I agree power isn't everything, and I'd much rather have a light car (like the Elise/Exige) with moderate power compared to heavier car with tons of power.
But there's a huge difference in a $58,000 CAD car compared to a $140,000 CAD car. Plus the NSX was targeted against Ferraris, Lambos and Porsches so it had to have the HP/Torque figures to back up it's exotic styling and compare with the competition. People spending that kind of cash want to have the figures, the market dictated it, but Honda didn’t listen.
Yet for some odd reason, Honda let it die, a slow miserable death. They could have done incremental upgrades to it, but no. I know they were already losing a lot of money on each NSX, in that case they should have killed it off by 97.
The 911 has been around for over 30 years, who’s to say the NSX couldn’t have stuck around. But nope, Honda didn’t want to spend anymore time or effort. It’s too bad, I’ve always loved the NSX.
When the NSX first came out in 91, the price was a far more reasonable 70k. It was significantly cheaper than the Porsche 911 and Ferrari 348 and offered very similar performance. However, I think Acura sold the car at a big loss because it wanted to get into the market and make a name for itself. The amount of tooling and technology required to make the NSX out of aluminum must have been very expensive. Not to mention that at the time it wasn't significantly lighter than the 911 or 348 with their steel bodies.
Another thing with the NSX is that it had minimal sharing of parts with other Acuras. Over it's 14 year life, it got a few upgrades but since they sold so few, it would be very difficult to justify big redesigns like Porsche was doing with the 911. The 911 had gone through three model changes itself going from the 964, 993, and 996. No other Acura shared the same engine, chassis, or even interior parts as the NSX. Meanwhile at Porsche, the 911 could work with using similar parts from the higher volume Boxster.
I too think that Acura kept the NSX way too long on the market - just to keep it as a halo car. $140k was a ridiculous asking price when it was discontinued and while it was improved a bit over it's life, it certainly wasn't worth twice as much as the original. One thing about NSX's though is that their resale values are incredible. It's tough to find a 91 that's below 40k. For a 15 year old car, there are very few cars that can claim that sort of resale value - the only car I can think of that can match it is the 911 itself (which itself has far higher resale then other Porsches).
Back to the original topic, I'd still take the Z06...
