Honda NSX: Miyagi wrought in steel

Cars

When I was 23 Honda loaned me an NSX for a week.

To this supercar novice it felt like Mr Miyagi: fearsomely capable, but patient and benign. I drove it and drove it and drove it, and it hard-wired into my head what Honda was all about: Swiss-watch engineering, truck-like toughness and democratic pricing.

I can still feel the wrist-snap gearchange – still maybe the best I’ve ever used – and hear the howl of the VTEC V6 as it came on cam. It fried my tiny mind and pretty much decided me on a career as a car writer, in which I’ve probably been a little misty-eyed about Honda as a result.

I still look at NSXs in the classified ads on a weekly basis.

But since the demise of the old NSX there hasn’t been a car at the top of the Honda range to do the same thing: not just impress neophyte motoring hacks, but represent to everyone what Honda is about.

We’ve had to look to the firm’s robotics and aerospace arms for the almost reckless creativity and innovation its founder Soichiro encouraged.

We’ve missed it.

“The NSX is what made me fall in love with Honda 22 years ago,” Jon Ikeda, chief designer at Honda’s US sub-brand Acura told me at this year’s Detroit motor show. “I wanted to work at a company that could build something like that. And not to have something that represents us is an issue.”

So Jon got the gig of designing the new NSX – a hybrid – that will go on sale around 2015. “This has been a long time coming for me,” he said. Me too. But although his concept looks mega, the new NSX can’t be the first Japanese supercar again; can’t have the quite same impact as the original.

That first NSX will remain the poster-boy for anyone, like me, who loves that country and its cars.






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2 Responses to “Honda NSX: Miyagi wrought in steel”

  1. Trevor Spiro

    I’ve been driving NSX’s since 1992, twenty years. My first, a 3.0, was delivered in 1992 and destroyed in an underground garage flood in 1999. Within weeks it was replaced with a 3.2, as seen in this photograph, which I still have. After 13 years it has done just 14,000 miles and is in mint condition. I will never part with it – it’s part of my life, like a member of the family, and is the best sports car I have ever owned or ever driven. It is akin to the perfect relationship: it does not excel in any one particular aspect, but when taken as a whole it gives you everything you want. It is a very ’rounded’ car, one that you can live with for a long time without ever getting bored. As for the new one coming out next year? I’m sure it will be good, but will it have any soul?

  2. Cap'n Geoff

    Sure is a great car-wild -looking and a true performer.

    Japan’s Corvette.