Tested: Honda Prelude’s Summer Tires Help It Corner Harder and Stop Shorter

As the weather turns in the Midwest, morning temperatures are dropping fast, and roads are waking up slippery. This has given me a chance to explore a new side of my 2026 Honda Prelude long-term tester, encouraging me to take the long way home after an early-morning gym or school run. What side is this? Its handling. As I’ve covered in previous blogs about this Prelude, the car has some flaws, most of which come down to packaging and value proposition. I’ll do deeper dives into several of those areas in the future; however, I’ve also elaborated that in other areas, like driving pleasure and performance, the car is an absolute banger.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. High ground clearance, four-wheel-drive systems with locking differentials, long-travel suspension, and LED lights that could cause sunburn are all cool and totally necessary in off-road vehicles. Still, the single most important upgrade you can make to your SUV or truck for traversing challenging terrain is replacing the original road tires with a set of all-terrain or off-road tires. These have deeper grooves and larger tread blocks for higher traction on all sorts of surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and mud, and they can transform your truck/SUV into an off-road beast. Naturally, off-road — more frequently known as all- or mud-terrain — tires are more aggressive and tend to sacrifice on-road comfort and grip to give you the ultimate off-road traction.

If you've ever purchased a new set of tires for your car, you may have noticed colored lines painted on the treads. They usually stand out as bright stripes that encircle the tire, and their function is to help identify products or rubber compounds as they move through production. Their purpose is for the people and equipment making the tires, rather than the person buying them. German company REA, which supplies marking equipment to the tire industry, says automated color lines are used for material type identification. Its systems can mark rubber components and finished tires, giving factories a way to distinguish materials and products during production. Those markings are an important tool for workers or machines to distinguish one type of tire from another. By the time the tires arrive at a retailer and have been installed on your vehicle, the painted lines have served their purpose. They will eventually wear off as the tires accumulate mileage.

Classic gems, tasteful customs, legendary supercars - for Silvian, they're all fair game. He's been in love with cars and motorcycles for as long as he can remember, so it made perfect sense to eventually turn that passion into a full-time writing career. Around six years and more than 3,000 articles later, he is still going strong and doesn't plan on hitting the brakes anytime soon. Brabus is so much more than a regular tuner in our day and age. It is a fully-fledged luxury lifestyle brand involved in a wide variety of pursuits not related to cars, including fashion, high-end real estate, and aviation. But to us car guys and girls, its core identity will always be rooted in car tuning and wild customization. The company’s partnership with Smart started more than two decades ago and is still going strong today, having yielded some fascinating results in the meantime. And with the tiny Fortwo discontinued to make way for the all-electric #2, you can bet your bottom dollar on this replacement getting the Brabus treatment.

It's wild how far we've come in automotive technology during the past couple of decades. Who in the '60s would've figured that we'd make 100 horsepower per liter, like with the Ford Mustang Dark Horse 5.0-liter V8, or that adaptive dampers would be common in the luxury market, including on the Acura Integra A-Spec (with Technology Package). Still, one seemingly overlooked aspect of automotive progress is how we actuate the clutch between an engine and manual transmission. While this area's workings have stayed relatively simple, moving from one form to another has improved daily driving in several ways. We're talking about transitioning from cable-operated to hydraulically actuated clutches.