This 400,000 Mile Acura NSX Shows What’s Wrong With the Current Generation
Recently, Instagram user @lonewolfdrifter crossed a pretty big milestone in his Acura NSX. Usually, people celebrate their cars making it 100,000 miles. Sean, the man behind the Instagram account, has done that four times over. It’s a pretty insane milestone, to say the least.
However, Sean’s devotion to his 400,000 mile 1992 Acura NSX also points out some pretty glaring issues with modern cars.
One owner drove his Acra NSX every single day
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Yes, you’ve read that right. Sean has driven his 1992 Acura NSX just about every day for the last 17 years. To put that in car terms, the BMW E46 M3 was still a new car back in 2004. In other words, Sean’s NSX, were it human, would be able to drive itself with a valid drivers license by now. Sean regularly waxes lyrical about the NSX, telling the Drive it’s the best car ever made.
Certainly high praise, but that opinion is likely exactly how Sean’s car ended up with so many miles on it. Even more incredibly, Sean’s car appears almost entirely stock. However, his choice in period-look wheels must be commended. The state of Sean’s Acura NSX brings us rather handily to the new car. It’s Acura’s halo car, but it certainly has its issues.
Is the new NSX worth the money?
Now, that’s not to say that the new NSX is a bad car by any means. In fact, the new NSX is a little underrated. People decried its hybrid powertrain on the car’s debut, and the car’s nearly $160,000 price tag sounds outrageous. However, adjusted for inflation, the ’92 NSX cost $127,000. Factor in the massive increase from 270 hp to 573, and the new car sounds like a steal.
That said, the biggest mistake with the new Acura NSX is how it makes its power. The first NSX is famously reliable and usable, as Sean proved. But can we really say a hybrid powertrain making 573 hp will be in the same state 17 years from today? Sure, Acura had to make the new NSX a halo car to aspire to, but at what point did being a “halo car” overtake what the old car was?
The old Acura NSX has one big advantage
But perhaps the biggest advantage is the rose-colored lenses through which a great deal of us view the old NSX (full disclosure, this includes myself). The old Acura NSX is a poster car of the height of Japanese poster cars. To the cynical, the new car, no matter how good, how fast, or how underrated, is an attempt to bring that back. At the end of the day, like the new Supra, expectations were severely high for the new NSX, and that doomed it, reliability be damned.
