writing, and it's hard to say how it might shape up in that regard. The relatively modest price and low-ish power output should go in its favour, but the Civic is already in a quite high group 28, and the Prelude is sure to be a few rungs higher than that. 

The government removed the token £10 discount for Vehicle Excise Duty (VED)/car tax on 'alternatively fuelled vehicles' in April 2025, so you'll be paying the same £195 annual rate as anyone else from year two of ownership. Unfortunately, the Prelude is just above the £40,000 threshold for the government's premium car tax supplement, so you'll need to shell out an extra £425 annually from years two to six. 

The Prelude's only trim level is called 'Advance', which is fitting, as it comes with a decent amount of gear as standard. The kit list includes adaptive suspension, 19-inch alloy wheels, a 10.2-inch infotainment system, a nine-inch digital instrument cluster, a Bose sound system, leather front seats, interior ambient lighting and adaptive cruise control.