New Honda NSX Hybrid revealed
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
In 1990, Honda stunned the world by unveiling its brand new supercar, the Honda NSX. Suddenly, those who had assumed that superminis or a mid-sized reliable estate car was the lofty aim of Honda designers had a spectacular new car to contemplate.
The NSX was remarkable in many ways. Its development took six years and its aim was to be able to better the performance of other supercars available at that time.
What Honda achieved with the original NSX was genuinely remarkable. The car was the first car ever to feature an all-aluminium monocoque body. This made the NSX remarkably light and agile. The NSX also boasted 4-channel anti-lock brakes, titanium connecting rods and in 1995 the company fitted the first electronic throttle control to a Honda vehicle.
Input from F1 stars Ayrton Senna and Satoru Nakajima saw the car tweaked for optimal performance and the results were astonishing. This was the first supercar that was not only fast, sleek and beautifully designed, but it was light, nimble, reliable and incredibly easy to drive. As such, the NSX earned the nickname as the first 'everyday supercar'.
It was this heady mixture of outstanding performance, reliability and drivability that saw other manufacturers use the NSX to inspire their next generation of vehicles. The original NSX remained a hugely popular vehicle throughout its 15-year lifespan, before production on the vehicle stopped in 2005.
Despite rumours of an immediate replacement or a redevelopment, it took seven years for Honda to unveil their new supercar addition. On January 9th 2012 at the Detroit Auto Show, the all-new Honda NSX concept vehicle was unveiled to an eager audience and it looks likely that this spectacular new incarnation of Honda's flagship supercar could revolutionise the entire industry once again.
This new car offers a huge number of improvements over the old and while the company has not yet revealed the final power output or weight of the vehicle, they have made two groundbreaking announcements.
The first is that the engine used in the new NSX will be a mid-mounted V-6 hybrid and secondly that the vehicle will incorporate a brand new Sport Hybrid SH-SWD (Super Handling All Wheel DriveTM) system to deliver a level of precision when manoeuvring the vehicle that has previously been unavailable.
Honda have confirmed that the new car's transmission system will be able to generate torque, either negative or positive, to the front wheels when cornering to aid drivability and control, additionally the driver will operate the transmission using a dual clutch system.
Although no official announcements have been made as to power output or the weight of the vehicle, automotive industry experts seem to concur that the new NSX will have around 395PS. From what is essentially (with a few minor tweaks and improvements) a hybrid-powered vehicle, this is an astonishing figure.
It is also an alarming realisation for many sports car manufacturers and industry experts, several of whom have maintained that no hybrid vehicle would ever be able to match the performance levels of a true petrol-powered super car. While Honda have not yet officially released the NSX figures, it seems likely that these assumptions may now be baseless.
Even more astonishing than the possibility that Honda may have produced the world's first ecologically sound supercar, is how achingly beautiful the car looks. In short, the new Honda NSX does not just perform like and contain the technology of a next-generation supercar, it has the looks of one too.
Indeed, so spectacularly futuristic are its looks that a concept vehicle very similar to the forthcoming NSX is being featured in the forthcoming superhero film 'The Avengers', driven by Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr.
If the original NSX helped redefine the supercar genre, then the new version looks likely to follow that trend, it is a car that many experts felt impossible to achieve with current technology.
The future of the supercar, it seems, begins in 2015.
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