First Drive Review: 2024 Honda Prologue

–Healdsburg, CA

The phrase “first, do no harm” is not part of the Hippocratic Oath, I’m told by both someone at Harvard and the collected wisdom of Wikipedia. The Greek deep thinker Hippocrates did more than likely inspire the idea (a good one) with a near-enough-as-makes-no-difference phrase in something called the Hippocratic Corpus. But your general practitioner didn’t have to swear to it on a stack of bibles or medical school bills (I’m unsure of the tradition here).

Regardless of origin, “first, do no harm” seems to have been in the minds of the Honda team that brought this new Prologue EV, the brand’s first very serious effort at an all-electric, mass-market vehicle, to life. Starting with a General Motors battery pack and presumably a less-than-flexible architecture as a result, my biggest concern before spending a few hours driving the Prologue was that it wouldn’t feel much like a Honda.

Honda

What’s a Honda feel like, you ask? Anyone who’s owned a Civic, Accord, or CR-V knows the answer, even if they might struggle to put it into words. Every Honda is just… easy. The company has made user-friendly products one of its calling cards, with subtle tunings like lightweight, precise steering, responsive but not punishing suspension calibrations, clever in-cabin storage solutions, and (for those who are still game) exceptionally slick gearboxes. (Various Honda infotainment interfaces have let users down over the years, but that outlander of a downward arrow is now pointing up.)

After the first few miles on curving roads around California’s wine country, it’s easy to see that the Prologue has that essential Honda-ness in its driving demeanor. The dual-motor, all-wheel-drive version of the SUV (Honda also sells a single-motor front-driver that I didn’t sample) is sprightly but not “EV quick,” with a combined 288 horsepower and 333 pound-feet of torque. I casually clocked the machine at about 6 seconds to 60 miles per hour, which will feel fast if the new owner is coming out of a Pilot, but not so much if their last lease was a Model Y.

The power was ample anyway, for hustling out of corners and making a few easy passes on the dotted-line sections of two-lane roads. I didn’t get much highway time on the drive day, but I can report that the Prologue handles its roughly 5,000-pound curb weight with grace. There isn’t much road feel through the steering wheel, of course, but it’s responsive to rapid requests for change of direction and well married to the planted feel that comes from a big battery in the floor. As is typical of every Honda from the Type R to the HR-V, it’s easy to move between aggressive driving and cruising without the vehicle feeling out of sorts.

Honda

The Prologue is relatively wide and low so it will feel quite spacious in both rows of seating to anyone under, say, 6-foot-5. I happen to be exactly 6-foot-5 and was therefore occasionally feeling my hair brush against the shade of the panoramic glass roof (which is quite nice). With giants accounted for then, there won’t be a bad seat in the house for even six-footers, and the front seats themselves are comfortable and lightly supportive under a cornering load.

Prologue’s width also helps in the area of cargo capacity, where the model does need a bit of a hand. The Honda offers just under 55 cubic feet of storage with the rear seats down (57.6 for the single-motor version, putting it behind both the Ford Mach-E (59.7) and Volkswagen ID.4 (64.2) in that spec. Access through the wide rear hatch is easy though, and it all but the most annoying helping your buddy move situations the space should be adequate.

The interior design is unfussy and subtly modern, with the view from the driver’s seat dominated by two big screens. A central 11.3-inch infotainment system wirelessly connects using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, with the rest of the software suite blissfully vanilla. There’s another 11-inch screen in front of the driver, which is big, configurable, and about 10% brighter than I want it to be even after I futz with the settings. Sharp-eyed test drivers will see some GM-sourced switchgear in the cabin, too, but nothing that feels like a transplant or impacts user experience at all (if I didn’t write about cars for a living I’d never notice them).

All Prologue models come with the Honda Sensing suite of active safety tech, like auto braking, lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, and lane keep assist. All of that stuff is likely to make your statistical likelihood of a crash diminish, and only the lane-keeping caused me any aggravation. That system was switched on by default when I started driving, and so aggressively pushed me away from the center lane of a narrow road that I thought the was something wrong with the power steering. Thankfully, you can switch it off if, like me, you prefer a little latitude.

Honda

This is an EV and I haven’t talked about range, charging, or battery specs yet. What gives? The truth is that, while the Prologue’s specs here are reasonable (especially when you control for price, as you’ll see), my test drive was only a few hours and I didn’t get to charge at all, so I’m relying on Honda data rather than firsthand experience.

With that caveat out of the way, all Prologue models use the same 85-kilowatt-hour battery pack, providing a maximum range of 296 miles for the single-motor cars, and 273 miles for the top-trim, dual-motor Elite I was driving. With DC fast charging one can top up the battery at a maximum rate of 150 kilowatts, which Honda says will take you from 20% to 80% state of charge in about 35 minutes. That charging rate is lower than you’ll find with competitors like the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5, though I’m of the opinion that if charging at home is an option for you, speed to charge is a very overrated EV stat.

Range, on the other hand, is a hot topic, especially where new EV buyers are concerned. The reality is that the electric SUVs that compete with the Prologue are all pretty tightly stacked here. I did a quick comp of the longest-range entries from some of the key vehicles in this segment, with the smaller Tesla Model Y thrown in for context since it’s a huge seller.

I’m not sure if “dollar per range mile” is a stat that will catch on, but it’s helpful to me in a landscape where all cars, and especially EVs, feel crazy expensive. You can see that the Honda’s MSRP for the top-range version of the Prologue makes it more expensive than most of the set, but not outrageously so. It’s also fair to remember that Honda pricing for ICE cars tends to follow this model as well, slightly above the price leaders in most segments, but the cars still sell very well because of long-term residual value, very strong brand loyalty, and generally excellent engineering.

In the end, Honda has seemingly followed the ancient Greek aphorism, creating a product that brand loyalists should love and one that will give all EV SUV shoppers something to seriously consider. Honda canceled further plans to partner with GM on another EV, so the Prologue will mark both the start and the end of that particular arrangement.

But having an electric SUV in your lineup has become table stakes for automakers in the U.S. today, and Honda’s entry is a fine starting point. And having one that’s quiet, roomy, and good to drive makes it a fine Honda, too.

2024 Honda Prologue

1 of 11:

Honda

2 of 11:

Honda

3 of 11:

Honda

4 of 11:

Honda

5 of 11:

Honda

6 of 11:

Honda

7 of 11:

Honda

8 of 11:

Honda

9 of 11:

Honda

10 of 11:

Honda

11 of 11:

Honda