It’s fair to say Honda’s been behind the ball when it comes to electric vehicles. Chevrolet launched the Bolt EV in 2016, Ford introduced the Mustang Mach-E in 2020 and Tesla’s been doing its thing for far longer than that. Aside from compliance-car experiments like the Honda Fit EV, any Americans who wanted a battery-powered Honda had to wait until last year when the Prologue burst onto the scene.
And as it turns out, there were a lot of Americans waiting for just that. Honda moved over 33,000 Prologues last year, landing it the No.7 spot among the best-selling electric models and No.4 among non-Teslas. This came as a shock to most of us who watch this industry closely. After all, the Prologue is really a General Motors EV underneath—hardly a serious electric effort from Honda. And it didn’t even really go on sale until the middle of 2024.
Honda is now taking some lessons from this situation, one of its executives told InsideEVs in a media briefing this week. Prologue buyers report “trust in the Honda brand” as the top reason for their purchases, American Honda vice president of automobile sales Lance Woelfer said.
It also helps that Honda buyers already associate the brand with greener cars, Woelfer said. Although the Toyota Prius has effectively become the iPhone of hybrids, it was actually Honda that launched America’s first hybrid car in 1999, the Insight.
“We’ve had a hybrid strategy for quite some time to develop that consumer base that would have the likelihood to move in that direction,” he said, meaning towards all-electric cars. “We wanted to make sure that we had an option for them. We don’t want them going outside the brand.”
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So, the Prologue’s gangbusters success shouldn’t have been a shock at all. It further proves something we already knew: Americans are hungry for electric cars from the Japanese brands they trust and believe to be reliable—the exact brands that people look to for great fuel economy and yet have been slowest to electrify.
Woelfer said he isn’t surprised at how quickly the Prologue took off last year, especially since Honda dealers had been asking for an EV to sell. (Although America’s car dealers have been some of the loudest voices pushing against rapid uptake of EVs, apparently a decent chunk support this transition.)
Photo by: Jeff Perez / Motor1
“Something else that gave us confidence is the dealers were letting us know they were hearing from consumers, ‘We need an EV vehicle,’” he said. “It really kind of met the needs of those consumers and the requests we were getting from dealers to have an EV product.”
The Prologue is also training Honda’s dealers to sell and service its future EVs, Woelfer said in an email. They’re getting practice selling to first-time EV buyers and explaining things they’ve never had to before, like home charging options, he said. With any luck, by the time Honda’s futuristic 0-Series EVs hit the market—cars that are much more advanced than the Prologue, mind you—it won’t be dealers’ first rodeo.
Really, all of this shows the power of branding in the EV transition. The shift to EVs has given aggressive early movers like Tesla and Hyundai-Kia an opening to steal customers from rival brands to a degree they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Many automakers say their EVs are winning more “conquests,” industry-speak for customers who come in from other brands. And that makes sense. Because electric options are still limited, people intent on ditching gas may be more open to considering new makes.
Yet many car buyers still have a deep loyalty to, and strong associations with, certain brands. They don’t want an EV from just anybody. They want a Honda. Or a Toyota. Taking the plunge into an EV is a big lifestyle change, and it stands to reason that many buyers will want to go with what they know.
Photo by: Honda
Studies bear this out. A Yahoo Finance-Ipsos poll from 2023 asked Americans which car brands they’d be most likely to buy an EV or a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) from. Honda came in third place, despite not having any PHEVs or EVs on the U.S. market at that time. Toyota claimed first, even though it only had one EV with rather lackluster specs, the bZ4X. Tesla, by far the top seller of EVs in this country, wound up in second.
EV sales growth slowed in the U.S. in 2024. And a big part of that may be that EV-curious buyers just don’t see enough options on the market that speak to them. The next wave of EV adoption rests on regular car buyers with practical concerns—not early adopters. In other words, Americans who probably lean more toward Toyota or Honda than Tesla.
Fortunately for them, both automakers are getting their acts together. Toyota, which has stubbornly stuck to hybrids and not put much firepower behind EVs, says it’s learned from the complaints people had about the bZ4X. A three-row Toyota EV is coming in 2026.
Photo by: InsideEVs
The Honda 0-Series SUV and Saloon.
Honda’s next EV, the Acura RSX, goes into production late this year in Ohio, debuting the automaker’s next-generation hardware and software. It’ll be followed by Honda’s 0-Series sedan and SUV, and the Sony Honda Afeela 1.
In the coming year, Woelfer expects the Prologue to keep chugging along and be a leader in the segment, although he says there are “a few things going on now that are a little outside of our control that may have some impact.” Honda, like other automakers, says it’s keeping a close eye on whether the incoming Trump administration will eliminate the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, a move that could depress EV demand.
“Affordability is something that is key, and that impact is something that we’ll have to address as it comes forward,” he said.
Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com
