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2017 Acura NSX

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If a 3868-pound, all-wheel-drive hybrid strikes you as a curious sequel to the original bantamweight NSX, you're not alone. As vehicle-performance lead engineer Jason Widmer tells it, the initial prospect of a gas-electric NSX caused as much hand-wringing within Honda's hallways as raised eyebrows outside them. In the early days of the new car, NSX mules consistently laid down faster laps without the battery-electric assist system that was supposed to make the thing quicker.

That was more than five years ago, and the NSX's hybrid-electric system is now a fully developed piece of go-faster kit. The car rolling out of Marysville, Ohio, seamlessly combines two turbochargers, three electric motors, four driven wheels, six cylinders, and nine forward gears to produce bona fide supercar performance. That won't make it any less controversial; there are an infinite number of ideas as to what a resurrected NSX should have been. The concept that won out is a rolling testbed for the future of performance technology. "You will not find a car in this category in 10 years that won't have electrification. I'm confident on that," Widmer says.

So are we. The NSX isn't the first of its kind to mesh electrons and hydrocarbons in the pursuit of speed, but give Acura credit for so rapidly democratizing the technology. Even with a starting price of $157,800, the NSX is hard evidence of the kind of trickle-down economics that actually works. Sacrificing a fraction of the performance and the pure-electric driving capability of the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder netted Acura a $700,000 price cut for its mid-engined hero.

Widmer may have been talking about McLarens, Lambor*ghinis, and Ferraris when he made his 10-year prediction, but the electrification of performance won't stop at supercars. Defying physics, the electrons are poised to flow into iconic performance cars where there's even more resistance. Hybridized 911s and BMW M3s are an eventuality, not just a possibility. This NSX is a preview of things to come.

For Acura, the hybrid system that supplements the 500-hp V-6 plays perfectly to the character of the NSX, both old and new. Just like the original, the modern NSX is every bit as civilized as it is quick. The open sightlines, the wide cabin, and the seats that accommodate the average American are as notable in this class as are the electric motors that give it instant off-the-line thrust. It's a supercar without a God complex, as unpretentious as a car with an engine behind the driver and a six-figure price on the window can possibly be.



More than any other modern car, the NSX is a product of whichever of its four modes-quiet, sport, sport-plus, and track-is active at the moment. Along with the usual calibration tweaks to the electrically assisted steering, adaptive dampers, and stability-control system, the NSX takes on a different persona depending on how it blends internal combustion and electric thrust.

Not That Sporty: Sport Mode
Because there's nothing "normal" about a 573-hp, torque-vectoring, gas-electric mid-engined Acura, engineers named the NSX's default street mode "sport." It strikes us as a misnomer, though, because getting the NSX to accelerate enthusiastically in this mode requires big, deliberate throttle inputs. It's best suited to urban settings, where the low-end torque of the electric motors-two up front and a third, larger unit mated to the engine-pulls the NSX off the line faster than traffic, but without spinning the engine much beyond 3000 rpm.

The chassis is always awake even if the powertrain isn't. With $1960 worth of Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R tires gluing the wheels to the pavement, our test car faithfully transmitted every minute steering input to the road regardless of the mode. Even as the steering weight ramps up with the more aggressive settings, the NSX turns in with zeal and precision. Most impressive, the NSX never belies its weight, no matter how fast the speed or how sharp the corner. Turns feel effortless, and as long as the pavement is smooth, the body remains flat.

That body is as much a hybrid as is the powertrain. It's made primarily of aluminum castings, stampings, and extrusions, but the A-pillars, roof beams, and windshield header are all made of steel, meaning there is more ferrous metal in the body of this NSX than in the 27-year-old original. The front floorboards are the only structural carbon-fiber bits, although $21,600 will buy just enough carbon fiber to reskin the roof, engine cover, splitter, sills, diffuser, and spoiler as seen on our $202,960 test car. The outer panels are a mix of formed aluminum and molded plastics.

Not That Quiet: Quiet Mode
Compared with the mild-mannered sport mode, quiet mode is the self-effacing, almost apologetic way to pilot a low-slung, Valencia Red Pearl–painted, origami supercar through a crowd; it kills the V-6 whenever possible. It is not, however, a truly silent mode. The engine still fires when you start the car in quiet mode, though it revs only as high as the 1500-rpm fast idle and sounds as fierce as a Honda Odyssey mini*van warming its cata*lysts. Once the powertrain is hot, quiet mode largely behaves like an aggressive stop-start system.

If you were expecting to slice through town with the swift, mute moves of a Tesla, you'd be disappointed. With a small *lithium-ion battery pack (Acura will only say its capacity is "approximately one kilowatt-hour") and less than a Honda Civic's worth of horsepower from the electric motors, the NSX rarely gets above walking speed without firing the engine. It prefers to ride the 3.5-liter V-6 to cruising speed and then sail on electrons up to 50 mph when the road is flat or downhill.

Quiet mode doesn't soften the suspension or lighten the steering. It's merely a dimmer switch for the gas engine, shifting more work to the electric motors and exercising the battery harder. The NSX rebuts any attempts to drive hard in this mode. It disables the paddle shifters and causes the transmission to short-shift at 4000 rpm when the accelerator is pegged. And while quiet mode turns down the volume both inside and outside the car by closing the exhaust bypass valves and the intake resonator pipe, it hardly feels tranquil from the driver's seat. The constant on-off-on of the engine quickly becomes tiresome.

Waking Up the NSX: Sport-Plus Mode
The obvious panacea is sport-plus, in which the gas engine never shut off and we never saw the nine-speed transmission shift higher than sixth gear on its own accord. Sport-plus redraws the tachometer to cover 9000 rpm, rather than 8000, but the redline remains unchanged at 7500 rpm, which is also where the boosted V-6 makes its peak 500 horsepower.

The engine's unusual 75-degree V angle results in a shorter and thus strengthened crankshaft relative to a 60-degree design, and a narrower overall width compared with a 90-degree unit. Forged internals include the crankshaft, connecting rods, and valves. Fuel is injected alternately into either the combustion chambers or the intake ports to maximize both power and efficiency. Yet the engine never sounds nor drives as exotically as it reads on paper.

That's the side effect of performance-enhancing electric motors. They smooth the power delivery to the point that they mask the full contribution of the gas-fed engine. Flatten the accelerator and the NSX stirs the motors, the turbos, and the reciprocating pistons into a cascade of low-end torque, midrange boost, and high-end power. If you could separate the sensation from the intake-resonance tube singing just behind your skull, it would evoke the initial torque swell of an electric vehicle with the seemingly endless pull of a 9000-rpm Porsche. Even during part-throttle shifts, gear*changes register strictly audibly, with the motors masking the momentary blip in gas-engine torque. Our VBOX test equipment, which logs data 100 times per second, failed to detect any slackening in the speed trace when the transmission shifted.

Left in automatic mode in sport-plus, the gearbox will downshift under braking, though not very aggressively. The transmission prefers to keep revs between 3000 and 4000 rpm, and it feels more natural to find the right gear on your own with the paddle shifters. Even then, the transmission often denies the final downshift into first gear as you slow for a stop sign, and it's only as you stomp on the accelerator that you discover the aggravation of still being in second.
Acura resisted the temptation to provide a separate damper calibration for every drive mode, which is fine by us. The Germans often get mired in creating a *different but similarly compromised tune for each drive mode. Based on feel alone, Acura's two settings use a fairly narrow portion of the bandwidth afforded by magnetorheological dampers, with one position covering sport-plus and track modes and a softer tune for quiet and sport.

While the softer position nicely balances ride quality and body control, the stiffer position proved too much on our 10Best loop. The NSX skipped over lumpy sections, the engine revs surging and sagging as the rear tires shifted between light and loaded, which is unsettling busyness that saps confidence. Sport mode's more compliant damping kept the body planted and allowed a faster pace over the same stretch of road. Unfortunately, there's no way to decouple the damper settings from the drive mode.

Supercar Demeanor, Engaged: Track Mode
In track, the NSX begins to reveal some slightly raw edges and finally begins to feel like what it is-a mid-engined supercar. It's the rare car that will crash into the rev limiter, rather than automatically upshift during launch-control runs with the trans in manual mode. Track provides a tame launch with a relatively soft clutch engagement from 2500 rpm and no wheelspin, but there's no mistaking the smeared landscape for anything other than speed. Sixty mph arrives in 3.1 seconds, and the quarter-mile requires just 11.2.

Those figures are plenty quick, but the competition seems to challenge Widmer's assertion that "the reason we have electrification is for performance." In our August 2016 "Junior Achievement" comparison, the NSX's rivals-the Audi R8 V-10 Plus, the McLaren 570S, and the Porsche 911 Turbo S-all delivered quicker acceleration without any electric assist. And they did so carrying at least 150 pounds less each.

You can feel the NSX's urge relaxing near 120 mph as the two 36-hp front motors fade out. Their purpose is more sophisticated than simple straight-line speed, though. The motors do as much to turn the NSX as they do to accelerate the car, and they are never more effective at that task than in track mode. The NSX's relatively low-torque, front-axle vectoring makes for a decidedly different feeling compared with the rear-axle action we've come to know well. A torque-vectoring rear differential, like that found in a Lexus GS F, often provides a tightly controlled drift. In the NSX, the front motors simply pull the car down toward the apex, tightening the trajectory instead of increasing the car's slip angle. The effect is closer to breathing off the throttle rather than inducing power oversteer.

The NSX rarely wants to let its rear tires slip, and with 1.06 g's of lateral grip from the Trofeo Rs, it rarely wants to slide the front tires, either. The handling balance is practically as harmless as in any Acura sedan, which some might interpret as the ultimate dis from a car magazine. It's not intended as such here. You want a car that drifts every time you look sideways? Buy a V-8 Chevy Camaro. All-wheel drive and a mid-mounted engine are good at delivering buttoned-up composure. The NSX is no exception.

The NSX's 70-to-zero stopping distance measures a truncated 142 feet on the $9900 carbon-ceramic brakes. The braking system is essentially a brake-by-wire arrangement with pedal movement translated into electrical signals that are parsed to blend the regenerative braking from the electric motors and the clamping forces of the hydraulic calipers. The pedal is slightly springy when you stand on it, but otherwise it allays the common critique of hybrid brakes: that they are inconsistent and difficult to modulate. Once your foot is recali*brated to the feel, the NSX provides predictable and linear progression every time you go to the left pedal.

The hybrid powertrain is the single thin thread tying the NSX to the rest of the Acura showroom. There isn't a single legitimate sports sedan in the Acura lineup to bathe in the glow of the halo radiating from the NSX, and that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Instead, Acura can only brag that the electric components are essentially a mirrored reflection of the system used in the RLX Sport Hybrid.

Acura could highlight the NSX's electric hardware if it would mimic Tesla's strategy of activating full regen braking when the driver lifts off the throttle, either in the less sporty driving modes or with a standalone, selectable option. One-pedal driving becomes another connection to the machine, allowing the driver to be an active participant in managing the battery charge and timing accelerator application with greater intention. If we were Acura, we'd consider it.

We apparently weren't too considerate with the right pedal, because we averaged 17 mpg in our time with the NSX, well off the NSX's 21-mpg EPA combined rating. While the 21-mpg city rating is unmatched by the competition, the 22-mpg highway rating is below that of the 570S and the 911 Turbo S.

The irony of the NSX is that it's far more impressive for its chassis than for the complex hybrid system that serves as its reason for being. Maybe that's because the handling really is that good. Or maybe it's because Acura is still searching for the perfect daily-use driving mode, somewhere between sport-plus and sport. You can be sure that Acura is in a race to perfect its hybrid system with multiple competitors currently prepping similar arrangements. Give it a few more years of development. But let's hope Acura keeps the chassis the way it is.



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