2020 Acura NSX

When it debuted back in 2016, the NSX was a long-awaited revival of the esteemed Acura supercar of the 1990s. The first generation was a relatively affordable mid-engine sports car with distinctive looks, excellent track performance, and undeniable street cred among fans of Japanese performance cars. The reborn NSX, however, was very much its own thing, and very much of the moment—that is, a supercar that looked like a proper supercar. This characteristic irked many, who felt it wasn’t a faithful extension of the original car’s gestalt. It was nevertheless an outstanding car.

Now, it’s even more of one. The A mild refresh for 2019 brought stiffer front and rear anti-roll bars, added stiffer rear toe link bushings and fitted Continental’s SportContact 6 tires in place of the ContiSportContact 5P rubber from the previous year. Cosmetic tweaks hone the design, and a variety of software enhancements boost its performance in different drive modes. But the core strengths remain: It uses a genius powertrain design to deliver immediate power wherever you need it. 

There are two electric motors at the front wheels and another electric motor integrated into the V6 engine. The result is incredibly precise torque-vectoring, with power sent to whichever wheel needs it most for traction, and in whatever fashion—more here, less here—will help it pivot around turns the fastest. You sense it working, and it’s hard to contextualize, but it works.

On both street and track, there’s precious little that the NSX can’t do. It’s fast, sticks like mad in the turns, yet it feels eminently controllable under any circumstance. This is almost to a fault—the traction control system is so good that you sometimes wish it would let go just a hair, so you can feel the backend slide around a bit in spirited driving. Ah well—can’t have everything. But you can still have acceleration that presses you back into the seat and cornering ability that borders on otherworldly. You’ll be forgiven for being a bit spooked by it the first time you experience it.

It also has features that seem just now to be emerging in various conversations, including a hybrid system that always maintains a minimum charge level so that you’re never short of a power boost when you need it. That is, the torque-vectoring system always has the juice it needs.

To say that the NSX—which was initially slagged for being both too supercar-like and not quite supercar enough—is being “reconsidered” after just two years on the market is perhaps overstating it, but its reputation is definitely ascendant. It’s hard to argue with the technology, which includes a hand-built engine that’s unique to this car and which serves as the foundation for the GT3 Evo race car and its hybrid setup. 

If there are quibbles, it’s the usual supercar stuff—minimal rear visibility, track-ready seats best suited to someone who’s invariably 30 pounds lighter or two-inches shorter than you are, etc. But it’s undeniably a world-class sports car, even if it does have to turn its back on some of what made the original NSX so appealing to its crowd. Are those “equivalent” buyers priced out of the NSX today? To an extent, yes—the $60,000 entry point of the car in 1992 is equivalent to $107,000 in 2018 dollars. Given that the new NSX started at around $150,000 in 2016, this is absolutely a different kind of car. But Honda set out to make the best sports car it could, just as it did the first time around, and the technology it chose to infuse in the vehicle doesn’t come cheap. Yet despite this, it’s still priced below most other supercars it competes with, and that’s a very big deal.