New 2016 Acura NSX Previewed Ahead of Detroit

Acura is going to kick off the new year with the debut of their most highly anticipated car of the past decade – the revived, second-generation Acura NSX sports car. The Japanese automaker’s new supercar will be shown at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show in full, production-ready form. In the meantime, we’ve been given a few teaser images (like the one above) and a video preview, complete with an audio sample of the engine. Hear it for yourself below:

Ominous, isn’t it? And it should be, this is shaping up to be a truly epic car. That high-speed rev you hear in the video comes from a twin-turbocharged hybrid powertrain. We won’t have official specs until Detroit, but most rumors tell us to expect a 3.5L V6 engine paired up with no less than three sport-tuned electric motors, all working in conjunction through Acura’s acclaimed Sport Handling All-Wheel Drive (SH-AWD) system.

Now, to give you an idea of just how much demand has been drummed up for the 2016 Acura NSX, Honda actually started taking pre-orders – and lots of them – all the way back in 2013, just one year after the original NSX Concept’s debut at the beginning of 2012. Before that, Honda had developed a custom sports car based on the NSX Concept to be driven by Robert Downy Jr. (playing Iron Man) in The Avengers.

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that the second-gen’s roots can be traced all the way back to 2007 – just two years after the original car ceased production – when Honda’s NA CEO, Tetsuo Iwamura, confirmed that they would eventually manufacture a hybrid supercar based on the then-new ASCC car (Advanced Sports Car Concept).

All that to say, it’s been a long wait for Honda’s motorsport enthusiasts. By the time the new NSX hits dealership floors at the end of 2015 as a 2016 model, NSX fans will have been waiting through almost a full decade of concepts and prototypes, all teasing this new model. But, we think it’ll be worth the wait, and Honda does do.

Acura’s senior VP, Mike Accavitti, believes that the new NSX will live up to the name of the original. “The next-generation NSX will deliver a ‘new sports experience’ true to its heritage and to the supercar concept that originally gave rise to the name NSX.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have much more than hype for you today. As we said of the beginning of this post, Acura has remained completely tight-lipped about technical specs. However, the teasers lead us to believe that the production car will closely resemble the 2013 NSX Concept in shape and form. Stay tuned at the beginning of January for the car’s full reveal in Detroit.