I distinctly remember the first time I drove an Acura NSX.

This is the kind of thing people say when they talk about legendary cars. It's often followed by hyperbole, because the person in question was either amazed ("THAT CAR WAS INCREDIBLE!!WTFpuppies") or not amazed and is attempting to seem punk-rock by knocking a beloved icon. (Google-friendly terms with which to learn more about this: "Internet," "traffic whoring," "jaded-ass clickbait.")

Both of these approaches are ridiculous as fuel for an interesting discussion. They miss the nuance, and every good car has nuance, because cars are a human product. Like people, no human product is 100 percent good or bad, even the ones famous for being good or bad. Examples: The Mazda Miata is cheap and wonderful but, in the pantheon of great sports cars, ultimately bland next to something like an Alfa Spider. The Renault Le Car was a roly-poly pile of goat feces, but few small hatchbacks are more fun in traffic. Walt Disney wasn't a saint; Hitler and Idi Amin probably had redeeming qualities in the dark recesses of their livers or toe jam or something.

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That said: I drove an NSX once. I was not impressed.

Set aside the sentiment for a moment—even having an opinion about the NSX's road manners is a privilege. This is not a common car, and most of the ones sold here came early in the production run, with fat tires and tall, old-school-supercar gearing. I wasn't working in this business at the car's launch and somehow missed driving an NSX until 2013. An acquaintance who used to work for Car and Driver (Hi Dave!) bought one after a long search, and he was nice enough to let me drive his car around Detroit. He was employed by C/D when NSXs were still in production, and he'd wanted one forever. As we backed the thing out of his driveway, he said something about never being able to get the car out of his head.

"OK," I thought, "Fair enough. Know the problem."

Car and Driver's Pat Bedard called the Acura "the first mid-engine supercar that doesn't act like a parole violator." You climb into that cockpit in the 21st century, it just seems old. And not steel-dash-and-carburetors old, just forgettably recent. In high school, my best friend's mom had a late Acura Vigor. (Side note: We need more cars named with words that mean "physical strength" and date to Middle English.) The NSX's interior was like the Vigor's, if the whole car had been flattened in a hydraulic press and sprayed with leather. The door tops were lower. The controls were intelligently placed. Everything seemed carved out of that weird and indestructible hard plastic found in every Japanese four-door from 1988 to 1999.

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That engine, with its titanium rods and 8000-rpm redline, sounded surprisingly like nothing, just understated Japanese V-6. The induction honk at high rpm was nice, if quiet; every Ferrari I've driven, and even a few Civic Si's, would out-shout it. What's more, the gearing was long enough that you almost never heard the engine in its happy place. The shifter was long in throw and wandy. Not unpleasant or great, just there. It was fast but not exceedingly so; I imagined taking an NSX to a California canyon, only to be outgunned by some jerk in a slammed GTI with springs and bars.

It wasn't all quiet. The view out the windshield was fantastic—panoramic and tall, with the top of the dash seemingly a few inches above your navel. You could see out of the car in traffic. The cockpit was roomy. The manual steering was talkative and buttery, even by classic-car standards. Thousands of miles away, Alpine passes beckoned.

But you know all this. The reviews in period said this. This is the cliché.

"Dave," I said, "What made you buy this thing?"

We talked for a few minutes. He said all the right things, stuff I wanted to say but just couldn't feel in my gut. It just felt like… a car. And that's the problem, has always been the problem, is why people knock it: You drive something that looks like this, it ought to blow your hat in the creek. (Flashback to the early 1990s, when I was riding with my dad and saw an early NSX in our neighborhood. Me: "Hey, an Acura NSX!" Him: "That's no Acura." Me: "Yes! Yes it is! It's amazing! When I grow up and live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house on the moon with custom-engraved rocket launchers because I'm a famous spaceman hero president, I'm going to drive one of those!" Him: Silence, turns up radio.)

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An old friend once called driving the average Ferrari "fistfights and blowjobs." That's been true of every good exotic I've been in. We want our nutso cars to be nutso, to justify the expense, the looks, and the impracticality. Only the NSX, there was no nutso or impracticality. There was only a car that worked, that needed little maintenance over big mileage, that had been tuned by Shigeru Uehara and Ayrton Senna and Bobby Rahal (Uehara and Senna and Rahal!) There were exotic bits, and the car was definitely a serious, special achievement in construction and tuning, but its light was under a bushel. Driving around with Dave, I imagined owning one to be like owning an E30 M3 or a Civic Si—two other great cars that aren't blindingly quick or flashy. You try to tell your friends why you swoon, but they're not buying it. "No, really! The engine has piston speeds higher than blah blah blah! The rods are made of this! The cams do that!"

And then they look out the window and wonder why they're getting blown off by a minivan at a stop light, and why you spent your money on an obvious penis replacement that makes you seem… underhung.

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I couldn't get my head around the Acura, at least not in that drive. Dave, the owner, is a very smart guy; I respect his opinion immensely, and I wanted to like it. We parted ways, and I went home, a little disappointed.

And then I started thinking about it. It took weeks. I couldn't get the car out of my head. I wanted to know why. I wanted to figure out some kind of justification, to see what I'd missed. I spent lunch hours watching videos of Senna pitching NSXs around Suzuka. I read countless road tests of the thing, imagined chucking it along some foggy Wales B-road at warp speed like the guys at British Car Magazine X or Y. I hounded the classifieds and forums. Who wants one? Why? How? What do people with an NSX do when they're not selling or buying or obsessing over those paper-crease fenders with a glass of whiskey in a dark garage?

Turns out the answer is simple: They drive the ever-loving hell out of them.





Novel idea. Any Ferrari or Lamborghini owner will tell you cars like that spend a lot of time sitting. Parts are expensive, service moreso. (Don't believe the modern hype about that stuff being cheap if you're smart. I've been around enough blown-apart 512s and 328s and 360s on lifts and seen enough Ferrari parts catalogs. You can make it less expensive. But you own one for more than a year or two, it'll blow your wallet to pieces.) Every mile or nondealer service—cheaper than dealer service—knocks down resale, and few exotics are cheap enough that the average owner doesn't care about resale. Even the guys with multiple private jets think about this.

An old friend once called driving the average Ferrari "fistfights and blowjobs."

But NSX owners drive the piss out of their cars. They drive them constantly, for hundreds of thousands of miles, in all weather. (Aluminum cars largely shrug off winter and wet.) All that stuff that minimizes the drama over a 30-minute drive adds up to low fatigue, and you wanting to get back into the car over and over again, over 30 months. Or 60, or 90. It's marriage as opposed to one-night stand. Reading forum accounts, it's like the car specializes in a friendly, indestructible sort of intimacy. Some people use them every day, are proud of the door dings and battle scars. Many people track them, unafraid of burning through expensive this or that, because it barely happens, at least by exotic standards. And the joy is apparently how the car is simply there all the time. It's comfortable and quiet enough for road trips. Spouses like it. Dogs ride in it, and their claws don't rip the thick, durable leather. Then there's the amazing chassis—something I admittedly didn't scratch the surface of in my short street drive. It's like a Civic that behaves like a period Ferrari, dresses like a runway model, and offers the ownership headache of a pair of blue jeans. And the speed, well, you stop caring about that so much, because even an early NSX is fast enough to get you into trouble, and it does all of those other things so well. Mileage affects resale, but prices show that the market is far from afraid of 200,000-mile NSXs.

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Yes, I thought. I could use one every day. Strap a car seat into the right side and haul my daughter around. Maybe hang an exhaust on it to fix the noise. Fit a lighter flywheel. Later gearing from an NSX-R. Tweak the things that keep the fringes from being batty. And then just use it every day. It would, of course, be far less expensive than doing the same with anything Italian.

I can't imagine that'll be the case much longer.

I've spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about these cars. It came to me at one point, though I don't remember when. It's nuance. I often spend the last three or four minutes before I fall asleep at night staring at the ceiling, thinking about it. (Also, if I'm being honest, the razor wail of a flat-crank Ferrari V-8 and Scarlett Johansson in pretty red dresses. But also titanium rods and how the Forever Supercar doesn't want a pint of blood every mile, just time and pavement.)

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There is an all-new NSX coming at this year's Detroit auto show. We'll see the production version, due in 20TK, and no one will be surprised, because that car will basically be an evolved version of the Acura/Honda show car that's been trotted out for years. We know what this car is going to look like. It's a hybrid. It's all-wheel-drive. It shares a basic profile with the first NSX, but not much else.

I don't want it, in part because of what I just listed. I know that makes me sound like a luddite knuckle-dragger, and I hope I change my mind the first time I drive the new car, because we need more things not made for luddite knuckle-draggers. And I hope, above all, that everyone else stays in the dark about that first NSX. Because at some point, I'm going to have to buy one and use it for years, driving all over creation. And it's going to be a lot easier to justify if they're still the happy side of cheap.

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