That Honda rearranged my internal organs
The connection wasn’t obvious at the time, not least because my grey matter’s now seen 46 summers. But a few months ago aBMW engineer told me something and my train of thought meandered off to a brief drive in Japan nearly a decade earlier.
That engineer was Dirk Hacker, BMW M division’s head of development. We were chatting in the then new M2, on a plinth, in the gardens of a hotel. Like you do. And having discussed everything from engines to electronics, F1 to bikes, we got onto the subject of EVs. And at this point Dirk either began lying to my face in the most convincing manner or this veteran engineer and confirmed petrolhead is genuinely excited about the brave new world of zero-emission performance cars. And then he mentioned four e-motors, one per wheel, and I found myself thinking about the time, a decade earlier, a little Honda rearranged both my internal organs and my understanding of what four driven wheels can achieve.
Rewind to 2015, Tochigi, Honda’s R&D facility. In a state of rabid anticipation I’m about to be among the very first people outside of Honda to climb behind the wheel of the then very late and very complicated NSX 2.0. The opportunity proved entirely underwhelming, sadly, with a buzz-kill supervisor in the passenger seat and just three speed-restricted laps of Tochigi’s speed bowl in which to try to form some opinions.
I failed. The NSX felt quite fast and quite heavy. It didn’t sound great, the seats were worryingly plump and the plastic gearshift paddles clacked with none of the tactile precision of a McLaren 650S’s. ‘It’s an every- day supercar!’ proclaimed the project leader, apparently unaware that the first NSX, precisely a quarter of a century earlier, had already climbed that particular Everest.
In need of cheering up, I found myself being belted into a scruffy looking prototype based loosely on the CR-Z coupe. And I mean very loosely. This was a CR-Z lookalike shell, nothing more, dropped like the polycarbonate body of a Tamiya R/C buggy onto a bespoke and highly experimental performance EV platform with – you guessed it – four electric motors, one on each wheel. ‘4-Motor EV with Precision Allwheel Steer’ read the stick
