Goodwood Test: 2021 Honda NSX Review

The formula for a supercar is often debated, but more often than not one will have two seats and an engine in the middle. So it follows the Honda NSX you see here is a mid-engined supercar like any other? Well perhaps not.

Like the original NSX launched more than 30 years ago this second generation NSX does things a little differently. The first NSX was different because it had a V6 rather than a V8 or V12 and it managed to be fast and rewarding without breaking the bank. With a £159,950 starting price this new car is certainly more expensive, but what sets it apart isn’t necessarily the price or how easy it is to drive or live with but the powertrain. This new NSX is a hybrid.

It might not be an all new car anymore but, as you’ll see, it has a few tricks up its sleeve.

There’s a lot to like when it comes to the way the NSX looks. At a very basic level it’s wide and sits low to the ground, but as you look closer at some of the details it all just gets better and better. Two giant mesh grilles on either side of the front bumper are contained within aggressive, angular surrounds that fall down to the splitter, circle across, up and back around, falling just short of reconnecting under the outermost point of the headlights. The impression that gives is of a floating section of bumper, when in fact it all channels air into two of three radiators in the front of the car. Under the number plate there’s another vent into which air can rush towards that third radiator, and while the plastic that surrounds the plate has always been black, one small tweak made for the NSX from 2019 onwards was the replacement of a chrome section between the plate and the bonnet with a body coloured panel.

Look at the profile of the car and you’ll notice a couple of strong creases along the door, the uppermost of which begins at a small duct just above the front wheel arch, while the sill appears to tuck in deep under the door. The wing mirrors are out on stalks, the A-pillars are thin having been made from steel rather than aluminium (more weight but a thinner pillar for the same strength), while the C-pillar floats, as the shoulder line from the doors tucks under it, allowing air to pass between the two sculpted surfaces for that all important downforce. At the rear meanwhile there’s a splitter, a triple exhaust almost hidden away and detailed, angular lights, as well as a sizeable spoiler, finished in carbon here. There’s also two more grilles behind the rear wheels, although they’re a lot less functional than they might appear from a distance.

It’s a fine looking machine, Honda has been able to create downforce and channel air exactly where it is needed for better cooling without calling on the services or a rear wing or great, undignified aero measures.

The carbon roof is pretty tasty too, and that orange paint? An £800 extra, but it’ll draw a lot of attention. That, in a mid-engined supercar, is most welcome.

I hope you have a notepad, because there’s plenty to get your head around here. Like the original NSX there’s a V6 engine, but where it differs is that this V6 is twin-turbocharged and has an electric motor integrated with it and the nine-speed double-clutch gearbox, all to improve efficiency, give more power and torque, and fill in what little power gaps there are when changing gear. The science lesson doesn’t end there, as there are two more electric motors, one for each of the front wheels, and they are both entirely separate from each other and everything at the rear end. All in all there’s 581PS (427kW) and 645Nm (477lb ft) of torque.

The resulting driving experience is wild. At a very basic level this is one seriously quick machine, not as fast as a 911 Turbo S but, if you engage launch control, still more than fast enough to whip your head back into the headrest from a standstill. And even though the gearchanges are lightning fast, that electric boost accentuates the feeling of unhindered acceleration, with the punch to sustain you through the shifts. I can only imagine astronauts experience something similar in a rocket, which is appropriate, really, as a little spaceship appears on the instrument cluster if you do a full-bore launch. Zero to 62mph takes less than three seconds, according to Honda, while the top speed is 191mph.

Beyond speed the powertrain serves up an experience you won’t find in any other mid-engined supercar right now. The mechanical separation between the front and rear means that if you plant your foot to the floor with cold tyres the rears will start to spin up while the fronts just keep pulling – in that respect something like an Audi R8 feels noticeably different, because in an R8 you can feel the power being shuffled around from front to rear. On paper both might be all-wheel-drive but to experience they’re quite different.

The noise is exciting, a sharp, fierce V6 howl that’s closer in character to a Nissan GT-R than a Giulia Quadrifoglio. There’s some audio trickery going on, with pipes feeding sound to a diaphragm and from there into the cabin. There are also are microphones hidden above the seats that listen to all of the noise that isn’t the V6 and pump antiphase soundwaves through the speakers, allowing you to hear the engine more clearly – a giant, mid-engined set of noise cancelling headphones, if you will. But none of that bothers me in the slightest, as it isn’t fake noise – Honda has just worked hard to make sure you get more of the good stuff.

The steering is light, fast and accurate, with a step up in weight when you move from the car’s Quiet and Sport mode to Sport+ and Track, and the wheel itself a delightful thing to hold. In the two former modes the suspension gives you a nice compromise between support and wheel travel, making the NSX a very easy cruiser. In the latter modes, though, although everything is tighter there’s still a real quality to the ride – it isn’t firm to the point of being compromised on UK roads. As for the brakes, well if no one told you there was no physical connection between the brake pedal and the brakes themselves you wouldn’t know it. That’s right, the NSX uses a brake-by-wire system, but it is not a detriment to the driving experience at all. Quite whether I’d option the £8,400 carbon-ceramic disks of our test car is another matter, although they were wonderfully on the open road and, unusually for carbons, at low speed. In fact the NSX is the most accomplished double-clutch gearbox, carbon-ceramic braked cars I’ve ever driven when it comes to pottering around at very low speeds.

The jewel in the crown when it comes to the driving experience, however, is that the NSX can run on battery power alone. It won’t do it for long, and you don’t have full control of when short of putting the car in quiet mode, but nipping around for short periods of time in traffic or pulling up at home with no noise whatsoever is hilarious fun. Prepare to see more confused faces than you ever had done before should you drive into a petrol station on battery power.

Climb inside the NSX and the seats are comfortable, supportive and, aside from being unable to raise or lower the front of the seat base, the driving position is very good. The visibility is truly fantastic, too – you might be sitting scant centimetres above the tarmac but the dash is low, affording excellent visibility. The steering wheel, as I said before, is lovely too. The drive mode selector is a simple physical wheel, and the functionality of the gearbox controls is very good. There’s even a glove box, a clip-in cup holder and another little cubby between the seats.

Is it the most luxurious cabin? No, it isn’t, and in some respects it is starting to feel its age. But you can forgive the Civic-like window controls and the basic climate control buttons because they are at least physical controls, and they work. The infotainment system, however, is less good…

On the centre of the dash there’s a 7-inch touchscreen through which you control the sat-nav, radio, connect your phone and so on (the NSX, you’ll be relieved to know, comes with navigation, a DAB radio, Bluetooth, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto as standard). But the basics are a little clunky. The touch home button is on the far left-hand-side, a stretch and a glance away, essentially. And the menus within the screen aren’t that clear or interesting to look at either. The navigation works well, but sadly the interact looks very dated, and although you get parking sensors and a reversing camera, the resolution of said camera will be familiar to anyone who used a camera phone in, say, 2011. Is the camera something that should have been updated when the NSX was given a few updates in 2019? Absolutely.

Elsewhere there are heated seats, cruise control, dual-zone climate control, while the instrument cluster is comprised of a digital display which is both very cool to look at and very useful (there’s a display for when the batteries are being charged or discharged, and a monitor for the battery level), on either side of which is a physical dial for the fuel and engine temperature – there’s something very reassuring about a real fuel gauge. Oddly, however, the two USB ports are hidden, one in the cubby between the two seats and the other in the glovebox.

If you look at the NSX and see an old car then you really need to drive one. While it is showing its age in places the technology underneath is incredibly advanced, and the driving experience unlike any other mid-engined supercar on sale right now.

What’s more, when you look around at the competition, you realise that this generation of NSX is ahead of the game like the original NSX thirty years ago, albeit in a different way. How many other regular, hybrid supercars are there right now? The hybrid McLaren Artura is on the way, but right now the NSX, even though it’s five years old, is still in a class of one.