Two Years And Out!

Honda has just put the ol’ kibosh on the Prologue – which was supposed to be the initial device in a series of new devices (these were to be called Zeros, appropriately enough). This was sound action, in the same way it is sound action to put a tourniquet above a gushing wound.

“Honda will conclude sales of Prologue later this year following completion of the 2026 model year. Prologue customers will continue to receive full support through our dealer network, including service, parts, and warranty coverage.”

The time has come for us to say Sayonara . . .

There are, of course, some who want the bloodletting to continue. Who wail and gnash their teeth over Honda’s sane decision to stop trying to sell what’s not selling. The Prologue has been the worst selling new Honda in decades. Second year (2026) sales are already down by 48.5 percent vs. last year.

It isn’t even really a Honda.

The Prologue is a reskinned, re-badged Chevy Blazer EV that Honda bought from GM to re-sell as its own device. Badge-engineering is a way to sell more than you’ve got in-house, or want to invest in making in-house, yourself. It’s a pretty common practice though why is another matter since it usually just waters-down the stock of the brand doing the re-selling. Whole lines – Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Mercury – were done in this way.

However, Honda was doing the smart thing by re-selling Chevy’s EV. It allowed Honda to minimize its losses. Buying Chevy EVs did not incur as much cost-loss as R&D’ing and tooling up its own EV. It was a relatively cost-free way to test the waters; i.e., to see whether there was enough interest in a Honda EV to justify making one. When it became obvious there was not, all Honda had to do was pull the plug – as it has done – and that’s it. No stacked up glut of unwanted inventory. No having to write off the huge “investment” in R&D’ing and tooling that now has no use except as scrap.

The Zeros – plural, there was going to be a whole line of them – have been late-term aborted, courtesy of the failure of the Prologue – saving Honda even more money and embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Chevy is stuck with the Blazer EV – which it continues to try selling because it wasn’t cheap R&D’ing this thing. This – plus Inspector Javert-like mania to push on with EVs, never mind whether there’s any way to make money doing it – drive GM to continue trying to sell the Blazer EV, which is doing even worse than the Prologue. Just 1,077 of these devices were sold during the first quarter of 2026, amounting to an 82.6 percent decline from the 6,187 sold in the first quarter of 2025. During the entirety of that year (2025) Chevy dealers only managed to offload 22,637 of the things. To put that in some perspective, Chevy sold more than twice as many non-electric Blazers that same year (46,531) but nonetheless decided to stop selling that one but continue trying to sell the electric one. It is perhaps the best example extant of the Marxist labor theory of value, which posits that the more effort you put into a thing, the more value there is doing the thing.

Defenders of the faith – such as The New York Times – bemoan the lack of faith evinced by Honda and also other brands, such as Dodge, that have pulled the plug. These apologists insist the EV just didn’t get the support it deserved; that – as Brando’s palooka put it in On The Waterfront – they coulda been contenders, had it not been for mean ol’ Orange Man cutting off the subsidies and (the horror) vitiating the so-called “Endangerment Finding” that said carbon dioxide “emissions” constitute a clear and present danger to people’s health. These were two of the three legs on which the EV sat and – having kicked them out from under – the EV and the apologists find themselves sprawled on the floor, smarting.

Here it bears remembering – as in every slasher horror movie – that it’s really important to make sure the creature is really dead before breathing a sigh of relief, much less turning your back. By no means have the creatures pushing EVs given up. They have merely gone off somewhere to salve their wounds and recover – before making their next attempt. . . .

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