I just saw something in the news about a new Acura and it got me thinking about that brand. When I was a teen Acura had just come out. My family had looked at them, my Uncle bought a couple of Legends. I remembered them as tech and cool. A very Japanese kind of tech/performance/premium/reliability. But somewhere that message got lost in what seems like an endless chase to follow someone else.
Here are a few visuals through the years.
Acura’s started out as rebadged Japan only Hondas. The Honda line was much bigger in Japan, with more premium variants, so it was pretty easy to stack a new lineup for a new brand. They launched the brand in 1986 and it was the first Japanese luxury brand (before Lexus and Infiniti)
I won’t go into the Integra, but Donut media did a great video on that model here:
The Legend was their flagship model, and the first production Honda vehicle with a v6. It was pretty understated, and clearly a visual cousin to the Honda Accord, but it was crisp, and the coupe in particular had a nice back end. A quick rebrand of the 1985 Honda Legend that had come out the year before in Japan… notably, the body side had little box flairs that even as a kid I associated with techy, fast rally cars.
1990 saw the second generation Legend. It was much more sophisticated looking with softer, more complex surfacing. The coupe has an even more striking back end with a very sloped rear window (think of the American cars at the time with their flat, near vertical rear windows) which contrasted this very cut off, graphical tail lamp facia. I always loved the chunky alloy wheels and slot like mini grille.
1990 also saw the introduction of the NSX and all of a sudden it really felt like this was going to be a huge brand… even though of course the NSX was branded Honda in Japan, the Google thing hadn’t happened yet and people didn’t know about JDM product in the US back then. I won’t go down the rabbit hole of how radically cool the NSX was at the time. It was a fast, aesthetically minimal, well balanced, and reliable Ferrari fighter. In a time when Ferraris and Porsches were totally unreliable and difficult to drive, this made all the other sports car makers reassess their product strategies.
Even though sales were strong in the early 90’s for the Legend, they seemed to decline and then fall off a cliff by the mid 90s as Lexus ramped up. Acura Legend - Wikipedia