The word supercar has never really meant anything It's closer to an emotion than any kind of specific word,
definition or number. And in the late 1980s, Supercar
meant two things Ferrari and Lamborghini Testarossa. 328 Countach even the Jalpa Sure. The Countach was a neck breaker. It looked like nothing else,
but it drove like a tractor. Its windows didn't open. You couldn't see out of it. And as an owner,
you knew every truck driver within 100 miles by name
you baked them cookies for Christmas. What I'm saying is they never ran
Ferrari's weren't much better Their 328 took muscle and clenched teeth
just to shift into gear. No power steering, weird pedal placement. It wasn't a car you drove every day
supercars for pretty much their entire existence up until 1990 were fast first, stylish second, and reliable... Well let's just say
the Italians don't have a word for that. That all changed in 1990 when the smallest, cutest,
most humble car company. Absolutely broke
the definition of supercar A new standard of performance cars reliable, practical, affordable, all while being fast enough to leave
that Lambo in the rearview mirror. A car that let every Italian manufacturer
know that they were lazy, they were uninspired,
they were asleep at the wheel in 1990. The word itself had a new meaning. This was the NSX, the Japanese sports car that broke supercars rewind. Its 1983 Honda back then was just a plucky little economy
car brand. CR-X, Prelude, civic, front wheel drive cars meant to be as reliable,
cheap and efficient as humanly possible, while still being just fun enough
to not put the driver to sleep. But behind the boring city
car brand was actually a team of dedicated racing engineers conquering
Formula two in the early eighties. They had an engine that won in 81
83 and 84. They just needed a car to show the world
what they were capable of. But what the hell does
Honda know of designing fancy Mid-engined Supercars? Well, nothing really. They hadn't even made a proper sports
car yet. They had no experience making midship cars without even an inkling
of how to start, so late at night. Or at least assume it's late at night. And supported by a few cans of Sapporo. Honda engineers started tinkering
with engine placements and drive types. Up till now, they only made front engined
front wheel drive cars so they took a Honda City... Yes, Honda City,
one of the least sporty cars ever, and slapped an engine in the back and
took it for a spin around the parking lot. The engineers were immediately blown away. The handling of this weird Frankenstein
econo box was actually tight, dynamic and exciting. Honda's team were ecstatic. They had tasted what it was like
to build something special. Seriously, the NSX, you know and love
Today owes everything to bored engineers
and a Honda City. It's pretty wild. Meanwhile, Honda Corporate was prepping
the Acura brand for us Americans. They needed a Halo car,
something to show the Yanks that they came to win, that this wasn't
just another Honda. Honestly, 1980s
Honda was out of their freaking minds. They could have taken one of their cars
made it rear wheel drive, got a team of engineers
to make a tuning division, and released
a pretty decent little sports car. But they said, fook it. The clapped out
Honda City in the parking lot is our muse. We're building a freaking supercar. We don't want to beat Nissan. Forget BMW and Mercedes. We want to take down Ferrari. The Project Lead,Shigero Uehara
told them to create a car that could outperform the Ferrari 328,
but make it a Honda. Honda didn't make difficult cars. They made reliable, respectable
and easy to drive cars, and the same should apply
to their sports cars. The Honda Supercar should be able
to spend a day at a racetrack and drive home in one piece. You should be able to park it
on the street. See out of it. Survive an accident in it.
The Honda Supercar Should be an actual good car. What a revolutionary concept. But in the 1980s,
that is not what Italy was making. Honda's vision of the NSX
may seem tame now, but in 1985 they were making history
just in a very, very Honda way. They set out to change the world
of sports cars with a piece of graph paper Uehara and his team plotted out every competitive sports
car on a graph comparing power to weight and vehicle weight and wheelbase
and oddly the competition all fit into sort of a band on the graph
that they ended up calling the Milky Way. Then they plotted the current Formula
One car There it stood way out there. They had their target. The NSX would push as close as it could to the Formula One
balance of power, weight and dimensions. And thus it would go beyond what every other sports car
and supercar of the time was doing. It would stand alone. now to create a car
like no one else had before. Honda needed to do what
no one else had done before. Look, if you know Honda,
they don't solve things. The American or Italian way. Just throw more horsepower or cylinders at it
until it's fast. So they have to be clever,
and the task they set for themselves was not an easy one. They struggled to balance
the car's weight and power the team traveled back and forth
between the Honda R&D centers in Japan on the bullet trains,
and suddenly it hit them There they were, riding back and forth,
trying to figure out how to make the fastest car
they could, riding on the fastest trains in Japan, which were made of aluminum. Up to this point, no one had made an all
aluminum monocoque production car before. This was it, the secret ingredient to make a car
with reliable power and low weight. The perfect balance their
"trainspiration" shaves 200 pounds off the car and more importantly, revolutionized the use of aluminum
in the entire automotive industry. And this is where Honda almost drops
the ball completely. You see, once
they have the chassis designed and all the bits ironed out,
they put a single cam accord engine in it. Yeah. The original concept for the NSX
was just to put a parts bin engine in it, out of the accord. You make an entirely revolutionary new way
to manufacture a sports car chassis, launching a whole new luxury
brand in the United States with This is your Halo car
and you give it a gutless sedan engine. So it's set to debut at the 1989 Chicago
Auto Show and the president of Honda, Tadashi Kume, gets ready to show the world
Honda's new prototype flagship supercar. There's already some other brand
making a presentation on stage and Kume just fires up
the prototype back stage like a bad ass The crowd is stunned and intrigued at what Honda has behind the curtain,
but Kume himself is flabbergasted. Revving up the NSX prototype,
he realizes the car doesn't have Honda's new revolutionary VTEC system,
so he presses his engineers who tell him that VTEC is only planned
for four cylinder applications He screams at them, you idiots! this is unacceptable! Or maybe he said something like that Kume forces the NSX team to develop
an entirely new six cylinder VTEC engine. And thank god he did
because the new C30 engine was Honda's best yet a three liter dual
cam v6. The second Honda engine ever
to receive the VTEC technology and the first time the American audience
would ever feel VTEC kick in. It was a revolution. It saved the NSX
from becoming the Japanese DeLorean. It propelled the NSX from
just being a pretty face to a full on world beating supercar. Featuring a variable volume induction system that gave the car
an incredibly broad torque curve. It had titanium connecting rods. This allowed
the engine to go up to an 8000 RPM redline in manual transmission trim
the NSX employed the power of 270 horses to propel it to 60 and under 6 seconds. Top speed over 160 miles per hour in development. Honda had its sights
set plainly on Ferrari with the 328 being the performance baseline
and the NSX absolutely kept pace. It even hung with the 348
that followed it, but they weren't done
with the vision in place. An engine breathing life into the car with their material
sorted and performance targets in sight. Uehara and his team produced a prototype
NSX capable of testing in 1989 and with the help of one racing legend,
they unlocked the NSX's full potential The NSX prototype spent an entire month
at Suzuka Circuit getting pushed to its absolute limits
by fate. The famed Formula One legend, Ayrton Senna, was in Japan to test out a McLaren
which was powered by a Honda. And look, he ain't no idiot when the guy who makes your racing
engine asks you to come by the racetrack and do a couple of laps
in the new supercar. You oblige. After a full month
of refining the NSX at Suzuka. The engineers were confident they'd wow
Senna with how the NSX carved an apex Senna eats a biscuit, drinks a coffee,
does a few laps, gets out of the car, scratches his head and tells them
it's a bit fragile. Engineers were stunned
The car was good, but not perfect. The NSX went back under the knife again
and emerged months later. 50% stiffer. Honda even employed a Cray supercomputer
to perfect the aluminum suspension design. This was maximum effort from Honda. There were no corners cut,
and now because of it, the NSX was a taut sharp supercar,
ready to compete on the world stage, all thanks to the legend Ayrton
Senna, a bullet train and a supercomputer. With the car properly
sorted with 400 patents filed, an entirely new way of making a production
car pioneered. It was time for the world to see what the
nerds at Honda had been making in secret. Honda's $140 million project had paid off at around 60 grand
brand new. The NSX broke sports
car molds left, right and center. Magazine
journalists praised it as a revelation. Consumers
were stunned to see such a sleek, fast, elegant machine
coming from the economy car brand. Mr. Ferrari and Captain Lamborghini
probably shipped their pants Here was a car that beat them
at their own game on its first try for half the cost
of a mid-level Ferrari. It was beautiful. It was fast it was drivable. It was reliable, and it was cheap. A supercar for reasonable people. A Ferrari for the guy
who leaves a big tip at the restaurant. A Lamborghini for people that say
thank you. Yes. On paper, especially now,
the NSX is almost laughable. It's. It's it's cute. The V6, no turbos
or superchargers under 300 horsepower. Kind of understated styling, but numbers
were never what the NSX was about. It was a balanced, sharpened knife in the right hands. It was as deadly and as fast as anything
the likes of Ferrari Porsche or Lamborghini could even hope to achieve When you look at the NSX
today, it's almost quaint. But that's because you're looking through the lens of every supercar
and sports car that it made possible. The reliable drivable supercar
changed the auto industry forever. At least the douchey, overpriced
and unreliable part of the industry. Lamborghinis now looks low class poorly
designed, unrefined. Ferrari is now needed to be faster,
more reliable and easier on their owners. If a Japanese company can come out
with a V6 sports car that costs half as much and performs
just as well. Italy needed to wake the hell up in multiple reviews
stacked up against the Ferrari 348. The Porsche 911 the lotus esprit and whatever else the world had to offer,
and the NSX stood above. It was such a revolution. It helped inspired
one of the greatest supercars of all time. The McLaren F1 Gordon Murray, the F1 designer, cites
the NSX as direct inspiration for the F1. It was the benchmark that the world's
first hypercar was set against. Today, more than 30 years since its release,
the NSX seems almost boring pedestrian. If you saw one on the road,
you might give it a second glance, but you might not even notice it
passing you. And for its 15 years of production,
the NSX suffered its own success. You see, the Supercar giant stepped up
their game to beat the NSX and won the McLaren F1
showed the world sports car perfection The Lamborghini Diablo changed
how expensive cars looked forever. The Ferrari 355
and 360 cemented the prancing horse as the defacto fast car and the NSX remained largely unchanged. It kind of faded from memory. So while today the NSX is all but dead. Let's not talk about that
second generation. You have to imagine that in a few garages
in Italy parked among prototype Ferrari's and Lamborghinis
an NA1 NSX sits under wraps. A stark reminder
to those that make fast cars to never rest on their laurels. Thank you for watching. Consider subscribing. It's been fun making this.
I'll make more See you on the next one.
