From the September 2019 issue of Car and Driver.

Okay, so I figured out what needs to happen with the Acura NSX. The epiphany hit me right after the 2019 NSX made my friend Dave puke. Technically, I suppose I made Dave puke, since I was the one driving. And therefore I was the one who said, "Check out launch control!" and then "check out these brakes" and "check out this torque vectoring" and then the brakes again, within about 90 seconds. "Hold on," he said, as I pulled over to turn around. He popped open the door, stepped to the nearby bushes, and began retching. "This has never happened to me before," he said. "Those brakes . . . this is embarrassing. If you write about this, can you change my name?" I said, Sure thing, Jay! I'll call you Dave or something.

Ezra Dyer Car and Driver

So anyway, this guy, he doesn't get carsick. But the NSX turned him green within about two miles. That's because, despite the everyday-car persona that is its birthright, the NSX is a violent machine. Zero to 60 in three seconds is vicious. Fifteen-inch carbon-ceramic brakes and Continental SportContact6 tires will literally tear up the pavement. And for 2019, Acura stiffened the suspension and retuned the traction management to give you more pronounced torque vectoring. And why not? As the saying goes, if you've got a front-axle twin-motor unit, flaunt it.

And yet the NSX insists on its normalcy. The interior looks very Honda. The stereo is tuned for audiophiles. There's a mode called "quiet mode." I mean, really? Quiet mode? I'm imagining Lamborghini procuring an NSX for benchmarking and test drivers in Sant'Agata getting really confused over that one. "What is this, 'quiet mode'? That means the car is broken, maybe? I drive in that mode, I can hear my cigarette burning. Why? Why do they do this?" Quiet mode in a Lamborghini is when you run out of gas. For those of you reading this in print, imagine that last sentence contains a link to an embarrassing episode involving me and a Huracán Performante. Because it will.

Fortunately, the NSX has other modes. And the first thing I did, each time I fired it up, was immediately switch to Sport+, which opens the exhaust bypass valves and plumbs the intake directly into the cabin. Now we're talking. Or more accurately, yelling, because it gets really loud in there. Acura claims there's a 25-decibel difference between the NSX's quietest and loudest personas. Now, I'm not one of the five people in the world who understand the decibel scale, but I think the way it works is that 80 decibels is kinda loud and then 90 is intolerable and 100 turns your brain to vanilla pudding. It's like if you had a dinner bill and $70 was $70 but then $100 would mean the restaurant owns your house. Anyway, the NSX in Sport+ mode sounds like it's constantly trying to Flowbee your hair into the intake manifold.

What we have, then, is a car with an identity crisis. The NSX has the performance (and, in the right mode, sounds) to be a freaky track goon, but it's also striving for this "Wow, I forgot I wasn't in my Accord!" normalcy. After driving the NSX for a few hundred miles and causing at least one episode of sudden reverse peristalsis, I came to the conclusion that this car needs to embrace its demented side and go fully berserk. Give it a huge wing. Rip out the sound deadening. Jack up the boost and make it shoot flames out the back. Make it scary and daunting and a little bit evil. Why not? That car is in there. Just let it out.



Because the livable-supercar approach was novel for the original NSX, but now just about every bedroom-poster machine can function as a daily driver. That's no longer a distinguishing characteristic—it's a given. Back in 1990, a driver would step out of an NSX and marvel that he wasn't on fire even a little bit. Now, we gripe about the AM radio reception in our McLarens. (That was actually a real problem they had to address on the MP4-12C.) I am happy to report that the NSX's trunk, behind the engine, embraces some old-school supercar flavor, in that it gets nearly hot enough to slow-cook a rack of ribs. I threw a thermometer back there while I drove around, and when I opened the hatch it read 113 degrees. Your move, Lamborghini!

Hey, I was excited to find a flaw in Acura's relentlessly refined machine. And embrace those flaws, I say, for they're just part of the charm when you're building a fearsome track car. Make the trunk even hotter and claim that removing the insulation earned you 0.3 second around the Nürburgring. Give it center-lock wheels, and tires that melt if it's sunny and shatter if it's not. Add a push-to-pass button that ups the boost or the hybrid assist or both. I want manual seats, and I want them to cost more than the power ones. Why not? The build plate on the car I drove read 01969. That optimistic zero out in the ten-thousands place indicates that perhaps sales have not gone the way Acura hoped, three years in. So let's delete that zero, too, while we're at it. I bet that would shave another 0.2 second off the Nürburgring time. And make room for some more characters on the badge. Like, say, "Type R."

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