From the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the 2016 Acura NSX.
Transcript
(trunk slamming) (upbeat music) (brakes squealing) To say the new Acura NSX is highly anticipated would be like saying that dinner is highly anticipated, after you skipped lunch and breakfast and maybe dinner the day before.
Here it is, after not one but two concept cars at previous Detroit Auto Shows, we have the all new re-imagined Acura NSX. Reprises a storied Acura nameplate from the 1990s and early 2000s. Let's take a look at everything. Now, like the original NSX and both concepts that previewed this car, a mid-engine car, very low slung to the ground here. Acura's shield-like grill kind of gets to its smallest point yet. It's almost just kind of a stripe here below the Acura logo. You get around the side, obviously huge fenders, cooling ducts here. They actually work. The ones behind the front doors here funnel air into the mid-engine layout. These pillars kind of funnel air over the rear, the trunk right there. Let's talk about that engine. It's a V6 engine, twin turbocharged, Acura says, and it's got three electric motors to help it out. One electric motor comes back here. Two are in the front. So you get an all wheel drive system that's torque vectoring, with electric motors up front and electric motor in the back. There's no plugin system for this. So it drives much like a conventional hybrid, but Acura says it'll have plenty of torque because of all that instant traction you get from the beginning from those electric motors. It'll also have more than 550 horsepower. Massive wheels here. 19 inch front wheels, 20 inch rear wheels. Carbon ceramic brakes here, cross drilled rotors. Speaking of carbon, a carbon fiber floor pan for this car. A lot of high strength steel, aluminum body panels elsewhere around it. A lot of super cars these days, like the BMW i8, Audi R8, have actual kind of parts bin pieces from their respective automakers. Kind of the same situation here. A fairly inviting interior actually. More so than what you'd necessarily expect seeing the outside of the car. Fairly thin A pillars really do help with visibility more than you'd think. Fairly large side mirrors. So I got to say, for a car that's as low slung as this, you'd expect this to be a really hard car to see out of. And I'm pleasantly surprised by the fact that it's not necessarily that difficult. Now, a lot of authentic materials, Acura says. Things like real leather around the upper doors, the dashboard, this center tunnel here. Very kind of big sort of bulky center tunnel, but Acura says it's functional. There's a lot of cooling and other stuff that goes on underneath here, which is why it has to be this high. Push button transmission right here for the dual clutch nine speed automatic transmission. There's an IDS integrated dynamic system here. That's a system that Acura has in a few other models that adjusts various drive train modes. Look at this giant knob. It just sits right here underneath the starter button, so that you can really turn things at a moment's notice instead of having to look at a smaller button. Similar system in various other Honda products actually. Acura is Honda's luxury brand. Rather than the two screen system in a lot of Acura cars, this is gonna have capacitive touch controls up on the left here. We've never been big fans of the way that system works, but it's reasonably fast otherwise. So hopefully it kind of works out the same. Obviously in a super car, not a lot of storage areas here, really along the center tunnel here. But no cup holders, you'll notice. Now there is a little port right here, which Acura says there's gonna be kind of a cup holder thing that fits into the glove compartment. It'll have two integrated cup holders. You can kind of plug it in here and have a couple cups. Although if you'd have a second cup, it meant that you had a passenger. And that would mean that this would really kind of encroach on them. Eh, figure that out. The i8 and the R8 are both as good a signals as any as how crowded this sort of super car segment has become. The NSX will obviously occupy it. So could Ford's all new GT. We don't know about pricing for any of the newest cars yet, but Acura says the NSX should start somewhere in the $150,000 or so range. So stay tuned for more on power, more on driving impressions. All of that closer to the car's on sale date in late 2015. (engine revving)
