This is agony: a prolonged, unnerving, and cruel tease.
Way back in January of 2012, Acura—Honda's fancy-pants division—put the NSX Concept on display at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Finally, here was confirmation that a successor to the brilliant original NSX midengine sports car was under development. Then, in 2013, a second NSX Concept appeared in Detroit with a more completely realized interior and the promise that a midengine supercar similar to it in appearance would enter production in "about two years."
All that's missing are the details: what will power the beast (though we know it will be a gas–electric hybrid incorporating some sort of V-6 engine), when exactly it's going on sale, how many will be built, and the ballpark in which its price will land. Honda has dribbled out the facts that the car will be engineered and built in North America. The NSX will be sold around the world as an Acura wherever that brand exists, and as a Honda everywhere else. Thin gruel.
So it was with giddy hopefulness that PM joined in on a conference call with Ted Klaus, the American who is chief engineer on the new NSX. Maybe, just maybe, he'd spill the all-alloy beans about the substance of the next NSX. Just maybe, all our anticipatory frustrations would drain away. Well, at least some of them. Okay, a few.
Klaus, it turns out, joined Honda back in 1990, shortly after the first NSX went on sale and just in time to join the chassis-dynamics engineering staff working on the well-loved 1993 Acura Integra GS-R. His big project before the NSX was the integration of electromechanical all-wheel drive and active dampening in the 2007 Acura MDX. And until his current assignment, he was the chief dynamic evaluator for North American products. Good experience going in on a project like the new NSX, which (we assume) is going to push the technological frontiers in those areas.
"On a personal note, I love cars," Klaus says. "I love driving cars. For me personally, part of maintaining that balance in my life of work versus happiness is just getting in a car and driving it. Or just seeing a beautiful car. And having that intimate experience of driving a car. That really recharges my spiritual battery. And that's why I'm superexcited, and probably why I was chosen for this project. Because that's the key attribute of any sports car, and certainly the NSX."
So where will the NSX be in the sports-car universe? "In order to understand the space we intend to occupy," Klaus explains, "you have to understand the space the original vehicle occupied. We're calling it NSX, and that stands for New Sportscar eXperimental. That's what it has always stood for and that's what it will stand for. So first and foremost we had to understand—how will we as a team create this new sports experience? How will we experiment? How will we come up with new methodologies to achieve those timeless sports-car values?"
"'Human fit' is designing the vehicle around the driver. And the driver is the smartest control element of the vehicle. We can never make the vehicle smarter than the driver. So human fit is all about getting the vehicle out of the way of the driver. And then related to this human fit and this user-friendliness, the key dynamic element is this 'vivid response.' So the space the NSX will occupy is a space that's driver-centric, it's respectful of the larger, broader, timeless sports-car values. But it's our own space defined by the first-gen NSX. Which is tremendous sensitivity to the driver, supporting the driver, giving the driver a partner to go out and experience pure driving pleasure. Then the issue is one of what I call gain. You know, how fast? As you're experiencing pure driving pleasure, how fast can you go around the track? Maintaining that sense that the driver is the center of the performance."
Is all that philosophically compatible with an electric–hybrid drivetrain? "It's a servant to the driver," Klaus contends. "So when the driver pushes on the throttle, the electric motor is there, creating the type of response that is consistent with a very lightweight, low-mass vehicle." Klaus says the same can be said for the torque-vectoring capacity that Honda has developed going back to the Prelude, and for braking too. "This is for the driver. This is to put a smile on the driver's face."
While Honda is closely guarding the actual launch date for the new NSX, Klaus says, the date really does exist. "The development is proceeding on a very specific schedule, and the development team is in place," Klaus says. "We're leading that development in Ohio. The powertrain is being led in Japan. We're all systems go."
Of course, the next NSX will be pricey. But in today's sports-car market there's $100,000 pricey, $200,000 pricey, $800,000 pricey, like the upcoming Porsche 918, and $1 million-plus pricey, like the stunning Ferrari LaFerrari. "We've always been compared to the pinnacle Ferrari of its day and age," Klaus says. "That's the 458 Italia in today's day and age. But the legacy of NSX is that amazing affordability as well. So within the range of the [Porsche] 911, which isn't saying much. But the point is that the person who will be excited to own and drive this vehicle will have a tremendous sense that they have the best combination of technologies to give them their desired sports-car experience . . . at a price that's only a fraction of those vehicles looking up."
There will be only 100 Honda employees assembling the NSX at the new Performance Manufacturing Center currently under construction in an existing building at Honda's Marysville, Ohio, property. There are few details about exactly how the NSX will be built. But whether that is a traditional moving assembly line or some other process, with only 100 workers in the plant it's unlikely that there will be a lot of new NSXs produced
So, after this conference call, what do we know? Just enough that we want to know much more and to stoke the desire to drive it. And that's more than enough to keep the agony of this tease going.
Courtesy of Popular Mechanics
