News that the upcoming Honda Prelude will have fake gearshifts has caused some consternation among enthusiasts in the various bits of the internet where we’re currently scattered. Quite a lot of sceptics, not much wild enthusiasm.
In their earlier incarnations, Preludes were among the best affordable driver’s coupés on the market, with high-revving VTEC engines mated to good manual gearboxes.
There are plenty of people – and I will admit that I’m one of them – who mourn the demise of cars like that.
Some say, then, that Honda should just fit the new Prelude with a proper manual ’box, like you can still get in an Integra in some markets, and to heck with the inefficiency, because the Prelude is a sports coupé.
Others say Honda should do away with even the idea of a gearshift, because it’s obviously not real and we should just grow up and get over ourselves, because this transmission is trying to dupe us.
As Cypher said in the 1999 film The Matrix (nothing but the latest cultural references for you here, reader): “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, The Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.”
Disliking fake technology is, I can see, an argument with merit too.
And it is, ultimately, fake tech. What this Prelude’s new S+ Shift system will do is take hybrid technology but make it less efficient while still not being real.
As referenced on page 11, it has a clever way of working, developed as it is from the transmission of the latest Civic. This is sometimes referred to erroneously as a CVT (continuously variable transmission), when it’s nothing of the sort.
Rather unhelpfully, e-CVT is even how Honda initially referred to it. It’s kind of the opposite, in that it’s not a variable transmission at all.
A petrol engine acts the vast majority of the time solely as a generator, making electricity for an electric traction motor that does all of the driving. In the Civic, the engine does very occasionally drive the wheels itself too, but only through one, single fixed ratio at motorway-type speeds.
Most of the time it’s just coupled to a system that makes electricity, with the motor doing the driving.
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