2026 Honda Accord Hybrid
Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2026 2:33 pm
I present to you the modern equivalent of the Grand Marquis. In the old days when reaching the age at which life had finally crushed anything remotely resembling passion, one could head to the local Lincoln Mercury dealer to purchase a mobile sensory-deprivation chamber. Mercury is long gone, but Honda has stepped up to fill that void with the blandest vehicle on the market today, the 11th generation Honda Accord.
Before explaining my rationale for trading my sporty VW, let me first point out that few have demonstrated more devotion to the manual transmission. I took my driver's license test 45 years ago with a manual. In all my years of driving, I have always had at least one manual transmission at my disposal, except for a period of about one year as we prepared to move to Alaska (and we bought the Saab very soon after our arrival in Anchorage). For about 21 of those years, I owned at least two manual transmission vehicles, including about 4 years in which I owned three. I have been a true manual transmission afficionado, but I think I might be done. It could be that my mix of driving today has made gear selection less interesting. It could be that my previous passion for pursuing perfect shifts has turned more into a sourness at my continued imperfections. It is likely, though, that I am simply captivated by newer concepts in drivetrains that inherently deliver smoothness.
The ultimate in smooth operation is electric. Electric motors have such wide operating ranges that we no longer need transmissions. Getting started from a dead stop is accomplished with a linear build of torque (proportional to amperage) that is unlike the nonlinearity (slip, slip, grab) of a torque converter or clutch. Interestingly, most people hate smoothness. The continuously variable transmission has been derided by the general public to the point that all current CVTs fake distinct shifting. We have literally programmed jerkiness into an inherently smooth device. Similarly, we now even have electric cars with jerky fake shifts (and fake engine sounds, but that's a different rant). I don't understand these things, but I do accept that I am the weird one obsessed with smoothness.
I look forward to the day when I buy my first electric car, but I am not ready to change my paradigms today. I am not ready to rewire my garage today. I do not live in a region that is really set up for electric; I probably can't even get to the ski area and back on a single charge. And no one is really making what I would want today. The closest I could find was the Lucid Air, but 620hp seems really excessive for my needs, as does the price, although since the electric car market has tanked, the price on lightly used ones is tempting.
As I looked for the smooth operating non-electric options, I learned a lot about hybrid designs. Electric car people like to say that hybrids are the worst of both worlds. In many cases, they have a point. Hyundai and Mercedes hybrids, for example, simply sandwich an electric motor between the engine and transmission. Their vehicles include all the components of an electric car and all the components of an ICE car. Honda has a unique approach (for now, Nissan is coming with a similar system). Honda's hybrids are essentially just electric cars with on-board generators. There is no transmission, although Honda cleverly uses a clutch mechanism to engage the ICE directly when traveling at steady-state freeway speeds (call it a one-speed, or call it more accurately, direct drive). This means that the ICE doesn't have to handle a wide range of loads at a wide range of RPMs, simplifying the design considerably (and likely its reliability). The engine can be designed solely for efficiency, achieving roughly 40% thermal efficiency, one of the best in mass production today. The engine doesn't even have an accessory belt. The air conditioner compressor is electrically driven. The water pump is electric. And of course the steering assist in all cars today is electric. The more I studied it, the more I was intrigued by Honda's simple elegant hybrid design.
Toyota is probably the world leader in hybrids. The primary design that they use on lighter weight vehicles is clever, but perhaps too clever. It uses a planetary gear setup to engage the ICE with a continuously variable ratio that can be blended with an electric motor. The controls of that system are necessarily a lot more complicated with a lot of variation and transition. For people who have no idea what is going on under the hood, those who simply get in and drive, Toyota's 25 years of refining those controls cover up that complexity. For someone like me, those variations and transitions are going to be noticeable and annoying. Of course, Toyota styling, particularly the interiors, is pretty weird, which helped make it easy to discount them.
As I fell in love with the Honda hybrid design, I also realized that having two vehicles with the same basic approaches to technology would be a huge advantage. Modern cars are tech-heavy. There are so many buttons and controls, so many menus and screens, that most of us don't even remember all the features of our vehicles, nor how to access them. When you have two tech-heavy cars like my VW and my Passport, switching between them becomes confusing. Simple things like differing start/stop button locations leads to amusing poking at the empty space on the dash in the VW. A more fundamental operating difference is that lane keeping assist in the VW is only available with cruise control while in the Honda, it is a completely separate function. If I tap the brake in the VW, I lose both lane keeping and cruise control while in the Honda, only cruise control drops out. That actually could be a dangerous bit of confusion in owning two different vehicles. The Accord and the Passport don't just share basic control architecture. Many of the buttons and dials are the exact same parts put in the exact same location, or at least as exact as can be in two different vehicles. The screens and the menus are also exactly the same, at least within the confines of the differing features and capabilities. If I needed a tie-breaker, Honda would win out just because our other tech-heavy vehicle is a Honda.
My selection process was bizarre. I landed on the drivetrain before landing on the vehicle. Honda offers essentially the same drivetrain in several different vehicles. Since I refuse to buy a crossover as my daily, I narrowed it down to three choices, Prelude, Civic, and Accord. The Prelude was a shocker for me when it was announced. I thought Honda had once again read my mind. I don't need a usable back seat, I prefer a smaller car, and I love that hybrid drivetrain. But as the details rolled out, the Prelude soured a bit for me. That slippery shape should get better gas mileage than the Civic, not worse. The blame is simply tire and wheel selection. We are finally seeing clearly how big wheels and wide tires destroy fuel economy. While my Accord also comes with stupid 235 width tires on 19" wheels (and a similar EPA rating of 44 combined), I know that lower trims of the Accord are fitted with 225/17s with a meaningful increase in fuel economy rating (47 combined). I don't know that I will ever replace the 19s, but it is nice to know that I could. The Prelude has big Brembo 4-piston brakes, precluding 17s, although TireRack indicates that we can put 18s on it. Those brakes are an expensive and ridiculous feature on a hybrid where the main advantage is regenerative braking. The Prelude also rides firmly, even with the suspension set to comfort mode, and clearly much firmer than the squishy Accord. The real nail in the Prelude's coffin, though, was the features. Honda is very insistent that the Prelude is a GT car, not a sports car, but where is the luxury? It doesn't have rain-sensing wipers, ventilated seats, nor a heated steering wheel. The real killer for us was the lack of seat position memory, a desirable convenience for a guy who can't even get into the driver's seat if it is set for my wife's stubby legs. The Civic is a preferable size for me than the Accord, but like the Prelude, it is missing desirable features.
It turns out that today, I am more of a luxury car buyer than a sports/muscle car buyer. If you look at my history, perhaps I always was. And size really isn't a big deal in a region where all parking spaces are built to handle huge pickup trucks. The Accord is far from a luxury car, but no one is yet making an interesting smooth-operating luxury car. I couldn't find a car at any price that satisfied my desires for luxury, efficiency, and smoothness. The Accord, though, comes pretty close without being unnecessarily flashy in our small town.
So there you have it. I traded a sporty VW for a bland Accord. If you see me weaving down the freeway at widely varying speeds with my turn signal on, drive on by, honk the horn, and give me the one-finger wave; maybe I will wake up from my sensory-deprived stupor.
I was hoping to post this on April 1. Amusingly, we were test driving Hondas on March 31, exactly one year after we purchased the Passport. We didn't finalize a deal until the 2nd. Last year, I was asked if my Passport was an April Fools post so I really thought this would be the perfect one year follow-up to that discussion. While it was no surprise that the Rapid City dealer did not have what I wanted in stock, it was an amusing coincidence that the only Touring trim they had on order was in the color combination that I wanted (red with the light gray interior). The estimated build date on our car is mid-April, but Honda has been slipping so it will likely be built later in the month with delivery likely in late May.