- The Honda Prologue is built by General Motors, and essentially the same vehicle as the Chevy Blazer EV.
- Despite this, Honda's only EV is still selling better than the Blazer EV.
- It's proof that many Honda customers are ready for EVs, and Honda will hopefully have a home-grown EV for them soon enough.
I didn't expect Honda's 2024 electric veicle strategy to work. Mostly because I wasn't convinced "selling a General Motors EV with a Honda badge" qualified as a "strategy." The brand's only EV, the Honda Prologue, is essentially a Chevy Blazer EV reskinned, and with Apple CarPlay included. But because GM is far more generous with incentive spending, the Honda tends to be far more expensive to lease. I thought that was all a recipe for a sales catastrophe, but here I am eating humble pie. The Honda Prologue is crushing it.
Honda notched 4,130 Prologue sales in October, after 3,785 sales in September and 5,401 in August. General Motors does not report sales on a monthly basis, but recorded 7,998 Blazer EV sales in the third quarter of 2024. The automotive sales calendar is highly seasonal, so we can't really annualize these rates simply.
But Honda is keeping a higher sales pace with the Prologue than GM is with the Blazer EV. Notably, however, the Prologue was introduced later and had a smoother rolloout than the Blazer EV. And the Blazer EV now has competition within the Chevy showroom: The new Chevy Equinox EV, which is only a bit smaller than the Blazer EV, is now on sale. It can also be had for under $35,000 with tax credits.
Factor in Equinox sales—9,772 deliveries last quarter—and the General still has Honda licked. The company's Cadillac Lyriq is also posting bigger numbers than Acura's ZDX, which is again quite similar underneath. GM moved 7,224 Lyriqs last quarter, a period of two and a half months. Acura delivered 1,212 ZDXs in October, 979 in September and 1,003 in August. Plus GM sells three electric trucks and has more EVs arriving shortly.
But we already knew GM's plan was working out. What's surprising is how well Honda has been able to recover from its late start on EVs. Its decision to rebadge a GM product has drawn plenty of criticism, but buyers are responding. Despite higher lease prices than the near-identical GM EV SUVs, the Prologue offers the same competitive EV specs from a brand that consumers seem to trust more. Honda has a 20-year history of taking hybrids seriously, and consumers broadly expect Honda and Toyota to lead the charge on EVs, too.
I wouldn't say either brand has risen to that expectation yet. But Honda's momentum is growing, and its first home-grown, long-range EV is set to arrive next year. The Prologue is already a better product than the slow-charging Toyota bZ4X, for which Toyota didn't even bother to develop in-car route-planning software or charging data screens. Honda's option is more fleshed out, with a solid range figure and good software. Plus, while Chevy's EVs don't offer Apple CarPlay, the Prologue does. That's a big win for normal consumers, who are used to the software.
Plus, Honda has a pipeline of buyers who care about efficiency and running costs, and trust the brand to deliver on those metrics. That's why hybrids, too, are becoming a bigger slice of the sales pie. While Accord Hybrid and CR-V Hybrid sales are down so far this year, the new Civic Hybrid is an electrified version of one of the most popular cars for young buyers. To those young buyers who are ready to trade in their Civics, Honda now has a real EV option, and it's converting a lot of them. More importantly for the brand, now that it has an electric option it's no longer losing every customer who wants a pure-EV experience. That alone makes the Prologue worth it for Honda.
So it's a success. But not a big enough one to carry the brand. Owning the future will require the institutional capability to build competitive, software-defined EVs in-house. Honda hasn't yet proven it can do that. It plans to in 2025. As the Prologue shows, if the company can pull off even a decent effort, it won't have too hard of a time finding buyers.
Contact the author: mack.hogan@insideevs.com
