- You guys have been begging for this one
so a billion of you better watch it.
(engine revving)
It was Japan's first supercar.
It challenged the reign of Europeans
and set a new standard for automobilia exotica.
I just made that up, trademark.
(engines revving and tires skidding)
Harsh rides, gone, poor visibility, no thanks,
expensive maintenance, GTFO.
I'm not gonna put up with that crap
just 'cause I wanna drive something shaped like wedge
with an engine behind my noggin.
Oh, and did I mention that Senna helped make it dope?
This is everything you need to know
to get up to speed on the Acura NSX.
What, you didn't know?
(thunder clapping)
You had (beep) better call somebody!
(laughs)
(eight bit music)
In the eighties,
lots of sports cars weren't all that sporty.
I mean, Ferrari was making some pretty hot V8s
but they were expensive.
Founder and supreme advisor of Honda Motor Company,
Soichiro Honda, very cool dude,
knew his company had the chops to build
something better than a Ferrari and for less money.
So, Honda called up Italian design house, Pininfarina,
and was like, "Hey, yeah, so we were thinking,
"you know what we usually do.
"Yeah, front engine, front wheel drive, yeah, yeah,
"well we want to do the exact opposite.
"Yeah, uh-huh, mid engine, rear wheel drive.
"I know, dude, sick, hold on, hello?
"Actually I'm on the phone with Pininfarina,
"can I give you a call back in like two seconds, alright.
"You still there, oh no, wait, hold on.
"Pininfarina, hello?"
What they ended up with was perhaps the most eighties car
to come out of the eighties.
A weird white door stop called the HP-X
which stood for Honda Pininfarina experimental.
It was aerodynamic AF and minimalist to the max,
so much so that it didn't even have doors.
You climbed in through it the plexiglass roof
like Maverick and Goose.
("Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins)
And it wasn't just another boring display car, no way,
'cause it had a motor in it, a cool one,
a two liter V6 from Honda's Formula Two team.
While all this HP-X stuff was going on,
Honda started racing in F1 again
and their engineers were getting more interested
in going fast, so they started playing
with mid-engine rear-wheel drive test mules
made from a first gen Honda City and a CRX.
They were also just about to launch
the luxury Acura brand in the US
and decided that giving the badge a halo car
would give it a leg up.
The company was getting excited about building a sports car
that bridged the gap between F1 and Civics
but it also needed to be comfortable
so that you could drive it everyday.
I mean, what good is an awesome car
if you don't even drive it everyday.
With the Ferrari 328 set as a benchmark
and using the HP-X as inspiration,
Honda got to work on a new project, code name NSX,
which stood for new sports car, unknown world.
Some people say the X stands for experimental
but Honda says it's unknown world
where X is the mathematical symbol for an unknown variable,
and daddy knows a thing or two
about being an unknown variable.
Hiya! (Chinese kung fu music)
Anyway, this ain't no algebra class, put your books away.
Driver's experience was a main focus of development.
Honda wanted the NSX to great 360 visibility.
They kept the cab forward design of the HP-X
and took additional inspiration for the greenhouse
from F16 fighter jets, F1 cars and hydroplane racing boats,
the coolest kind of boat there is.
(water spurting)
The new Japanese sports car also needed a bigger engine
to compete with the Europeans
'cause that two liter V6 just wasn't gonna cut it.
The V6 from the Acura Legend wasn't quite there either
so Honda took VTEC from the JDM Integra
and combined it with their Formula One race tech
to come up with (explosion roars)
a glorious sounding all-aluminum three liter V6
putting out 270 horsepowers.
(engine revving)
The pistons were forged in the fires of Mount Doom
and for the first time in a production car,
the connecting rods were made of titanium.
(laughs)
Honda wanted the NSX to have incredible, F1-like handling.
(click) Oh (beep).
And modern amenities like air conditioning, power windows,
traction control and ABS
but having all that stuff in a steel body
would make a pretty portly car and they didn't want that.
No judgment if you like fat cars, do your thing,
Honda just wasn't into it.
They were going to have to take the weight
out of the chassis somehow.
After experimenting with high strength steels
and carbon fiber, they decided to do it using aluminum,
a lot of aluminum.
So Honda called up their metal suppliers and they were like,
"We want aluminum that we can build a car out of."
"Honda, there is no aluminum
"you could build a whole car out of."
"Huh, weird, what are we going to do about this,
"oh, I have an idea, how 'bout you frigging make me some?"
"What, uh--"
"If you don't make me enough strong aluminum
"to build a car to beat Ferrari, I will kill you."
"Guys, we gotta make aluminum that can build a car
"or Honda's gonna kill me, he sounded serious."
That's actually what happened.
So five specific aluminum alloys were carefully chosen,
special processing techniques were developed
and an entirely new plant was built to produce the new
lightweight monocoque chassis.
In February of 1989, Honda had a few nearly
production ready cars in hand
and the Acura NSX prototype was set to debut
at the Chicago International Motor Show.
Honda was setting up for the big reveal
when the president of the company, Tadish, Tadashi,
Tadashi Kume was like, "I need to inspect this car,"
then he hopped in and fired it up and his team was like,
"Stop, there's a Ford press conference going on next door."
and he was all, "What?"
And they were like,
"There's a Ford press conference next door!"
"I'm revving the engine, I can't hear you, it's too loud,"
and his team was all, "Stop!"
Meanwhile, in the Ford press conference, Ford was like,
"And I present to you..."
"Stop!"
"The world premiere of the new..."
"I can't hear a single word you're saying
"'cause this engine is too loud."
Word spread quickly that something special
was gonna be at the Acura press conference
and by the time the car officially debuted,
excitement was through the frigging roof.
("Careless Whisper" by George Michael)
At the same time over in Japan,
a certain F1 driver you may have heard of named Senna,
was testing another prototype at the Suzuka race track.
After claiming that he didn't feel qualified
to give advice on tuning a mass production car,
he told the engineers that it felt fragile.
So Honda scrambled for eight months
to give the aluminum chassis more rigidity
and set up their first long-term overseas testing facility
at the Nürburgring in the process.
The end result was a chassis 50% stiffer than the prototype
and 40% lighter than an equivalent chassis
made out of steel.
Further testing with Senna, F1 racer, Satoru Nakajima,
and indie car champ, Bobby Rahal,
turned the NSX into one of the best handling cars ever made!
(thunder clapping) Lightening, lightening,
lightening, lightening.
The suspension was a complex work of forged aluminum art.
Both the front and rear featured an intricate web
of beautiful double wishbones.
Mm, getting hungry.
Up front Honda designed a unique compliance pivot
that maintained the same toe setting as the suspension moved
to reduce bump steer.
Wow.
Even the tires got a ridiculous amount of attention.
Yokohama tried out 10 molds, 100 different tire specs
and 6000 different tires
before they thought they got it right.
Honda was so exacting in it's fine tuning
that the front and rear compounds
ended up being slightly different.
(engine revving and tires skidding)
The new Acura NSX was fittingly launched
to the automotive media
with laps around Laguna Seca and the Nürburgring.
The press raved about it's civilized demeanor
and awesome performance in a reliable Honda package.
Quotes, it is the best sports car ever made.
Quote, all of our current cars
are now completely irrelevant.
That's really impressive for a manufacturer
known better for making motorcycles and Civics.
Hiya! (Chinese kung fu music)
In late 1990, the NSX finally went on sale to high demand.
American dealers were keeping cars for themselves
instead of selling 'em, and in Japan,
people were put on a three year waiting list to buy one.
Only a year into production,
Honda invited owners to a track day
to give them driving lessons and to pick their brains
on how to make their groundbreaking sports car even better.
The feedback they got went into creating
the JDM only, track oriented 1992 NSX Type-R.
(engine revving)
They stripped out the sound insulation, the radio,
the spare tire, the AC, the traction control.
It got Enkei wheels and the cush leather seats were replaced
with Carbon Kevlar Recaros or as I like to call them,
recarbon fiberos.
The NSX-R dropped 265 pounds to become
a lightweight track day machine gun.
After the first two years of production,
US sales started to drop off pretty quick.
In 1995, Honda replaced our NSX Coupe with the NSX-T
where the T stood for target top not turbo.
(engine revving)
Removing the roof reduced the chassis rigidity
that the NSX was known for
so they added some more braces to stiffen things up
which added more weight.
I was fat and had braces too.
(laughs)
Sales spiked briefly but fell off again the next year.
In 1997, engineers tossed in a bigger 3.2 liter V6
making 290 horsepower.
US sales coasted along in cruise control selling
just about 200 cars per year.
For 1999, Acura brought back the Coupe
with the super limited Alex Zanardi Edition NSX.
50 red cars based on the Japanese market Type-S were built
to commemorate Zanardi's back to back
Champ Car championship wins.
(engine revving)
In 2002, Honda committed
one of the greatest atrocities ever,
they killed off the pop-up headlights on the NSX.
(It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday by Boyz II Men)
♪ And I'll take with me the memories ♪
♪ To be my sunshine after the rain ♪
At this point, even though people said they loved the NSX,
not that many people were actually buying the NSX.
It stayed pretty much the same car for 15 years
and only about 18,000 were sold in the entire world.
2005 was the last year of production
for the original Japanese supercar.
You know the old saying,
you don't know what you got till it's gone,
well, as soon as the NSX was gone,
people wanted another one.
God, make up your minds!
Do you want me, do you not want me,
do you want me, do you not want me,
do you want me, do you not want me, dad.
Just two years later,
Honda announced a future V10 supercar was in the works.
V10, dude.
But by 2008, the economic downturn had car manufacturers
cowering in their khakis and the new supercar
just wasn't really on the agenda anymore.
Luckily the car-pocalypse was short
and in 2010 there were already rumors
that another NSX successor was coming.
The V10 idea was dead just like my dad
and now it would be a more environmentally-friendly hybrid,
say what?
Hybrids were not cool cars in 2010.
But after years and years and years of teasing
in Marvel movies and Superbowl ads
featuring my best friend, Jay Leno,
(Jay laughs)
an impressive new second generation NSX
rolled out of an Ohio factory in 2016.
The new NSX is all-wheel drive
with a mid-mounted twin-turbo 3.5 liter V6
and three electric motors
putting out a supercar worthy 573 horsepower.
(engine revving)
Lead designer, Michelle Christensen, calls it,
"An American muscle car in an Italian exotic car's body,"
and it bares absolutely zero resemblance
to the original NSX.
Like before it offers Ferrari-level performance
at a lower price
and it won Road & Track's 2017 Performance Car of the Year,
but it's
eh.
Hiya! (Chinese kung fu music)
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