The Honda Prelude title will return to Australian showrooms for the primary time in 25 years with its deliberate arrival in mid-2026, but it surely received’t sit alongside any direct rivals nor set gross sales charts on fireplace, based on the model.
The Prelude was beforehand a mainstay in a extremely aggressive sports activities automotive market which has shrunk to a handful of fashions, together with the Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86, Ford Mustang, Nissan Z and Toyota Supra.
In accordance with Honda, none of those are direct rivals to the 2026 Prelude, which would be the first to supply a hybrid powertrain.
“By the character of it, it’s going to be a bit bit available in the market. There isn’t going to be something you’ll be able to neatly say, it’s a direct competitor of that – it’s simply seen in quite a lot of totally different areas,” mentioned Honda Australia managing director, Rob Thorp.
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The sentiment is backed up by Honda Australia CEO Jay Joseph, who informed CarExpert: “Prelude is a extremely enjoyable automotive, but it surely’s not a high-volume automotive.
“It’s a little bit of a Swiss Military Knife – it actually doesn’t match neatly right into a phase and I feel that’s the chance that we get to leverage.”
Within the Prelude’s ultimate 12 months in Australia, 2001, complete gross sales throughout the ‘Sports activities’ phase had been 8820 throughout all makes, making up 1.14 per cent of all of the 772,681 new automobiles bought that 12 months.
In 2024, the identical Sports activities phase noticed 10,633 gross sales, making up an excellent smaller 0.87 per cent share of all new automobiles bought (not together with manufacturers like Mahindra, Tesla and Polestar manufacturers, which don’t report back to the official VFACTS figures, and would cut back this quantity additional).
Whereas the worth of the Prelude in Australia is but to be introduced, it can enter a dramatically totally different battleground when it returns in mid-2026 – however does the sports activities automotive market have room for one more competitor in Prelude?
“Sure, we expect it does,” Honda Australia managing director Ron Thorp informed CarExpert.
“We’ve truly been planning this for a short time, and … the character of the mannequin is it doesn’t match a market phase simply.
“It’ll, from a VFACTS perspective and pricing, however the buyer who we expect will probably be , it’s going to be fairly a large, broad base.”
“If you happen to have a look at [Civic] Sort R, we all know who desires to purchase Sort R,” Mr Thorp mentioned.
“Trying on the Prelude, it might be a sports activities automobiles individual, however you can kind of see, to be trustworthy, older males who used to personal them again within the 90s shopping for them once more – I feel it’s going to reattract quite a lot of shoppers again to the Honda model.
“You possibly can see it opening as much as a feminine viewers as effectively due to the way in which it seems to be and drives and handles.
“We kind of suppose that that is the place the client phase group may be,” Mr Thorp mentioned, with the Prelude probably in a position to “entice quite a lot of totally different folks from quite a lot of totally different areas”.
“It’s additionally going to supply a possibility to really conquest and converse to new prospects on the identical time, and the mixture of the 2 will permit us to generate nice [brand] consciousness and begin to put Honda on a consideration checklist.”
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