No Fixed Abode: Since You Won't Eat Your Vegetables, Honda Is Eating Crow With the NSX

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

Psst… Have I got a deal for you! There’s a low-profile $30,000 factory incentive out there on a really great mid-engined supercar. You could be looking at just $1,500 a month on a lease, which is about what you’d pay to buy a new Corvette Grand Sport over five years. Or you might get a car with a $165k sticker for just $122,000. Are you FREAKING OUT right now? Or are you waiting for me to tell you which one?

Well, let’s see… It’s not the Ford GT, because those are sold out. It’s not the Ferrari 488GTB, which is on a waiting list and subject to $100k worth of additional dealer markup. It’s not the Lamborghini Huracan, used examples of which are fetching close to MSRP. It’s not even the Audi R8, which has some nice lease programs at the moment but which still generally sells for sticker or close to it.

You know what I’m going to tell you, of course. You know it’s the Acura NSX. From day one it’s been a tough sell and, while I’d like to think that the 2017 Road & Track Performance Car Of The Year accolade helped the showroom traffic a bit, I’d be naive to think that it was enough to move the needle too far. Starting next year, NSXes will be special order only. If you want a car out of dealer stock, now’s the time to do it and Honda will throw $30k worth of cash on the frunk to make it happen.

Maybe it’s time to ask why this state of affairs came to pass — but I bet you already know that, too.


Approximately a decade ago, Honda decided to embark upon a course of corporate action that I like to think of as forcible vegetable ingestion. Some of you will remember this from your childhoods; Mom wouldn’t let you leave the table to go play baseball or whatever until you ate all your vegetables. Didn’t that suck? But you had no choice, because Mom was in charge of the house and you’d made inquiries to both the Merchant Marines and the French Foreign Legion only to find they weren’t accepting eleven-year-olds in headlong flight from nothing more serious than some mandatory asparagus.

Honda’s version of the above policy was a statement that, “Each new Honda model will consume less fuel than its predecessor.” While this would be relatively admirable were it to come from, say, Bentley, to say nothing of being little trouble besides, in the case of Honda there was a strong blood-from-a-stone aspect to it. It ensured that there would be no follow-up to the S2000 and that new variants of the Civic Si would lag the competition more and more each year. It turned the CR-Z from a hotly-anticipated teenage dream to a retirement village golf cart alternative.

And then there’s the NSX. I should point out that it is an outstanding car that astutely makes the case for a performance hybrid powertrain. To drive the NSX is to love it. But to consider the NSX as a proposition on paper is to become severely disappointed. This is made worse by the fact that Honda had a whole generation full of massively wealthy potential buyers who cut their teeth on slammed Civics and the like. They were champing at the bit for the fastest Honda money could buy and they weren’t gonna be too particular about how much money it took. All Honda had to do was to repeat the original NSX formula.

What was the original NSX formula? It wasn’t “technologically-advanced aluminum-and-titanium marvel.” That might have been the sales pitch, and it might have been the engineering team’s guiding principle, but it wasn’t what drew people to the car. The real NSX formula is, “Faster than a Ferrari, and more durable, for about two-thirds of the money.”

Honda could have easily done it. There’s enough room in the NSX for a biturbo V8, which is the current supercar powertrain of choice. You can’t tell me that the Ohio R&D team couldn’t have cooked up something to beat the 488GTB at its own game. The price would have been about the same. But it wouldn’t have met with corporate approval. It wouldn’t have forced the customers to eat their hybrid vegetables.

So instead we have the NSX as it sits today. People don’t want it, because they don’t want a hybrid supercar that isn’t called a LaFerrari. And while you can make poor people and middle-class people eat their vegetables in the showroom, you can’t make the one-percent crowd do anything they don’t want to do. They’ll buy a Lambo or a McLaren 650S instead. Maybe they thought the “techy” aspect of the hybrid powertrain would help them sell in San Jose. I could have told them otherwise. The young men who cash in their IPOs don’t want technology any more than a butcher wants to go home and argue with his wife over which cut of meat to cook for dinner. They want the fastest car they can get, and they want it to sound vicious. In other words, they want a Ferrari 488GTB.

Everybody knows how Honda could save this situation. They could sell a non-hybrid NSX at a lower price. It would sell — not like a 700-horse biturbo V8 would have sold, but better than the current product. What’s required here is a willingness to admit that a mistake was made. Your guess as to whether that willingness exists is as good or better than mine. Failing that, they could lower the price the way the Viper team did in that car’s final year. It would be better for morale than doing secret incentive programs that won’t stay secret.

My advice to Honda: Dump the hybrid system, cut the weight, put in a manual box, price it at $129,999, and let it eat the lunch money of the Porsche 911 GTS and AMG GT S. You’ve made your point. You showed that you could deliver 90 percent of a Porsche 918 for 15 percent of the price. You showed that you could create a silent supercar with Accord-level fuel economy. Now step aside and let the enthusiasts take a crack at it. That’s what the old Honda would have done. That was a company focused on delivering the best possible product regardless of conventional wisdom or marketplace chatter.

Give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? The dealerships would have to dust off their 1981-era stock of additional-dealer-markup stickers?

[Image: Honda]

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • SunnyvaleCA SunnyvaleCA on Oct 27, 2017

    "You showed that you could create a silent supercar with Accord-level fuel economy" Not sure what figures you're using but it looks like EPA figures are 21/22. The outgoing "worst" Honda Accord (which is, of course, the best Accord) was the V6 Coupe with manual transmission, which benched 18/28. With the automatic and V6 you got 21/32. Heck, even a Porsche 911 Turbo gives EPA benchmarks of 21/24. This, while costing about the same, acing every acceleration test, and sounding terrific in the process. I think the big thing the NSX has going for it is that it looks awesome and is unique. The original NSX could hang its hat on "mid engine" before the Boxster and Cayman came out and before the Carrera morphed to a weight balance similar to most mid-engined cars. But Porsche kind of has this new NSX hemmed in on all sides with it's current broad lineup. With Porsche you can get more or less expensive, mid or rear engined, automatic or manual, 2 or 4 seats, convertible or hardtop, RWD or AWD. And, although a Cayman/Boxster/Carrera isn't "unique" on the road, the interiors can certainly be optioned up to be unique.

  • Vook Vook on Oct 28, 2017

    Agreed. To me, it seems as though Honda has burdened Acura with the task of selling customers what they need as opposed to selling what they want. That's called car selling 101, isn't it? I so wanted to see a light weight and powerful new NSX (as you described) and acknowledge Honda's technical abilities with the current car, however it's not what I want.

  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
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