2017 Acura NSX

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 test bed 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, Lambor­ghinis, 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.