2024 Honda Prologue SUVOTY Review: It’s a Start
The Prologue is a decent EV SUV held back by being a reskinned GM product.
Pros
- Excellent new design direction
- Rides great
- Great one-pedal driving mode
Cons
- Lacks personality
- Tiny cargo space
- Pricier than the competition
Even a good compromise requires both sides to give a bit. Working with GM allowed Honda to get its hands on a competitive EV platform quickly with minimal development costs, but it meant giving up control over the engineering and suppliers. The result, the 2024 Honda Prologue EV, is a good EV that lacks Honda’s typical personality.
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“The Prologue is a perfectly fine first EV for an average sized or smaller family,” associate editor Bob Hernandez said, “and an acceptable SUV for 99.9 percent of the things that SUVs do today.”
This was a common sentiment. Our judges all agree the Prologue is a pretty good SUV and a decent EV, but it doesn’t offer anything above and beyond to justify its high price for the segment. Still, it has plenty going for it. Everyone loves Honda’s new exterior design direction pioneered on this vehicle. We like its unusually quiet interior, smooth ride, and fluid handling.
Turning over all the engineering except the final calibration to GM, though, comes with some drawbacks. Honda engineers are revered for their ability to package an interior and find space where no others can, and although we appreciate all the storage between the front seats, the tiny cargo area is a miss for such a big SUV. Our judges were also disappointed by the oddly slow steering and a total lack of that cornering eagerness all true Hondas seem to have.
We were likewise a bit letdown by the interior, which looks nothing like a modern Honda interior—because it’s a modern Chevy interior and full of Chevy switchgear and materials. The parking brake control and Sport mode button hidden by the driver’s left knee are just poorly laid out. Even the screens use Chevy graphics with a few Honda touch-ups. We do appreciate Honda’s commitment to keeping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto while Chevy abandons both, however.
A bigger issue for all judges, not just repeat Honda customers, was its performance in the sand pit, which we use to simulate deep mud and snow. There, the overzealous traction and stability control pull nearly all power and slow the vehicle to a crawl, which is disconcerting. Moving off from a stop in the deep stuff is also a struggle, with the vehicle going so far as recommending via a warning we put it in all-wheel drive even though it’s a two-motor system with permanent all-wheel drive, and the driver has no control over power distribution.
We were also underwhelmed by the Prologue’s charging speed. The Chevy it’s based on will pull 190 kW on a DC fast charger (which is good but not great), but the Honda can only do 150 kW, which drags out charging stops. To add insult to injury, this Prologue AWD Elite is both slower and has slightly less range than a comparable Chevy Blazer EV RS AWD, our 2024 SUV of the Year.
Finally, judges were disappointed to see Honda’s quite good lane centering system is absent, replaced by Chevy’s basic lane keeping system, which is not nearly as adept. GM’s excellent Super Cruise isn’t offered at all; it’s reserved for the pricier Acura ZDX also spun from GM's architecture.
“It lacks any sort of Honda-ness to it in how it feels, looks, or drives,” digital director Erik Johnson said. “Hondas always have this zestiness below the surface, like they’re politely waiting to be let outside to play, but there’s none of that here. It’s a decent, honest EV but one that evokes little emotion.”
This review was conducted as part of our 2025 SUV of the Year (SUVOTY) testing, where each vehicle is evaluated on our six key criteria: efficiency, design, safety, engineering excellence, value, and performance of intended function. Eligible vehicles must be all-new or significantly revised.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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