The 1988–1991 Honda Prelude Si Offered Four-Wheel Steering – Was It A Gimmick?

In mid-1987, Honda rolled out its third-generation Prelude coupe with a high-tech new option: a complex four-wheel steering system that was supposed to improve handling and maneuverability. Honda 4WS was the first of its kind in the U.S., drawing a lot of press attention — and a lot of skepticism about its cost and benefits. Here’s how the Honda mechanical 4WS system worked, what it was supposed to do, and what it actually did, based on contemporary tests and my own experience with the 4WS Prelude I used to own.

Four-wheel steering is a very old idea. Large vehicles that can be steered at both ends date back to the 19th century, and the thought of doing something similar for cars popped up early on. A Japanese patent application from 1907 described an automobile whose steering wheel used a central shaft to let it turn both front and rear wheels simultaneously. There were 4WS experiments on and off for years, but starting in the late ’70s, four-wheel steering became a technological arms race between the major Japanese automakers.

Despite what some American journalists erroneously reported in 1987, Honda was NOT the first automaker to put one of these 4WS systems into production. Nissan had beaten Honda to the punch with its first HICAS (High Capacity Active Steering) system, introduced on some versions of the R31 Skyline in 1985, although the way HICAS worked was quite a bit different than the first Honda 4WS.

I’ve never seen an R31 Skyline except in pictures, but I used to own a 1991 Honda Prelude Si 4WS, the last year of the third-generation model and its mechanical “steer angle dependent” 4WS. When I first got the car, I knew what it was, but I didn’t know that much about how it worked or what to expect from its behavior.

Here’s how the mechanical 4WS was laid out. The rack-and-pinion steering box had an extra pinion gear, which drove a long central steering shaft to the rear axle.

At the back, this steering shaft connected to a second steering box with tie rods that changed the actual the toe angles of the rear wheels.

The rear steering box used a planetary gearset to move the stroke rod that controlled the rear tie rods. Rear steering angle varied with the angle of the steering wheel, but both the degree and direction of the rear-steer changed depending on how much the wheel was turned.

When you turned the steering wheel off center, the rear wheels would initially steer a small amount in the SAME direction as the front wheels (in phase), up to a maximum of 1.5 degrees of rear steer at a steering wheel angle of about 120 degrees. If you kept turning the steering wheel, the rear wheel angle would go back to zero by about 240 degrees of wheel rotation. Beyond that, the rear wheels would steer in the OPPOSITE direction of the front wheels (out of phase) by up to 5.3 degrees.

This system did two quite different things. One was obvious and sometimes handy; the other was subtle enough to perplex drivers far more skilled than me.

The way that big motions of the steering wheel turned the rear wheels out of phase allowed the Prelude turn VERY tightly at low speeds. The actual reduction in the turning circle wasn’t huge — 1 meter (39.4 inches), according to the specifications — but the effects were pronounced. The third-generation Prelude was not a particularly small car as coupes went (it was 175.6 inches long), but it had a tighter turning circle than a hatchback Toyota Tercel, and it was possible to thread it through some tight and convoluted spaces. (This was aided greatly by superb outward visibility — how I miss that expansive low-cowl ’80s Honda feel!) However, 4WS required essentially relearning how to parallel park; the first time I tried it left a nasty scrape on the right front wheel.

The second effect of 4WS was more subtle: The in-phase rear steering with smaller wheel motions was supposed to improve response and stability in fast transient maneuvers. Car and Driver technical editor Csaba Csere explained the principle like this:

Same-direction steering, in theory, improves handling at higher speeds. To understand why, consider that the front tires of a conventionally steered car develop cornering forces immediately when they are steered, but the rears develop cornering forces only when the body of the car has begun to turn. On a 4ws car, in contrast, all four tires develop their cornering forces at the same time. The result is more responsive handling in transient maneuvers, such as entering and exiting corners. Furthermore, since the rear tires of a 4ws car do not depend solely on the car’s drift angle to produce their cornering forces, the car’s tail doesn’t swing out as far in corners or wag as much in quick lane changes.

You can get a similar effect with what’s called passive rear steer, where the rear suspension bushings are softer in certain directions so that the rear wheels toe in or toe out slightly under some driving conditions.

Porsche pioneered this concept in the early ’70s with the “Weissach Axle,” originally developed for the Porsche 928. A lot of later cars have used the same basic idea in different ways. However, passive rear steer has two limitations: The amount of rear steer has to be small, so that it doesn’t make the car less stable, and it relies on weight transfer to change the rear wheel angles. At least in principle, “active” rear steer systems can turn the rear wheels whenever and as much as it’s useful to do.

That’s the theory. Did it actually work in practice? Honda made some cautious claims about improved stability in abrupt changes in direction, even for non-expert drivers. They published a couple of technical papers full of complicated graphs of yaw rates, roll angles, and phase delay frequencies, none of them remotely comprehensible to laymen. I could show you some of them, but they wouldn’t tell you anything useful.

Some contemporary car magazines decided to run staged time trials on a test track. Car and Driver tested 4WS and non-4WS test cars back to back on both wet and dry pavement, using traffic cones to set up different slalom-type maneuvers, including a violent “double lane change” maneuver that involved veering sharply from one 12-foot lane into another and then back within the space of 100 feet. They also set up a skidpad to measure lateral acceleration (maximum cornering grip in a steady, sustained turn).

Based on Honda’s claims, C/D figured lateral acceleration would be the same with or without 4WS, but that the 4WS car would be faster through the slalom-type maneuvers, especially on wet pavement. That wasn’t what happened. Here were their results on dry pavement:

Car	Lateral Acceleration, 300-ft. skidpad, g	Slalom, 50-ft. Cone Spacing, mph	Slalom, 100-ft. Cone Spacing, mph	Double Lane Change, Low Speed, mph	Double Lane Change, High Speed, mph
Prelude 2WS	0.77	31.5	62.0	30.5	57.5
Prelude 4WS	0.78	31.5	62.0	34.0	61.0

Here were the results on a wet track:

Car	Lateral Acceleration, 300-ft. skidpad, g	Slalom, 50-ft. Cone Spacing, mph	Slalom, 100-ft. Cone Spacing, mph	Double Lane Change, Low Speed, mph	Double Lane Change, High Speed, mph
Prelude 2WS	0.76	24.0	44.5	28.0	49.5
Prelude 4WS	0.73	24.0	44.5	27.0	47.5

For some reason, the 4WS car had slightly better lateral acceleration in the dry, but had LESS grip in the wet. The C/D editors had no idea why, since the 4WS system shouldn’t have had any effect on steady-state cornering. (Their test cars had the same tires, and the weight difference was only 28 lb.)

With 4WS, the Prelude did go faster through some of the slalom maneuvers, as Honda suggested it would — but only some of them, and ONLY on dry pavement. In the wet, C/D found that the 4WS car felt more stable, although it was actually a bit slower than the non-4WS Prelude. For a less-skilled driver, like me, that was probably a worthwhile trade-off, but a FWD Prelude with double wishbone rear suspension was hardly a twitchy or tail-happy car. The rear end could jiggle quite a bit on rough roads (which British testers hated), but the rear wheels stayed planted, and it would take some very violent maneuvers (or maybe hitting a pothole mid-turn) to make the Prelude wag its tail at all.

While the Honda 4WS did sometimes produce a measurable handling difference, it wasn’t one that most drivers could actually feel. Even driving 4WS and non-4WS cars back to back, a lot of magazine testers insisted that there was no perceptible difference. Car and Driver tried to do a “blind taste test” comparison, covering up all identification that might show which Prelude had 4WS. Some drivers who put the cars through their paces on the track thought they knew which was the 4WS car; they were often wrong.

I’m certainly no expert driver, but while I never noticed any handling difference on the move, 4WS was quite noticeable in low-speed maneuvers. Not only would the car turn more sharply, steering effort would increase or decrease in weird, nonlinear ways at low speeds, as the power steering pump intermittently fought the added resistance of two sets of steered wheels rather than just one. At first, I feared there was something wrong with the power steering pump, but this was normal behavior. It was basically a harmless quirk, but I found it disconcerting and sometimes annoying.

I bought the Prelude used, but the first owner warned me of another 4WS drawback: It would eat tires if it didn’t get regular alignments, which required a special tool to lock the rear wheels on the rack. I took this warning to heart, found a local alignment shop with the correct tools, and paid for one of those three-year unlimited-alignments deals. This avoided any problems with unusual tire wear, but it was something a lot of owners could have easily overlooked, and it was yet another item on a fairly demanding and expensive maintenance schedule.

Buying the 4WS was also very expensive. American Honda insisted on treating the 4WS Prelude as a separate sub-model, packaging it with some additional equipment that pushed the price premium to a hefty $1,300. Annoyingly, this also meant you couldn’t combine 4WS with antilock brakes (which American Honda treated as a different sub-model). There was no technical reason you couldn’t have both features together — JDM and European Preludes often did — other than the nonsensical stubbornness of the U.S. sales organization.

If you’ve seen Jim Klein’s feature on tight Japanese parking spaces, you can see why the low-speed maneuverability of 4WS could be very attractive there. Honda didn’t use the mechanical 4WS system on any other U.S. cars, but it was also available on some versions of the JDM Accord and Vigor. In the States, with bigger, marked parking spaces, I thought 4WS was basically a parlor trick. People who did gymkhana may have found it worthwhile, and 4WS might conceivably have saved your neck in an unexpected evasive maneuver, but for the money, I would much rather have had ABS, which could easily pay for itself by avoiding even one panic stop disaster.

Other Japanese automakers offered their own 4WS systems, including Mazda, Toyota, and Mitsubishi as well as Nissan. Each of these systems worked somewhat differently — all this stuff was heavily patent-encumbered in the ’80s and ’90s — and some worked better than others. The Mazda system, offered on some versions of the U.S. 626 and MX-6 between 1988 and 1990, was heavier and more complicated than the Honda 4WS, it hurt handling more than it helped, and some testers suffered expensive mechanical failures. U.S. sales were limited.

Nissan Super HICAS, used on the 300ZX Twin Turbo and offered on the 240SX, Infiniti Q45, and Infiniti J30, allegedly provided better high-speed handling, but did nothing at low speeds, since it couldn’t counter-steer the rear wheels. A Mitsubishi 4WS system also showed up in the U.S. for a while on the Galant VR4 and 3000GT VR4. I don’t think the Toyota system ever made it here, but you could get 4WS on a fair number of mid-price JDM Toyotas well into the ’90s. They weren’t necessarily the sportiest models, suggesting the main draw was greater parking maneuverability.

Honda abandoned its mechanical steering angle dependent 4WS in 1991 in favor of an all-new “Super 4WS” system for the fourth-generation Prelude and a few JDM models. The rear steering angle changes were similar (counter-steer in low-speed maneuvers, in-phase steer at higher speeds), but there was no longer any mechanical connection between the front and rear steering boxes.

Super 4WS instead used an electric motor to control the stroke rod of the rear steering box, which avoided the odd steering-effort changes that I noticed. The system was still very expensive for what it did, so it wasn’t ordered very often, at least on U.S. cars. In Japan, Honda actually continued to offer 4WS on the fifth-generation Prelude, but American Honda decided there wasn’t enough demand to import it anymore after the end of the fourth generation.

Active rear steering faded out for a while as the Japanese economic bubble burst and the sporty coupe market collapsed in the ’90s, but 4WS never really went away. GM and Delphi tried adapting it for big pickups and SUVs with the Quadrasteer of the early ’00s, and it’s shown up on a lot of high-end European and Japanese cars over the past 15 to 20 years, joining a litany of other active chassis controls like computer-controlled shock absorbers and adjustable anti-roll bars.

For 98 percent of American buyers of the late ’80s and early ’90s, I think 4WS was an overpriced gimmick. It was a cool idea, and the way Honda executed it was ingenious, but it added a lot of cost and complexity, and its real-world benefits were mostly a big shrug. There were some things about the Prelude that I still miss, but its four-wheel steering was one feature I could have done just as well without.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1991 Honda Prelude Si – Improving The Original (by Tom Klockau)

Vintage Road & Track Review: 1983 Honda Prelude – “Simply Terrific” (by Paul N)

Curbside Classic: 1983-1987 Honda Prelude – New Priorities (by Perry Shoar)

1986–1989 Acura Integra: Was This The Most Satisfying ’80s Honda? (by me)

Curbside Classic: 1994 Honda Prelude 2.2 VTEC – A Prelude Of Better Things To Come?  (by B234R)

Curbside Classic: 2001 Honda Prelude – The Postlude Of The Flagship Sports Coupe (by Brendan Saur)