The Honda Prelude name will return to Australian showrooms for the first time in 25 years with its planned arrival in mid-2026, but it won’t sit alongside any direct rivals nor set sales charts on fire, according to the brand.
The Prelude was previously a mainstay in a highly competitive sports car market which has shrunk to a handful of models, including the Subaru BRZ and Toyota GR86, Ford Mustang, Nissan Z and Toyota Supra.
According to Honda, none of these are direct rivals to the 2026 Prelude, which will be the first to offer a hybrid powertrain.
“By the nature of it, it’s going to be a little bit in the market. There isn’t going to be anything you can neatly say, it’s a direct competitor of that – it’s just seen in a lot of different spaces,” said Honda Australia managing director, Rob Thorp.
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The sentiment is backed up by Honda Australia CEO Jay Joseph, who told CarExpert: “Prelude is a really fun car, but it’s not a high-volume car.
“It’s a bit of a Swiss Army Knife – it really doesn’t fit neatly into a segment and I think that’s the opportunity that we get to leverage.”
In the Prelude’s final year in Australia, 2001, total sales across the ‘Sports’ segment were 8820 across all makes, making up 1.14 per cent of all the 772,681 new vehicles sold that year.
In 2024, the same Sports segment saw 10,633 sales, making up an even smaller 0.87 per cent share of all new cars sold (not including brands like Mahindra, Tesla and Polestar brands, which don’t report to the official VFACTS figures, and would reduce this number further).
While the price of the Prelude in Australia is yet to be announced, it will enter a dramatically different battleground when it returns in mid-2026 – but does the sports car market have room for another competitor in Prelude?
“Yes, we think it does,” Honda Australia managing director Ron Thorp told CarExpert.
“We’ve actually been planning this for a little while, and … the nature of the model is it doesn’t fit a market segment easily.
“It will, from a VFACTS perspective and pricing, but the customer who we think will be interested, it’s going to be quite a wide, broad base.”
“If you look at [Civic] Type R, we know who wants to buy Type R,” Mr Thorp said.
“Looking at the Prelude, it could be a sports cars person, but you could sort of see, to be honest, older males who used to own them back in the 90s buying them again – I think it’s going to reattract a lot of consumers back to the Honda brand.
“You can see it opening up to a female audience as well because of the way it looks and drives and handles.
“We sort of think that this is where the customer segment group might be,” Mr Thorp said, with the Prelude potentially able to “attract a lot of different people from a lot of different areas”.
“It’s also going to provide an opportunity to actually conquest and speak to new customers at the same time, and the combination of the two will allow us to generate great [brand] awareness and start to put Honda on a consideration list.”
More: Everything Honda
