- 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.
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.
Photo by: Jeff Perez / Motor1
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
My personal Chevy Blazer EV, which is pretty much the same car as the Prologue.
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
Credit : insideevs.com
