The upcoming Honda Prelude is a very interesting car. It’s not a hardcore sports compact—Honda already has one of those—nor is it a replacement for the Civic Si as Honda’s basic, fun daily. The new Prelude is, on paper at least, actually very on-brand for what that model used to be: a stylish “personal coupe” that also had some sporting pretense, but also offered a peek at new technologies and progressive design. One example of the latter is a small detail about the way the front end of Honda’s new two-door was sculpted precisely to make it easier to park.
This detail comes from a Japanese-language “teaser” site that Honda sent live today. It includes a lot of information and media about the new Prelude, including interviews with its designers. Scanning through one of those interviews, with the help of Google Translate, one clever feature of the Prelude’s design caught my eye. I’ll let Yoshihisa Yanagimoto, one of the coupe’s designers, explain how it works, and then try to unpack what I believe he’s getting at.
“To make it easier to visually understand the position of the tires, we designed two lines of the hood when viewed from the driver’s seat,” Yanagimoto said. “The belt line from the fender to the door is connected without interruption, and the interior lining is also designed to flow smoothly horizontally. This makes it easier to grasp the direction of travel and makes it very easy to park. Many professionals, including the exterior and ergonomics teams, collaborated to achieve such a design.”
If we look at a close-up, front three-quarter view of the Prelude, we can see two creases on the hood extending out from the A-pillar. Not sitting in the car, it’s hard to say how these inform an impression of the front end because it’s obviously all about the driver’s perspective. That vantage point also depends on whether we’re talking about a left- or right-hand-drive vehicle; for one of our Preludes, we’d be looking to the other corner. I actually just happened to get into a Prelude for the first time at Goodwood a few weeks ago, and had I known about this, I would’ve checked for myself.
That example looked great in metallic gray. In any case, this is the kind of thoughtful, low-tech problem-solving through design that we love to see, which is so rare in this modern age of “fixing” everything with silicon, sensors, and screens. Such technology only drives up the cost of vehicles and makes the features they enable more expensive to restore when something goes haywire.
Personally I’m really excited for the new Prelude—seemingly more so than any of my colleagues, judging from our Slack conversations. Yes, it’s basically a two-door Civic hybrid with Type R chassis components and a way prettier design, but, well, does any of that sound bad? At all? Save for the powertrain part, that’s kind of what the Integra used to be during its prime, before the bloated, ugly new one. Yeah, I still haven’t come around on the current Integra, but that doesn’t really bother me anymore, because this exists.
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