In the late 1980s a supercar had to be a street legal, high performance car, it had to have a terrifying pricetag, and it had to push the outside of an envelope. Lamborghini and Ferrari were the two Italian manufacturers that were making the first production supercars but were not doing as good as they should have. The Lamborghini Countach had flaws when it came to ergonomics, it was terribly difficult to see out of, it was ungainly, clumsy, and drove like a tractor according to most owners. Ferrari did not do much better with their 328, with its lack of power steering and weird pedal placement; they were not cars you could drive daily or easily afford. That all changed in 1990 when a small company known to make economic, front-wheel drive cars completely changed the definition of the word “supercar” and pioneered a completely new way of making production cars.

When the Honda NSX was first introduced in 1990, it was heralded as a new type of supercar. Honda engineers designed the NSX to be a no-compromises car with an emphasis on high performance and handling while still being easy to drive on a daily basis. The NSX was the world’s first all-aluminum monocoque body production car, featured an electronically controlled all-wheel drive system, and was the introduction of v-tec to America.

The NSX project leader, Shigeru Uehara, and his team set out to outperform Ferrari’s 328 in 1985, which was seen as a difficult car. Honda did not make difficult cars. They made cars that were reliable, respectable, well performing, and easy to drive, and Uehara wanted to apply that to their sports cars as well. To him, a Honda supercar meant being able to spend a day at a racetrack and drive home all in one piece. Honda’s vision of the NSX may seem tame now, but in 1985 they were making history.

Uehara and his team plotted out every competitive sports car on a graph comparing power to weight, vehicle weight, and wheelbase and what they found was that the competition all fit into a similar section on the graph. They then plotted the current Formula One car on the graph. It stood out from all of their competitors; they now had a target. Uehara would push the NSX as close as it could to the Formula One balance of power, weight, and dimensions; thus, it would go beyond what every other sports car and supercar at the time was doing and would stand alone. They did not want to make a sports car the Italian or American way of simply adding a lot of horsepower or cylinders until it was fast. They had to be clever, and they definitely struggled to balance the car’s weight and power. 

Uehara’s team was inspired by the bullet trains used in japan which were made of aluminum. Up to this point, no manufacturer had ever made an all-aluminum monocoque production car before. Using the aluminum body helped them not just balance their car’s weight and power but it made the NSX more reliable, 200 pounds lighter, and most importantly, it revolutionized the use of aluminum in the automotive industry. 

The NSX was set to debut at the 1989 Chicago Auto Show ,and the team decided to put a single cam Accord engine on it, which was a huge disappointment to the president of Honda, Tadashi Kume, when he revved up the engine at the auto show. His discovery of the engine without v-tec made him press the team of engineers, who told him v-tec was only planned for four-cylinder engines. Kume got furious and forced the NSX team to develop an entirely new six-cylinder v-tec engine. Those engineers made history because the C30a engine was Honda’s best yet, a three litre dual cam v6, which was the second Honda engine equipped with v-tec technology. This would be the first time America felt v-tec kick in. This helped Honda’s NSX not just be a pretty face, unlike the American DeLorean. However the car was not perfect. In 1989 the famed Formula One champion Ayrton Senna was in Japan to test out a McLaren, which was powered by a Honda engine at the time and was invited to drive the team’s NSX prototype. Senna’s input was that it was a bit “fragile.”This led engineers to take the NSX back under the knife, and it emerged months later 50% stiffer. this was maximum effort from Honda, and their efforts paid off.

Consumers were shocked to see such a fast, sleek, elegant car coming from an economy car brand, and Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche were probably shocked as well, seeing a car that beat them at half the price, and it was actually drivable. On paper, the NSX is almost laughable, the v6, no turbos, no supercharger, under 300 horsepower and some might say understated styling. But the NSX was never about numbers; it was about balance. In the right hands the NSX was as deadly and fast as anything the likes of Ferrari, Porsche, or Lamborghini hoped to achieve in a racecar. This made them target reliability and for Ferrari, speed. Gordon Murray, the designer of one the greatest supercars, the McLaren F1, cites the NSX as direct inspiration; it was the benchmark that the world’s first hypercar was set against, some might say.