Great headline writing is a lost art, thanks to the internet. Newspapers, particularly tabloids, once crafted their headlines with telling or teaser summaries hoping it would entice people to reach into their pockets and fork out a few shekels to buy their publications to see what the stories were all about. Most publications these days write headlines to entice Google’s algorithms under the tutelage of supposed experts who profess they can help game a story’s positioning in search rankings.
There’s little debate about the greatest headlines of all time. One of them was the New York Post’s April 15, 1983, headline, Headless Body in Topless Bar, a rallying cry for New York’s soaring crime and chaos at the time. The headline’s author, Vincent Musetto, died in 2015 from cancer.
Another legendary headline was the New York Daily News’ October 30, 1975 banner, Ford to City: Drop Dead, which deftly captured the implications of President Ford’s declaration that he would veto any bill calling for a federal bail-out of New York City.
The most famous fake news headline was the Chicago Daily Tribune’s banner declaring that heavily favored Republican New York Gov. Thomas Dewey had defeated incumbent Harry Truman in the presidential election. It was the beginning of the corporate media’s storied tradition of deceiving the public and publishing stories that fit their preferred narratives. Only an estimated 15 percent of newspapers nationally supported Truman, with the Tribune calling Truman a “nincompoop” on its editorial pages.
The Autopian, a car-culture website run by obsessive car nerds who want nothing more than to make people laugh while teaching them about geeky car minutiae, in recent days posted a story about the electric Honda Prologue with a headline that was both brilliantly damning and likely optimization compliant. The headline gave me goose bumps, as it’s clear that the car enthusiasts at The Autopian share my dim view of GM and its vehicles.
It’s unlikely that anyone who reads The Autopian’s story would buy a Prologue. As a public service I’m happy to call attention to the article and provide some additional context about Honda’s disgrace and its betrayal of legions of Americans who long had good reason to be loyal to the brand.
One can easily mistake an EV Prologue for a real Honda, as it has the company’s badge and styling. While the vehicle’s cabin and frame are Honda compliant, it rests on GM’s Ultium platform and is powered by GM’s problem-plagued technology. GM CEO Mary Barra previously said the Ultium platform was the automaker’s secret sauce that would help her sell more EVs than Elon Musk by the end of this year.
A gussied-up EV Chevy Blazer
The Honda Prologue is for the most part an EV Chevy Blazer, whose initial launch was such a problem-plagued disaster that GM was forced to stop selling the vehicle after two trade publications mercilessly trashed it. The Prologue would be akin to Apple marketing a new computer under its brand powered by Microsoft’s operating system. Admittedly, likening GM to Microsoft is overly charitable.
Adding to Honda’s shame, the Prologue is built at one of GM’s plants in Mexico, where under Barra GM became that country’s biggest auto manufacturer and prior to Donald Trump’s election had planned to build many of her EVs to dethrone Musk. GM’s EV Chevy Equinox and Cadillac Optiq vehicles are also manufactured in Mexico.
Unlike Barra, decidedly among the most anti-MAGA manufacturing CEOs in the Fortune 500, Honda is among the most patriotically American manufacturers, despite being based in Japan. In Cars.com’s rankings of the most American-made vehicles, Honda and its luxury Acura brand captured nine of the top 20 spots.
GM’s most American-made vehicles were its Colorado and Canyon pickup trucks, respectively ranking No. 23 and 24.
Honda’s American patriotism is by design.
“Honda has a traditional quality to manufacture where demand exists,” Toshihiro Mibe, Honda’s president and CEO, said at the February 2023 ground-breaking ceremony for Honda’s electric battery plant in rural Ohio, a milestone he thought important enough to attend. “Because we want to supply high quality automobiles for American customers, we naturally want to build cars and the batteries here in America.”
Prologue owners are experiencing what owners of GM vehicles have come to expect, hence the brilliance of The Autopian’s headline, and how the publication deftly framed its article:
Let’s set the scene: It’s 2025 and car forums are still miraculously kicking. While broader interest forums have largely been supplanted by Facebook groups, model-specific forums are still chugging along, and the general discussion section of most new car forums is filled with a wide variety of topics. Talk about features, specs, accessories, economy, and all the facets of owning a particular vehicle. The Prologue Drivers forum is a little bit different. Click on the general discussion tab, and you’ll find that it’s heavily composed of Prologue owners complaining about their GM-built EVs.
While minor complaints from memory seat issues to wireless Apple CarPlay dropouts pepper the board, sadly, a few tech glitches are par for the course on new cars. What isn’t par for the course? Actual mechanical issues, that’s what. Unfortunately, it seems that a bunch of Prologue owners have been experiencing real problems with their vehicles, things that really shouldn’t be failing on brand-new cars.
Among the reported issues with the Prologue are defective axles causing clicking noises, incessant notifications of high voltage system error messages caused by bad modules in the high-voltage battery pack, charging issues, and required premature battery replacements for which there are no replacements, presumably because so many are needed. There are also reports of niggling problems like non-functioning memory seats.
One reader posted to The Autopian story that his Blazer arrived with a giant tear in the back seat that took three months for a replacement. Then at 4000 miles his axles began clicking, he was given a loaner, which had the same issue.
“I’m not surprised by the happenings of the GM platform,” posted another Autopian reader. “It’s in its infancy, and GM is not an agile enough company to really put out a fully baked product in the first try.”
Honda told The Autopian: “Owners with concerns should contact their local Honda dealer for assistance. The Prologue is covered by a robust warranty.”
It’s disappointing reading about Honda touting its robust warranty. I previously drove an advanced technology-laden Acura TL that never once in my five years of ownership was I forced to return to the dealer except for regularly scheduled oil changes.
Although Honda’s reliability ratings have been slipping in recent years, it’s still a perceived as a premium brand, which would explain why the Prologue not only outsold the Chevy Blazer in 2024 despite costing more, it outsold every GM electric vehicle last year. I wonder how many Prologue buyers purchased the vehicle knowing they were essentially buying a GM product.
The Prologue isn’t the only incident where Honda got burned getting into bed with GM. The company had planned to deploy a self-driving car in central Tokyo in partnership with GM’s autonomous vehicle unit Cruise, but Barra shut down the unit last year after repeatedly vowing it would generate $50 billion in annual revenues by the end of the decade.
If I’m not mistaken, Japanese executives are still hidebound to the appearance of honor and integrity. I recall seeing a photo of Toyota’s former CEO bowing humbly before reporters after it was reported that his company was involved in a scandal. Honda’s CEO should follow the example and apologize for his company getting into bed with GM and sullying the company’s reputation.
GM’s Barra, who received $28 million in compensation last year, is fortunate that U.S. executives don’t adhere to such traditions of honor. If Barra was forced to apologize and bow for all GM’s missteps and ethically challenged decisions during her more than ten years as CEO, she’d have developed a serious curvature of the spine.