Someone Made a 4×4 Honda Prelude by Adding a Second Engine

French car company Citroën made a four-wheel-drive 2CV in the 1950s by installing a second engine in the trunk to spin the rear wheels. Fast-forward to 2025 and an enthusiast has applied this dauntingly complex solution to a fifth-gen Honda Prelude. It looks absolutely amazing, I’m sure it goes like stink, and it’s for sale.

There’s no shortage of heavily modified Preludes on the market, but the twin-engined model listed on Cars & Bids takes things a lot further than most builds. Let’s start with the obvious: It has two engines. Up front, there’s a 2.2-liter four-cylinder linked to a five-speed manual transmission. Out back, there’s the exact same thing. The rear engine is mounted transversally, and stuffing it in the space usually reserved for groceries required numerous additional modifications. There are air vents chiseled into the quarter panels, the trunk floor has been cut out, and there’s a firewall separating the rear engine bay from the passenger compartment. This must have been quite the project.

It doesn’t end there, either. The coupe features a custom-made tubular chassis, lowering springs, and a Wilwood brake bias adjustment system. The list of modifications provided by Cars & Bids also includes a carbon fiber hood, fixed Lexan windows, and bucket seats with harnesses. The listing adds that the climate control system, the power steering, and some of the interior panels have been removed to save weight.

With two engines, part-time four-wheel-drive, and numerous weight-saving modifications, this Prelude sounds like it would figure out how to elbow its way into a Group B race if it could travel back to the 1980s. It looks like a lot of resources went into the build. Each engine has its own ECU, its own cooling system, and a common 12-gallon fuel cell, and this Franken-Prelude is set up to run either the front engine or both at the same time. You apparently can’t switch off the front engine and run it as a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive car, however.

It’s sick, and I have so many questions. What’s it like to drive? Each engine makes 200 horsepower stock, so we’re looking at about 400 horsepower total excluding the modifications. The second engine adds weight while dramatically shifting the Prelude’s weight distribution, which is normally heavily front-biased, so odds are this is a truly special car to handle—especially with a pair of limited-slip differentials.

Bidding stands at $12,000 with about two days left in the auction. Reach out if you’re the winning bidder; we’d love to take a closer look.

Got tips? Send ’em to tips@thedrive.com

The post Someone Made a 4×4 Honda Prelude by Adding a Second Engine appeared first on The Drive.