The best way to experience a great sports car is on a long and winding road. Over the years, few cars have had a longer road with more twists and turns along the way than the second-generation Acura NSX. The NSX has had at least two major configuration changes and a complete program cancellation over the past decade. Now that Honda is almost ready to start to delivering cars to customers, the automaker invited media in to see how the new NSX will be built.
The road to 2016
When the original NSX debuted in 1990, it marked an inflection point in the timeline of what we then called exotic cars. Before NSX, virtually all exotics came from small factories in northern Italy and while they were fast and gorgeous, they were often hard to live with. Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the era typically had dubious build quality, reliability and ergonomics.
Honda showed that it was possible build a mid-engine, two-seater would start up without fail every morning, with windows and air conditioning that worked and that didn’t require flexibility of a yogi to get and out. In other words it combined the traits of a Ferrari that made teenage boys drool with the characteristics that made an Accord a mass market success.
After a 15-year run, Honda decided it was time to hit the reset button build something all-new, but this time it was going to be a lot tougher to disrupt the segment. After NSX, at least the major exotic brands like Ferrari and Lamborghini began to emulate the pattern set by the Honda/Acura and they’ve been joined by the likes of the Audi R8 and McLaren 650S to set new standards for daily driver supercars.
In January 2007, Acura revealed the first draft of a new NSX, now with a front-mounted V10 engine replacing the mid-mounted V6 of the original. By 2008, prototypes were circulating the Nurburgring but it was not to be. Following the global financial collapse in the fall of that year, CEO Takeo Fukui cancelled the program so that Honda could refocus on building more efficient and affordable cars.
By January 2012, Honda was ready to try again, returning to the transverse, mid-V6 configuration of the original but now adding a three-motor hybrid system with all-wheel-drive. In the four years since, Acura has shown us several more iterations of the 2012 concept as the design evolved and the powertrain changed yet again. By 2015, the V6 had grown a pair of turbochargers and been turned 90-degrees to a longitudinal layout.
The world has caught up
With a total system output of 573-horsepower going through all four wheels, the new NSX will undoubtedly be fast. But while the original was a breakthrough product in the segment, this generation suddenly doesn’t seem as exciting as it was even four years ago when we saw the concept for the first time. Hybrid supercars and hypercars aren’t the novelty they were just a few years ago. The LeFerrari has a battery and electric motor to assist its V12 and the McLaren P1 and Porsche 918 even had plugs and the ability to run around town on electrons alone. The BMW i8 has a carbon-fiber platform and a turbocharged three-cylinder engine to go with its battery.
Perhaps the most exotic thing about the new NSX is its birthplace, deep in central Ohio. Honda has repurposed a 186,000 square foot building that was previously used for logistics to export Ohio-built car parts back to Japan. The building on Honda’s sprawling Marysville campus is now known as the performance manufacturing center or PMC. Inside, Honda engineers have created a largely open floor plan that has the capacity to produce about 800 NSXs annually for the American market and as many again for the rest of the world.
Unlike the composite structures of the McLaren, BMW, Porsche and Ferrari, the NSX is predominantly aluminum. Unlike the original, this car relies on a space frame layout assembled from a mix of extrusions, stampings and castings.
One of the most interesting aspects of the structure are the six cast nodes where the other pieces come together and which provide mounting points for the suspension. Honda has utilized a process known as ablation casting for these six parts, the first time it has been incorporated in the auto industry. Like traditional sand casting methods, ablation casting consists of pouring molten aluminum into a sand mold.
However, where traditional processes use an adhesive binder to hold the sand together, ablation uses a water soluble binder. Right after being filled, the mold is sprayed with high pressure water jets to remove the sand, enabling the casting to cool and solidify more quickly and evenly. The result is stronger, lighter parts with more consistent characteristics.
When it comes to assembling the space frame, there weren’t really any surprises. Mig-welding industrial robots are used join aluminum parts that are set in fixtures that rotate to provide the best angle for the welding heads. Honda claims the robots can weld faster and more evenly than humans doing it by hand, leading to less heat distortion of the aluminum. Strangely, many of the welds on the structures we saw on the factory floor looked decidedly inconsistent and frankly sloppy, especially compared to the hand welds on the custom-built cars used to move items around the plant.
Honda doesn’t use any industrial adhesives in the NSX, instead augmenting the welds with the same types of flow-drill screws and rivets that you’ll find in the body structure of the current generation aluminum Ford F-150 pickup. High-strength steel tubes have replaced the original aluminum used for the A-pillars after the lighter but larger parts were found to impede visibility.
Another F-150 parallel can be found in the paint shop where a zirconium phosphate mixture is used for the electro-coating process prior to painting the frame. Unlike traditional e-coating that has been around since 1960 (incidentally invented by Ford and first used on the Thunderbird), the zirconium doesn’t produce any sludge and is a much cleaner process. One important element of the NSX production process is the emphasis on quality. At every stage of the build process there are extensive checks with the goal of making sure that every car is built right the first time before it comes off the line. The glass enclosed quality confirmation center with its coordinate measuring machines sits right in the middle of the factory floor where every employee can see it.
What assembly line?
Speaking of the line, the PMC has no moving assembly line to speak of. As the space frames count out of the paint shop, each is loaded on a cart and pushed into the first of 12 stations in the assembly department. Two to three Honda associates work at each station installing parts from a kit kart that contains all of the components needed for a single car at that station. Unlike high-volume plants, every single fastener on the NSX is started by hand to prevent cross-threading. Transducer equipped electric tools with wireless transmitters are used to torque everything precisely and then record the data. Assembly instructions are displayed on large LCD monitors at the station and every step is verified before moving to the next.
Technicians install the engine and transmission in the 2017 Acura NSX (video credit: Sam Abuelsamid)
The cars stay at each station for approximately 62 minutes. When the assemblers are done with the tasks on a car, they push the cart by hand to the next station. Mid-way through the assembly department, a crew of three mate the engine/transmission to the back of the chassis. The engine is rolled up on a cart, the frame is carefully lowered over it, everything is aligned and the bolts are inserted and started by hand. Before the exterior body panels are attached at the last two stations, the car is actually fired up to make sure everything works while the assemblers still have access to the interior.
After the wheels are added, the suspension is aligned in another process that takes about 45 minutes. The PMC team did come up with some innovations at this station. Before the car goes entirely up on the hoist, a comfortable chair mounted on a rig with rollers is inserted between the two platforms of the hoist. The technician doing the alignment can easily roll back and forth under the car while making adjustments without risk of falling into openings below the hoist. The team also designed and fabricated custom brackets for the alignment tools that mount into the center hubs of the wheels. Traditional alignment equipment clamps onto the wheel spokes and can easily blemish the finish, something that’s unacceptable in a car that can cost over $200,000.
The final quality checks include a four wheel rolls test with a brake torque test to ensure that all four corners are braking evenly. A four post shaker in the last station simulates driving down a bumpy road to make sure there are no rattles, squeaks or loose parts.
When finalized production NSXs begin deliveries from the PMC to dealers in late April, this will be the most hand-built car in the Honda/Acura lineup. By 2016 standards, there actually seem to be more innovations in the latest Civic than in the NSX. This will likely be an amazing car to drive outstanding quality and customers will hopefully feel they are getting their money’s worth, but based on what we saw of its guts as we walked through the PMC, it doesn’t appear to be the groundbreaker its predecessor was.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/03/17/building-the-2017-acura-nsx-not-as-revolutionary-as-the-original/
2016-03-17T00:00:00+00:00