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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GM keeping the BlazerEV and ditching the ICE variant is classic.
As with all Marxist/socialist programs that fail to produce the stated goals, it’s just that the Right People weren’t in charge and given enough time and money.
It’s never a FAILURE of the plan.
Epilogue would be great headline for your article.
I agree, Neitzel – hat tip for the suggestion!
Near the bottom of this post:
https://no01.substack.com/p/weekend-thoughts-de2
There is a chart of EV sales by percentage in 2025 (and compared to 2019 percentages). For all countries, the percentage has increased in those six years, some more dramatically than others. In most cases, the increase appears due to government fiat or regulation of ICE vehicles (see Norway, Nepal, and China especially). Apparently, if the government forces EVs down people’s throats, they’ll buy them.
I’ve noticed that the major Japanese car companies haven’t really gone all in on the EV thing. Which is wise—in fact, the Japanese “Big 5” (Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Mazda, and Nissan) typically let the Americans and Europeans “blaze the trail” and if something catches on, wait and see how it does, and then copy and improve on it, á la the Lexus LS 400.
I suspected that the Japanese car companies knew EVs weren’t really all they were cracked up to be and thus only half-heartedly embraced them.
That said, my plan was to consider an EV only
after the major Japanese car companies started offering them en masse.
Now, that hasn’t happened…and in fact, the opposite happened.
“Why Toyota is going all-in on EVs while other makers are cutting back”
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/cars/shopping/2026/03/24/toyota-ev-push-other-automakers-retreat/89290056007/
“We’ll have that battery problem solved any day now!” – EV advocates
This is why engineers are more important than scientists. Engineers see through the handwaving bullshit and ask “How are you going to build it?” and “You want it when?”
Indeed, RK –
It’s a multi-faceted problem. The engineers have figured out how to design a battery that can store enough electricity to power an EV for 300-400 miles. But they have not figured out how to get that electricity into a battery quickly. Even ten minutes – for a partial charge, mind – is paralytically slow relative to the 3-5 minutes at most it takes to fully fuel most vehicles. There is also the practical problem of generating all the electricity that would be necessary to power a fleet of EVs.
I have theorized a way for them to solve this problem (speed) – but that would never fly: Have all EV makes and models *standardize* the size and shape of batteries – and make them REPLACEABLE (i.e., like a propane tank on a grill), so when you need fresh batteries – you just swap them out.
Sure, it introduces a whole new set of problems (battery integrity, etc) – but it certainly solves the speed problem.
Naturally – the cars would look stupid if they made batteries easy to replace (they’d have to have easy access), but don’t you think if “the environment” was such a major life-threatening issue, that people wouldn’t care how their mode of transport looks, as long as it’s for “saaaaaaaaafety?”
Hu NJ,
Yup; the Baker Electrics of 100 years ago worked like that; in many ways they were superior to modern EVs as A to B transportation.
Some OEMs HAVE thought of this. A Chinese cell and battery company, CATL, makes a standard EV pack they call the Choco-SEB battery that EV manufacturer Nio adopted across all their cars.
https://www.theautopian.com/how-chinese-automaker-nio-lets-you-swap-your-evs-battery-in-2-5-minutes-instead-of-having-to-wait-at-a-charger/
Mind you it’s not like lugging around a 20 lbs propane tank in that you can do it in your driveway. They built infrastructure to handle a several hundred lbs pack, basically looks like a drive through car wash where an automated hoist works in a pit under the car. They’re all over China, nearing 4,000 swap stations that have done over 100 million swaps so far. The whole concept is up to its 5th generation.
It’s not done in the USA because, well, we’re not China and everything China does is stupid, right?
Well, it’s not a very good idea, is it. Apart from making battery swaps into a lottery (where you swap a battery with another one in unknown condition, or even worse, you don’t own the battery at all), it causes all sorts of additional problems, all without addressing the underlying problem, which is that charging is slow, even with the battery taken out of the car.
So the reason it’s not done in the USA is probably because there’s no point in repeating the mistakes of the Chinese.
I theorized this method too as the only way, barring faster charging tech that likely won’t happen.
The challenge then is how to build a ‘quick change’ garage. Yes, it could be done by robots, but once Osha, DEP, etc…. get in the way, I could easily see it creeping back up to 30 minutes or more, again, ‘for safety’……….
I bet it could be done pretty quickly without regulation, all while the robot hands you a cup of coffee.
Oh, yeah, and the cars don’t look particularly stupid. They look like any other modern dull blob cars.
https://www.nio.com/
Honda management seems to still have some memory on how to make money selling cars. Kuddos to them.
Toyota used to be this way but bent a knee at the altar of safety and climate change. They’re all in on the bet, telling customers it’s EV, hybrid or nothing.
Toyota overtook GM as the biggest car company in the world by selling good cars at a fair price. What the hell happened?
Now it appears people who STILL belieeeeeeeeeeve the narratives on cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change and EVs are claiming that to “Saaaaaaaaaave the planet” & “Stop cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change”, EVERYONE who drives an automobile MUST drive an EV despite the fact that the truth about EVs has become increasingly difficult for the government and overzealous EV pushers to hide, most people can’t even AFFORD an EV, and EVs are actually WORSE for the environment than gas vehicles.
It reminds me of the overzealous COVID vaxx pushers from a few years ago who claimed that for those brand new COVID vaxxes to work and “Stop the COVID pandemic”, EVERYONE had to take an untested jab that not only was experimental, they also had too many unknowns, particularly when it came to long term effects. But remember, the establishment wants people to think the problem is the unvaccinated and people who refuse to get an electric vehicle, not the garbage they’ve been trying to shove down the masses’ throats.