Honda CR-Z meets Prelude: Was hybrid coupe misunderstood?

The Prelude has returned to fill a small, front-driven hybrid coupé-shaped gap in Honda's line-up - some 16 years after the launch of its spiritual forebear, the CR-Z.

The older car, while similar in conception, arrived in an entirely different era for the petrol-electric performance car.

At the time, the motoring world had yet to meet any of the much-celebrated 'holy trinity' of hybrid hypercars (Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, Porsche 918). Henrik Fisker was on the brink of launching his rare-groove Karma (remember that?). And the only really widely seen performance hybrid you could buy was the Lexus GS 450h sports saloon.

It was early days for Honda to be suggesting that petrol-electric fun could be offered fairly cheaply, when it had yet to be offered much at all - at any price. Of course, in the finest traditions of the company, that didn't discourage anyone.

The CR-Z was, quite plainly, a kind of 'son of Insight': little, affordable, modestly powerful and surprisingly simple. It was about as technically similar to a Prelude as a Prelude is similar to a carbonfibre-tubbed BMW i8 (unveiled three years after the CR-Z, since you asked).

Honda UK lent us its CR-Z GT heritage car so we could appreciate this first hand. After the Prelude, it felt relatively pedestrian - though not slow in an outright sense.

The Prelude's powertrain is a series-hybrid-style, range-extender system, with an electric motor that does most of the grunt work, backed up by a 2.0-litre Atkinson-cycle petrol engine that mostly runs as a generator but can connect to the wheels via planetary gearing when switching to higher-constant-load, parallel-hybrid running.

Honda doesn't actually claim a total system, engine-clutched-on, parallel-series torque figure, but I would estimate that it must be well beyond 250lb ft, because the Prelude certainly feels brisk. Not quite top-level hot hatchback fast, but quick enough to make a climbing, twisting, uneven mountain road in the Rhondda nicely interesting to set about.

The CR-Z is a little in want of some properly purposeful suspension tuning, perhaps, but not without a fun factor all of its own. It has three pedals and a six-speed manual gearbox for a start. Its electric motor produces only 14bhp and 58lb ft of torque - more, slightly, in later versions, yet never anything like the Prelude's electric reserves.

But you can certainly feel the hybrid torque hitting the driven axle at lower engine speeds, when the car pulls higher gears much more assertively than you expect of something with an atmospheric 1.5-litre petrol engine, and yet it still goes on to rev fairly freely.