The Story
Born from a 1984 Pininfarina concept and a Honda City cut in half, the NSX was Honda's answer to a simple dare: match Ferrari's drama, keep Honda's manners.
HP-X concept
Honda commissions Pininfarina to design the HP-X (Honda Pininfarina eXperimental), a mid-engined concept with a 2.0L V6. The brief soon escalates: beat the Ferrari 328 — and later the 348 — on performance, while being a car you could drive every day.
NS-X debuts in Chicago
The NS-X ("New Sportscar eXperimental") prototype stuns the Chicago Auto Show. The design team under Masahito Nakano and chief engineer Shigeru Uehara study the F-16 fighter's 360° cockpit visibility, giving the car its cab-forward stance and long tail.
Senna at Suzuka
Ayrton Senna — then winning championships in Honda-powered McLarens — tests the prototype at Suzuka and tells Honda the chassis needs to be stiffer. Honda feeds test data through a Cray supercomputer and stiffens the aluminium monocoque by over 50%. (The myth says Senna was the development driver; in truth the endless laps were done by Motoharu "Gan-san" Kurosawa, with Senna's input at key moments.)
Production begins
Assembly starts at the purpose-built Takanezawa R&D plant in Tochigi. The NSX becomes the world's first production car with an all-aluminium semi-monocoque — roughly 200 kg lighter than a steel body — plus titanium connecting rods and an 8,000 rpm VTEC V6. US price at launch: $60,000, half a Ferrari 348, twice as usable.
The founding years ★
The original NA1 coupes land and immediately reset expectations — Gordon Murray cites the NSX's ride and handling as a monumental influence on the McLaren F1. In late November 1992 Honda begins building the NSX-R: 483 stripped, blueprinted, Championship White cars for Japan. These three years define everything the NSX would become. Full spotlight below.
NSX-T targa
A removable roof panel joins the range and quickly becomes the default body style in North America.
NA2: the 3.2 arrives
The C32B grows to 3.2 litres — 290 hp, 224 lb-ft — with a 6-speed manual. Type S and S-Zero variants sharpen the formula in Japan.
Zanardi edition
Fifty-one US-market coupes honor Alex Zanardi's back-to-back CART titles — a rare fixed-roof throwback in the targa era.
Facelift + NSX-R reborn
Pop-up headlights give way to fixed HID lamps, and the NA2 NSX-R returns as the hardest-core NSX ever sold: 1,270 kg, carbon everywhere, no compromises. It is now the million-dollar NSX.
End of an era
Production ends on November 30, 2005, after roughly 18,900 first-generation cars across 15 model years.
The hybrid sequel
The second-generation NSX lands as a twin-turbo hybrid with three electric motors and SH-AWD — 573 hp, later 600 hp in the 2022 Type S. Just 2,908 are built in Marysville, Ohio, including only 350 Type S cars. Bookends of a legend.
