The Original Acura NSX Was Honda's Most Successful Failure — Revelations with Jason Cammisa Ep. 32

foreigner here is a controversial statement and then an apparent contradiction Honda makes no mistakes and yet the NSX was not a success, it will be fun to unpack it because while that NSX sits there looking eternally beautiful and without engineering problems. handling vices or personality flaws ended up being largely ignored by the buyers for whom it was created, did Honda really make a mistake or is there something that buyers missed? Thank you. Hagerty Drivers Club brings you insights, including fabulous roadside assistance. magazine and discounts on your favorite car items, there's a link up there, click on it, thanks for looking and now back to my regularly scheduled nonsense.

Honda is a company that makes no mistakes when it sets out to achieve something, it achieves it quickly, he thinks. about this for a second just three months after Honda debuted its first car, it says: we are going to compete, but not in any kind of Formula One race, just eight months later, Honda made its F1 debut when everyone else They used old V8s. Honda built a 14,000 RPM 48-valve, roller-bearing crank V12, widely considered the

most

powerful engine in the field. The debut was not just on any track, but on the tortuous Nurburgring, so one would expect Calamity, but the Honda ended up qualifying an admirable 13th in the overall standings after it crashed and it only took Honda another year to win. a Formula One race, which means that in a period of just two years Honda went from making its first car to winning a Formula One race.

You're probably still wearing the same underwear you were wearing two years ago. Me too. This is a company that succeeded in everything and just 20 years later Honda was on top of the world. Its luxury brand Acura launched in 1986 with the legendary Legend in 1989. The Accord became the best-selling car in America. Honda was also making waves in the racing arena. He had just returned to F1 in 1984, but a Honda-powered car won the Formula One Championship in 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991. It defecated integrally to the likes of Ferrari and as this was all Brewing Honda wanted a way to show off his formula one technology on the street and or just wanted all over Ferrari on the boulevard he also not only stepped on Ferrari's toes there, he kicked the Italians straight in the groin when he called the pin of the style house facto from Ferrari and Farina and said, uh, hey, forget about those guys for a second, how about you design us a carbon composite aerodynamic sports car of the future with our 2-liter V6 in the middle?

Anyway, the engine would have to be in the middle, because in a Formula 1 but also in the B. Honda engineers had experimented with mounting the engine in the middle under the floor of the first generation subcompact Honda City hatchback and could not stop laughing, the concept was HP called the X script for Honda pin and Farina experimental and began the development of the NS X script the new sports car Because Honda didn't have a story to pull from so that the engineers had free rein to do whatever they needed, the only goals were a top speed of 170 miles per hour, a quarter mile and less than 14 seconds, and handling and braking. equal to those of any Ferrari or Porsche, and another thing that the car had. be practical and easy to use at the same time because Honda would convey the ideals of Formula One, meaning that light weight takes priority over everything else and there would be no styling tricks or otherwise, composite construction concepts were replaced for the world's first aluminum monocoque production car. the same basic construction method as Honda's first F1 car.

Honda used the world's fastest supercomputer, the cray 2, to make the nsx's chassis as rigid as possible, but then I handed the keys to the world champion. I got hurt and Senna, who disagreed with the computers and said, um, it's a bit fragile, remember Honda doesn't fail, so he went all out and set up two kilometers from the Nurburgring, the site of that first race. of F1, just 25 years earlier he used the ring to torture the NSX with the first Japanese car. With every Formula One racer behind the wheel, whenever they noticed a structural weakness, the team would manually weld the reinforcements until they fixed it and send that information to Japan to be fed into the Cray supercomputer, which would then find a lightweight solution.

In addition to that structural improvement, it's cool that the result of the Nurburgring project was a 50 increase in rigidity over the

original

design, making it, by the way, 50 stronger than that of a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari 328 ,

most

importantly thanks to the optimization of the entire aluminum body. The shell was only 20 pounds heavier than the small, steel-bodied Miata that Mazda was developing at the same time to power the lightweight Wonder. Honda tried a 5-liter V8 but it didn't meet the strict packaging and weight requirements, so they tried turbocharging. V6 but the turbos never respond quickly or linearly enough for a sports car.

They could have made the power using a supercharger, but superchargers weigh too many revs. The NSX inherited the C-series V6 to 6 that just launched in the Acura Legend. It was pierced. at 3 liters and generated 250 horsepower revving at a healthy 7,300 RPM, this was demonstrated by Honda's CEO when he hit the Prototype with its rev limiter before its public debut at the Chicago Auto Show while Ford was in the room next door trying to hold a press conference and this accomplished two things, well, the third because he's certainly angry about it, but number one, he made sure that every journalist in the city was in the room the next day, when they took the wraps off the NSX.

Number two, he promoted the big boss of Honda. to ask where the VTEC is, this was a huge omission. Previously, VTEC had only been planned for Honda's four-cylinder, but not the V6, which used only one camshaft per bank. VTEC is often misunderstood, but in simple terms it allows an engine to effectively have two different sets of camshafts, one that is tuned for the lower part of the rev range and another for the upper part of the rev range. VTEC simply switches between the two camshafts and its benefits everywhere without any drawbacks, it's typical Honda reliable genius and boss.

He wanted to know why Honda's flagship didn't have it. I think it's a reasonable question, so the flagship got VTEC and vvis and the V6 got something no other Honda V6 got until 2021, more than 30 years later, double overhead cams, that's right, your mom's minivan . It has single overhead cams anyway, the NSX's V6 also has titanium connecting rods to stay together at an astronomical 8,000 RPM. Unfortunately, the big twin cam heads no longer fit on the car, so Honda had to redesign the entire body to fit, stretching the wheelbase by over an inch and it was definitely worth it, worth less for the 20 horsepower than for the bragging rights of 8,000 RPM plus the acoustic impact of the cam shift.

This was the first appearance of VTEC in America and when that thing switched to high gear. The lift cam lobes, the intake sang a song that had only been sung on the Over Square Italian Honda. The V6 had a 90-degree design that left plenty of room for that cool intake system, but 90-degree V6s generally require balance shafts and the NSX didn't get it. To them, this gave the NSX's engine a distinctive low-rpm motion, although the split crank pins gave it a uniform firing order for maximum power. 270 horsepower went a lot further than you might think because the all-aluminum NSX was a true lightweight, just a third of a tank of gas away from weighing less than 3,000 pounds, so light that the 5-speed models They didn't have or really needed power steering, it looks easy, so the NSX comfortably outpaced its competition, hitting 60 miles per hour in 5.2 and outpacing the fourth with 13.8, beating the new Ferrari 348 by half a second or more in Both measured when the road turned, it outperformed the Lotus and 911 and outperformed everything in those individual performance metrics shown, but put them all together in terms of their total performance.

The envelope and the NSX was untouchable. He won almost every award he could here in the United States. Car of the year. Car of the year. Design of the year. There was a two-year waiting list. making Ferraris irrelevant, flawed relics of the past that had no future in the modern world, the NSX was a phenomenon, a phenomenon and then it was just a no, a non-start, a non-event, a non-charter. people's purchases only a few years later. the same car that every American Car magazine said would put Ferrari out of business was being outsold ten to one by a Ferrari.

The NSX remained in production for 15 years, but 60 percent of all NSXs produced were produced in the first two years for which the plant was designed. It spit out 25 cars a day, but by the end of the third year it was operating at less than 10 percent of that capacity. Although the NSX is widely credited with forcing Ferrari to up its game, sales of the NSX evaporated long before then. that Ferrari even had the opportunity to respond. of course they did it ironically, it could have been the inherent goodness of the nsx its biggest flaw because for some it had committed the sin of the Cardinal Supercar, the NSX was boring this was by Design Honda's head of research studied what really made a sports car out special and We came to the conclusion that balance is the most important thing.

Look, I came out of a supercar as emotional, not cognitive, so if we're going to examine the relative success of Ferrari versus Acura, we're going to have to do that now. start a discussion about the relative merits of sex appeal versus intelligence Australian magazine Wheels said cite this car with brains and fingertips with a Ferrari Lamborghini is bravado and biceps Car and Driver said the NSX is cite a neurosurgeon's approach to make quick trades this is the age old debate between brains and beauty and I have neither so I'm not qualified to comment on that but one person is and she is famous automotive journalist Joan Rivers.

Don't you think men really like intelligence better when it's right? Down once put his hand on a woman's chest looking for a library card. The NSX was a library card. An intelligent and rational car. The problem was that buyers already had one of those in sedan form with things like power steering and a back seat when they were around. looking for a supercar the only thing that mattered was excitement, even though the driver Karen was one of the biggest fans of the NSX, she felt the need to defend her love for the car four years after its presentation, she had to admit that the NSX did not It was neither coveted nor respected in fair proportion to the joy it offered and then went on to define joy as only an engineer could.

The great outside visibility was 312 degrees. In fact, thanks to this F-16-inspired canopy, the NSX has ice-cold air conditioning, tilt, and telescope. Easy shift steering wheel Hey, we got 25.5 miles per gallon on a highway trip. I'm not making this up. Good elbow room, who cares? JD Power's initial quality survey results show fewer

failure

s per 100 cars than a Mercedes-Benz, er, Honda had designed. a Ferrari for cable buyers who, importantly, weren't Ferrari buyers, yes the NSX was so good it made Ferrari go back and put ice cold air conditioning in their cars, but ironically the NSX was too good a car to put Ferrari in it. business, that means Honda made a mistake, look, the purpose of a car is to sell, so it depends where you draw the line on this side, you have the first generation of the NSX, which maybe was a

failure

in optimization of sales in the other. you have the second generation NSX, which was undeniably a mistake, they ruined it too, it won all sorts of magazine awards but was left nailed to the showroom floor in the meantime, it's unquestionably talented.

Engineers boasted about how well their tires performed in Ohio's cold winter puddles. We were proud that it started quietly so as not to attract attention in the church parking lot. I'm not making this up, it was another rational left-brain supercar, a contradiction in terms that most buyers simply weren't looking for, but Acura's great sin is The second time around was removing every bit of the simple Formula One philosophy and driver-focused lightweight of that NSX. This could have been arational version of a supercar. But as time has passed, most supercars have become supercomputers. Honda's focus on lightweight.

The simplicity and brilliance of the powertrain are the enduring qualities that make this a special car today and its inherent greatness and reliability certainly no longer hurt it; In fact, they make it a very easy car to own. Answer that question from earlier. No mistakes here, foreigners, okay.