Honda Prelude returning to Australia in 2026

HONDA has confirmed it will bring the rebooted Prelude sports coupe to Australia in mid-2026, 24 years after the nameplate was last offered in this country and nearly 30 years after the previous generation Prelude made its debut.

Speaking to media at a business update in Melbourne, Honda Australia’s director of its automotive division, Robert Thorp, was bullish about the Prelude’s potential as a brand-builder for the Red H.

“The Prelude… to be honest, we’ve been talking about this car for a while. I want to say so many things, but I think the really important thing is that it’s such an iconic name, it has such rich brand heritage and history within it as a model, and we’ll bring it back to Australia next year. We’re really, really excited for that.”

For the sixth-gen Honda Prelude, the original formula of basing a swishy two-door coupe on the underpinnings of a four-door stablemate remains, although unlike the first five generations the foundation for the new Prelude won’t be the Accord, but rather the Civic

It will also be a hybrid from the get-go, leveraging the existing 2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol-electric powertrain from the e:HEV variants of the Civic, CR-V  and Accord, although Honda has yet to confirm whether the Prelude will take the 135kW tune of the Civic and CR-V, or if it will enjoy the boosted-up 152kW of the Accord-spec version of that powertrain – or  take a tune that’s totally unique to the Prelude.

Torque will likely land at 335Nm, given the Civic, CR-V and Accord hybrids all currently top out at that number.

Underneath, the Prelude looks rather similar to a  Civic Type-R. Honda has confirmed that its new two-door will utilise the same dual-axis front suspension design as the Type R, which is a hybrid MacPherson strut design that decouples the steering axis from the damper body, improving front suspension geometry and greatly reducing torque-steer.

The Prelude will also feature the same 1.6-metre track width and adaptive dampers as the Type R, as well as the high-performance Civic’s four-piston Brembo front brakes, with unique tuning to adapt all of that borrowed hardware to the Prelude and impart it with its own distinct personality.

But while there’s plenty of component sharing under the skin, there’s no recycling of body panels. The sixth-generation Prelude wears bodywork that sets it well apart from the rest of Honda’s modern showroom, with a sleek front bumper with a tiny upper grille and pinched headlamps looking a world apart from the rectangular lamps and yawning mouths of every other Honda, from the Accord to the ZR-V.

From the profile view, the new Prelude’s cab-forward teardrop silhouette is a departure from the long bonnets and notchback coupe stylings of its predecessors, though it certainly looks sleek.

Flush-fit door handles reinforce the notion of low drag, while the rear end is spanned by a LED light bar that emphasises the car’s width. Interestingly, though it’s still powered (indirectly) by a combustion engine, Honda’s designers have eliminated the tailpipe from the rear bumper, with it instead exhausting down toward the ground rather than poking through a bumper cut out.

Inside, the driver’s seat features unique cushioning, offering a tighter grip than the more comfort-oriented passenger seat. A rear seat is present, but it remains to be seen how useful it is thanks to that tapered roofline. At least the rear seatbacks can fold down to help increase boot capacity.

With its local launch still being around a year away, neither Thorp or Honda Australia’s recently-arrived CEO Jay Joseph would be drawn on details like pricing or specification, but there’s the potential for the Prelude to play a couple of important roles both within Honda’s showrooms and within the broader market.

For one, the auto-only Prelude will finally give Honda’s salespeople something to recommend to punters who are attracted to the Civic Type R, but turned off by its manual-only offering and/or its overtly sporty styling.

It remains to be seen whether Honda prices the Prelude at or near the Type R’s $74,100 drive-away sticker, but if we consider that its core mechanical offering is somewhere between that of the $55,900 Civic e:HEV LX and the Civic Type R, then there’s plenty of airspace between those two models where a Prelude could easily fit.

Secondly, the Prelude will be the only hybrid in the sub-$90K sports car category. Electrified options exist in the $90-plus sports segment in the form of the MG Cyberster and Corvette E-Ray, but while hybrids have proliferated across nearly every other passenger and SUV segment in recent years, the world of affordable sports cars has yet to make the transition.

Honda may be in an advantageous position to scoop up any latent demand for a fuel-sipping coupe when its Prelude gets here, provided the price is right.