If you lie awake at night worrying about the fate of low-sales-volume, high-performance supercars, well, you should probably cut that out. There’s a lot more pressing issues facing the world today. And besides, you can stop fretting over at least one such sports car—the Acura NSX, at least for a couple of years. A leak from an internal Acura dealer webinar revealed a chart detailing some of the automaker’s product plans for the next few years. A notable inclusion was the NSX, which is represented as part of the lineup all the way through 2022.
Look, supercars that cost a lot to develop and produce while selling in small numbers don’t exactly represent slam-dunk business cases, thus threatening their very existence, and the NSX is an extreme example. Acura sold a whopping 238 copies of the car in 2019—hardly a sales hit, especially given how Porsche managed to move almost 10,000 911s in the same year. And yet, somehow, the NSX is being kept around for at least two more model years.
We reached out to Acura for more details, and this is what it had to say in response:
“We’ve expressed Acura’s steadfast commitment to Precision Crafted Performance since the launch of the second generation NSX. While this presentation is intended for Acura dealers and is not all-encompassing or definitive, it does demonstrate that we intend to deliver on that brand promise, step-by-step, starting with the 2021 TLX.”
Okay, so that doesn’t really clear things up, but neither does it deny the basic idea that the NSX isn’t in immediate danger. What neither the leak nor Acura’s response sheds any more light on is whether or not we’ll see the much rumored, higher-performance NSX Type-R in that two year time span (or ever). It is possible that plans for it were simply left out. As Acura said, the chart you see before you isn’t definitive.
We’ve been hot and cold on the NSX since it launched in 2017. Initially, we felt it could be sharper, quicker—more exotic, basically. Acura addressed some of that concern with some fine tuning as part of a 2019 refresh for the NSX, and the supercar now feels more of a piece, more worth its price tag, and a real contender its crowded corner of the sports car market. It’s good to know the NSX will (probably) be with us for a little while longer, then, and we look forward to whatever else Acura has in store for its novel sports car.
