It’s always tempting to look at the last of a breed of car and feel vaguely guilty that faint praise has damned it to the point of extinction. Wait! We didn’t mean it! Please don’t leave!
So it is with the Honda NSX, the final example now having left the factory, no longer a warrior from the land of the rising sun but a sunset in the cornfields of Ohio. As a follow-up act to the original, the reborn NSX had a lot to live up to. Too much, really. The first NSX was an utter revelation at a time when mid-engined Italian exotics leaked and overheated and regularly threw mechanical fits costing thousands to repair. Instead, why not a gorgeously engineered mid-engined coupé from friendly Honda?
This car was Honda’s Ferrari F40 moment, the last project personally signed off on by the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda. It was burnished by the hallowed loafers of Ayrton Senna himself and was filled with delicately engineered details from the brightest minds of Honda’s golden age. Gordon Murray drove one the entire time he was creating the McLaren F1. It was a special car.
From its debut in 2015, the second-generation NSX struggled to capture the imagination. Things weren’t helped by Ford releasing its successfully heretofore unseen GT at the same show, but the NSX also failed to fizz with the critics. Furthermore, it cost McLaren money, yet in the US, where all the cars were made, it came with the same Acura badge as grandad’s beige TL saloon. Incidentally, that TL had basically the same 3.5-litre 75deg V6 engine.
In its final year, in this new and more sporting Type S specification, the NSX is still a hard sell. Modern exotica no longer goes awry so often, so a usable supercar isn’t a novelty. Also exiting the market at around this time is the Audi R8, which has always done an excellent job of putting V10 Lamborghini lunacy in a business suit. And then there’s the existence of the Porsche 911, either in Turbo form for performance-number anoraks or GT3 guise for that street-legal racing spirit.
So what’s new? Well, Type S designation takes the NSX’s hybrid powertrain from 573bhp to 592bhp, thanks to bigger turbochargers taken from the NSX GT3 Evo racing effort, along with higher-flow fuel injectors and more effective intercoolers. The redline remains at 7500rpm. Battery capacity has increased by 20% and the ability to get output current to the electric motors is up by 10%. Peak torque is up to 492lb ft, and both the torque-vectoring four-wheel drive and dual-clutch automatic gearbox have been reworked, the latter now executing shifts twice as quickly.