The Civic donates the Prelude its architecture, plus its 2.0-litre Atkinson-cycle engine and drive system dubbed e:HEV.
It’s worth spending a bit of time on this because it’s not straightforward, and when the Civic first arrived, Honda used the term e-CVT or something like that, which is rather misleading.
The engine predominantly acts as a generator, because it’s the electric motor, around 180bhp (tbc exactly), that drives the front wheels.
However, Honda, like a few other companies, thinks that an electric motor on its own doesn’t offer enough driver interaction. And an engine revving an engine at a constant speed is particularly annoying.
So on the Civic, it has a system that simulates gearshifts. The engine revs change just like in a conventional purely automatic petrol car, but you can’t control the revs.
The Prelude moves this system one phase onwards. Called S+Shift, the system not only simulates an eight-speed transmission, but it also lets you pick the ratios via gearshift paddles.
This means it behaves like any conventional auto in which you can select the gear via flappy paddles. The difference here is that the engine’s still not actually attached to the wheels.
Except…
Yes, there is an except. As with the Civic (and I think this is where some of the early confusion came) there is one fixed ratio in which a lock-up clutch is engaged and the engine is directly connected to the front wheels. Here it’s at the ratio of eighth gear.
This doesn’t mean that every time you’re in eighth it will connect the engine and wheels, but if it ever does, it’ll be in that eighth ratio only.
The rest of the time this is an motor-driven car, with energy generated by internal combustion.
A few other things to note. There are three drive modes: Comfort, GT and Sport. The engine sound – and it’s real sound, at actual engine revs – is amplified a little more each time.
The drive mode also changes the dynamics. The Prelude is Civic based, but with a slightly shorter wheelbase.
The suspension hardware is mostly Civic Type R, but the spring rate and anti-roll bar stiffness is “decreased in the direction of comfort”, according to Honda’s Tomoyuki Yamagami, large project leader for the Prelude.
The tyres are a bit less aggressive than the Type R’s, too, being 235/40 R19 Continental Premium Contact 6s on our test car, which changes the front and rear track width very slightly.
The car’s weight has yet to be disclosed, but it’s in the region of 1450-1500kg and is more rear biased than in a Civic Type R because there is more hardware towards the rear.
