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Electric cars as popular as they were when Honda first brought us to the Prologue in 2022. Designed around General Motors’ new Ultium motor and battery platform, it was planned to be the first in a series of electric cars to take advantage of it. sharing with GM. But at the end of last year, this task was abandoned. Instead, Honda will focus on a local circle of electric car relatives, investing $11 billion in North American production alone. This gives the Prologue a pretty accurate name, but it’s also something of a dead end, as it’s built on an underlying architecture that you wouldn’t possibly notice with Honda’s wings.
The Prologue is a mid-length SUV, so it’s larger than a CR-V. It’s the same length as the Chevrolet Blazer and our revision’s dual-motor, all-wheel-drive powertrain generates the same 288 hp (214 kW) and 333 lb-ft (451 Nm), powered by the same 85 kWh capacity. Ultium battery.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: The Prologue comes from the same GM plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, as the Blazer EV. But Honda is guilty of the handling and handling and, as with the more upscale Acura ZDX, it also took care of the car’s UI/UX. And the result is an electric vehicle that doesn’t feel like a Blazer EV to drive or sit on for the most part.
Weighing in at 2,392 kg (5,273 lb), the Prologue is rarely a very light car, but it still manages to weigh less than the AWD Blazer EV or the (remarkably heavy) Acura ZDX. There is no option for inner tubes on the Prologue. Even on the Elite, traditional multi-link suspension springs and shocks did a greater job of filtering out the rigors of the road than the Blazer EVs I drove last December.
I’m not sure Honda even included a 0-60 figure in their tech specs for the Prologue, and while we said the car had a “Honda sporty driving character,” I didn’t find any of that evident during our week with the car. You need to make sure there’s a good gap in traffic before exiting a side street to make a left turn, given your acceleration rate. And as it accelerates at full throttle, the front wheels begin to rotate with torque thanks to tires that favor low rolling resistance over lateral grip.
On the other hand, I discovered the Prologue as a lovely car to drive slowly, even if it’s more imposing. The guide is sleek and responsive, and at its maximum hardness setting, the one-pedal riding mode is nicely calibrated for the 20 to 30 mph (32 to 48 km/h) speed zone that covers maximum riding. in the city those days.
The Prologue’s infotainment made it almost unlikely to have a smart idea of how effective diversity would be in the long run, restarting its demo on one or both trips. At the height of the summer recorded here in Washington D. C. , at least 20% of the energy consumption of both trips was spent on operating the air conditioning, and between that and the 21-inch wheels and all-wheel-drive powertrain on the Elite version, the most productive thing I saw posted was 3 miles/kWh (20. 7 kWh/100 kilometers).
The Elite has the shortest EPA diversity of any Prologue model at 273 miles (439 km). But everyone can temporarily qualify at the same speed, taking 35 minutes to go from 20 to 80 percent. While charging, the Prologue maintained a relatively low speed. Top speed for the full 35 minutes instead of reducing it quickly, as is the case with previous EVs.
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