NSX

The Honda/Acura NSX: An Everyday Supercar, Twice Over (1990–2005; 2016–2022)

Honda set out in the mid-1980s to build something that had not really existed before: a mid-engine exotic that a Ferrari or Lamborghini owner would recognize as a genuine supercar, but that also started reliably every morning, held its temperature in traffic, and did not punish its driver with an unsorted chassis or brittle build quality. The NSX (New Sportscar eXperimental) was Honda's answer, and the company committed to an unusual piece of engineering to get there: an all-aluminum monocoque and body, a first for a mass-production car, chosen specifically to cut weight relative to steel-bodied rivals without sacrificing structural integrity. It was a decision that only a company with Honda's manufacturing confidence, and its willingness to spend on tooling for a low-volume halo car, could have made in the late 1980s.

The car's most often-repeated origin story concerns Ayrton Senna, who by 1989 was driving Honda-powered McLarens to World Championships in Formula One. Honda brought him to Suzuka to evaluate a pre-production NSX prototype, and by most accounts he was not satisfied: the chassis felt short of torsional rigidity, and the steering went vague near the limit. Chief engineer Shigeru Uehara's team responded by increasing the aluminum monocoque's torsional stiffness by roughly 50 percent before finalizing the production specification, and Senna was reportedly invited back, including to Honda's test facility near the Nürburgring, to help tune the suspension further as the car approached production sign-off. The involvement of a reigning Formula One champion in a road car's chassis development, at a company that also happened to supply his engines, is one of the more genuinely well-documented crossovers between top-level motorsport and a production sports car, even if the precise sequence of test sessions is easier to find in enthusiast retellings than in a single definitive Honda document.

The production NSX launched in Japan in September 1990, badged Honda at home and Acura in North America and Hong Kong. That was itself a notable moment, since the NSX was effectively the flagship that established Acura's credibility as a standalone luxury-performance marque in the US market. Under the rear deck sat a 3.0-liter C30A V6, mounted longitudinally amidships and driving the rear wheels, with Honda's VTEC variable valve timing arriving on some manual-transmission markets from 1991 to sharpen the top-end. A Targa-roof NSX-T joined the range for 1995, and later manual cars gained a larger 3.2-liter C32B engine paired with a six-speed gearbox. Throughout, the car's reputation rested less on outright numbers against Ferrari's contemporaries and more on a different proposition: everyday drivability, visibility, and ergonomics that most exotics of the era simply did not offer, wrapped around genuine mid-engine handling balance.

For the purists, Honda built two homologation-flavored NSX-R editions, sold only in Japan and stripped of nearly everything not needed to go fast: the original NA1-chassis Type R from 1992, and a second run on the updated NA2 chassis with the 3.2-liter engine in 2002, close to the end of the first generation's life. The NSXPrime register counts 483 of the 1992 car. For the 2002 car, Honda's own corporate retrospective gives 140, while a dedicated chassis registry and two specialist dealers give 152, one of them citing a build plate that reads '149/152'. First-generation production continued for a remarkably long fifteen years, ending on 30 November 2005 without a direct successor, and the NSX name went quiet for more than a decade. The silence only deepened the reverence enthusiasts held for the original.

When the NSX returned in 2016, it returned with a fundamentally different engineering answer to the same brief. The second-generation NSX, internally the NC1, paired a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V6 with three electric motors: one integrated into the transmission to fill in torque and eliminate turbo lag, and two independent motors driving the front wheels for torque-vectoring cornering assistance. This Sport Hybrid SH-AWD system made the new NSX a genuinely different kind of hybrid supercar rather than an electrified afterthought bolted onto a combustion car. Just as significant as the powertrain was where it was built: Honda's Performance Manufacturing Center in Marysville, Ohio, making the NSX the first Acura or Honda model assembled entirely in the United States for both domestic sale and global export, a striking reversal of the "built in Japan, sold in America" pattern the original NSX had followed.

The second generation never approached the first generation's volumes, and Acura made no secret that it was, again, a low-volume flagship rather than a business built on unit sales. Acura announced the car's discontinuation and closed the run with a limited Type S variant, reportedly capped at 350 units, the bulk earmarked for the US with the remainder for Canada. The final car, a Type S finished in Gotham Gray, rolled off the Marysville line on 16 November 2022. Total NC1 production across the whole 2016–2022 run has been reported at roughly 2,900 cars worldwide, a fraction of the first generation's output. The price point was far higher, and the market, by the early 2020s, had far more competition for a hybrid mid-engine flagship than Honda faced with the original NSX against 1990s exotics.

Published production totals for the first-generation NSX do not split its fifteen-year life by chassis code: the 18,685-car first-generation total covers the NA1 and NA2 together. The NSX Prime production charts give North American sales by the same NA1/NA2/facelift year-windows enthusiasts use informally: roughly 6,833 cars sold in the US across the 1991-1996 window and about 1,359 across 1997-2001. Acura's own newsroom reports cumulative US sales of 8,733 through the end of 2004, and 248 more followed in the model's final year, 2005. Those are US sales figures, not global production.

Two Chief Engineers, One Continuous Brief

Shigeru Uehara's path to leading the original NSX began well before the project had a name. He joined Honda R&D in 1971 and spent more than a decade becoming the company's in-house specialist in vehicle stability and handling, exactly the discipline a mid-engine exotic would need most, before Honda appointed him Large Project Leader in 1985 for the mid-ship project that eventually became the NSX program in 1990. Uehara later described the assignment in terms that make clear how much weight Honda's leadership placed on it: the company, he said, wanted a car that could "bridge its mass production FF models and F-1 cars," a new face for Honda rather than simply another model in the range. This background bears on the well-known Ayrton Senna chassis-tuning story: Senna's input mattered because Uehara's team had already spent years building the specific competence in ride, handling, and structural rigidity that let them act on his criticism quickly rather than starting from scratch.

When the NSX returned in 2016, Honda handed the equivalent brief to a different kind of chief engineer working in a different country. Ted Klaus served as chief engineer and global development leader of the second-generation, NC1 NSX, working alongside Ryoji Tsukamoto as the large project leader based in Japan. It was a binational leadership structure that mirrored the car's binational manufacturing story at Marysville, Ohio. Klaus's Honda career did not end with the NC1's launch: he went on to become president of Honda Performance Development, the division responsible for Acura's North American sports-car racing programs, which put him in charge of exactly the kind of factory-backed GT racing effort that the NSX nameplate would go on to compete in for the rest of the decade.

Le Mans, Super GT, and a Quarter-Century on Track

The NSX's competition record runs in an unbroken line from the original car's earliest years to well past the second generation's retirement, and it is richer than the model's road-car reputation for civility might suggest. Honda entered three NSXs in the GT2 class at the 1994 24 Hours of Le Mans; the best-placed of the three, driven by Armin Hahne, Christophe Bouchot, and Bertrand Gachot, finished 14th overall and 5th in class. It was a respectable but unspectacular showing. The following year told a different story. While two heavily turbocharged NSXs entered in the faster GT1 class both faltered during the race, a third car, still in GT2 specification and entered by Team Kunimitsu, won its class outright and finished 8th overall. Its driving line-up reads like a roll call of Japanese motorsport history: team founder Kunimitsu Takahashi, later remembered as the "grandfather of drifting"; Keiichi Tsuchiya, the "Drift King" who helped popularize drifting as a discipline in its own right; and Akira Iida. By most accounts, it marked the first time an all-Japanese team had won a class at Le Mans in a Japanese car. That made the win a significant milestone for both the NSX and for Japanese motorsport more broadly, achieved with a production-derived GT2 car rather than a purpose-built prototype.

Domestically, the NSX-GT built an even longer competitive record. Team Kunimitsu brought the car, based on the same Le Mans-winning GT2 specification, into Japan's JGTC (later Super GT) GT500 class in 1996, and Honda turned it into a full factory program from 1997 onward, fielding as many as four works cars by 1998. The results compounded over decades rather than seasons: by the end of the 2020 season, Honda's GT500 NSX-GT program had accumulated 58 race wins, five drivers' championships, and six teams' championships, before the car finally retired from the series after the 2023 season. It was one of the longest continuously competitive one-model racing programs in modern Japanese motorsport.

From the IMSA Podium to the Gran Turismo Garage

The second-generation NSX's own racing chapter, the Acura NSX GT3, was built in partnership with Italy's JAS Motorsport and made its competition debut at the 2017 Rolex 24 at Daytona with Michael Shank Racing. Over the following seven seasons it collected 38 class wins across IMSA and SRO-sanctioned competition worldwide, two manufacturers' championships, five drivers' titles, and four teams' titles, receiving two significant technical evolutions along the way, in 2019 and again in 2022, before running its final IMSA GTD race at the 2024 Petit Le Mans. Between the first-generation NSX-GT's Super GT program and the NC1-era NSX GT3's IMSA and SRO record, Honda and Acura kept some version of the NSX on a professional racing grid for very nearly thirty consecutive years.

Away from real racetracks, the original NSX became one of the defining cars of an entire genre of racing video games: some version of the model has appeared in essentially every mainline Gran Turismo title since the franchise's 1997 debut, with the circuit-focused NSX Type R '92 in particular treated by the game's own fan community as a series constant. That kind of sustained digital presence, running in parallel with the car's real motorsport record, has fed directly into a collector market that has moved dramatically over two decades: reported values for clean first-generation NSXs climbed from roughly $80,000-90,000, near original sticker price, around 2000, through the $120,000-150,000 range by 2010 and $200,000-250,000 by 2015, before pristine cars began breaking $300,000 around 2020. The rarest cars have gone further still: a post-facelift NSX-R reportedly sold at auction for $1,060,516, a record price for a Honda-built car of any kind. The NSX began as a usable, everyday alternative to a temperamental Italian exotic.