LOS ANGELES — Honda has chosen a forward-looking title for the battery-electric crossover that it’s creating with Common Motors for the 2024 mannequin yr: Prologue.

The Honda crossover will use GM’s Ultium platform and batteries, however Honda will develop the automobile’s physique model and inside. The Honda-GM enterprise additionally will develop a battery-electric Acura crossover within the 2024 calendar yr, the corporate mentioned.

The Prologue is predicted to go on sale in early 2024, the corporate mentioned.

“Our first quantity Honda BEV will start our transition to electrification and the title Honda Prologue alerts the position it can play in resulting in our zero-emission future,” Dave Gardner, govt vice chairman of American Honda Motor Co., mentioned in an announcement.

Honda already makes a small EV for the Japan and European markets, marketed merely because the “e.” However that automobile is taken into account a distinct segment product, whereas Honda expects the Prologue to be its first quantity EV.

Gardner mentioned throughout a media presentation that Honda will use its personal e:Structure platform within the second half of the last decade to create a sequence of latest EVs. He declined to say how that may have an effect on the the corporate’s EV collaboration with GM.

Gardner additionally declined to say the place the Prologue and the approaching Acura EV will probably be manufactured, or provide automobile specs. A slide included as a part of the media presentation instructed the Honda EV can be smaller than the Acura EV.
 

Honda expects annual Prologue gross sales to rapidly eclipse deliveries of its gas-powered Passport crossover, however to stay beneath the Pilot crossover in quantity. Honda offered 39,567 Passports final yr within the U.S. and 123,813 Pilots. Gardner didn’t provide a selected gross sales quantity or timeline, however mentioned the Prologue ought to ramp rapidly.

Automotive Information reported in January, citing trade sources, that the Honda-branded EV will begin manufacturing in 2023 at GM’s crossover plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, the place GM at present builds the gas-powered Chevrolet Equinox and Blazer. In April, with out mentioning Honda, GM confirmed it can make investments $1 billion in that plant to arrange for EV manufacturing.

Trade sources even have advised Automotive Information that the Acura-branded EV will probably be constructed beginning in 2024 alongside the upcoming Cadillac Lyriq EV at GM’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn.

The Lyriq is a midsize automobile, which suggests the Acura will probably be as effectively. The Prologue is prone to be a compact crossover, since that’s the most well-liked mainstream U.S. phase outdoors of pickups.

Honda said in April that it expects one hundred pc of its gross sales in North America to be zero-emission autos by 2040, together with each battery-electric fashions and hydrogen fuel-cell autos.