Honda NSX review

Living with this car would be a constant pleasure, we suspect. Even after a handful of days, you start to wrap your brain around the complexity of its drivetrain, better learning how to extract electric-only distance from the mechanicals beneath you and feeling like you’re part of an important chapter in the handover of petrol to electric supercars. It’s like living with an experiment, with the occasional quirks that’s likely to entail. Just try and resist getting totally attached to this thing, though.

Which you’ll have to be to forgive its utter impracticality. All that electricity up front means no front boot like a McLaren, R8 or 911. There’s storage space at the back – enough for a couple of squashy bags, but certainly nothing resembling a hard case – so long as you don’t mind the things you pop in there getting a bit warm. Oops. No rear seats, either.

Abundant sensible points on the NSX’s score board when you consider its fuel economy, though. In boring, urban gridlock you can expect mpg in the 20s – twice that of a V10-engined R8 – while you’ll easily get 30mpg on a long run. Reckon on low 20s as an average. With 573bhp on board, that’s not bad at all. Even if it’ll be of small concern to buyers of a £143k Honda.

Tiny handfuls of these things in Britain ought to mean high residuals, with the earliest examples of this mk2 NSX now dipping below £100,000. But wonderful though it is, we’d wager this isn’t a stone-cold classic like its forebear – the speed at which hybrid sports cars are going to develop might make this feel a little old-hat before too long, with the BMW i8 likely to be better remembered as the turning point for petrol-electric performance cars.