1991 Acura NSX

The Story

The 1991 Acura NSX rewrote the rules for what an exotic could be. Sold as a Honda in most of the world, the company's new flagship married genuine supercar performance with everyday usability, proving a mid-engine two-seater could be reliable, comfortable and easy to drive. These were qualities the temperamental, often fragile Italians of the day could only envy, and the NSX delivered them without sacrificing the drama buyers expected from a car shaped like a wedge of the future.

At its heart sat a 3.0-liter C30A V6 mounted amidships, the first production engine to use Honda's VTEC variable valve timing in this application, producing 270 horsepower and revving to a screaming, race-bred redline. Built around the world's first all-aluminum production monocoque, the NSX was remarkably light and stiff, allowing it to sprint to sixty in well under six seconds while remaining perfectly docile in city traffic. It could be driven hard on a track one day and used as a quiet commuter the next.

Development famously drew on input from Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna, whose laps at Suzuka convinced Honda's engineers to further stiffen the chassis before launch. The result was steering precision and chassis balance that road testers repeatedly compared favorably to cars costing two or three times as much, all wrapped in a low, clean, cab-forward shape with a glass-roofed cockpit that offered superb outward visibility. Fit and finish were flawless, a revelation in a class accustomed to compromise. Even the ergonomics and outward sightlines, usually afterthoughts in a mid-engine exotic, were carefully resolved so the car could be lived with daily.

Priced around $60,000, the NSX dramatically undercut Ferrari and Lamborghini while matching or embarrassing them dynamically, and it forced the entire supercar establishment to finally take reliability and build quality seriously. Its influence on rivals is hard to overstate. Today the first-year NSX is a blue-chip modern classic, sought after for its purity, its motorsport pedigree and its everyday civility, with pristine early examples now commanding well into six figures at auction. More than three decades on, it is still widely regarded as the car that proved a supercar need not be difficult to be thrilling.