Since I traded up from an 89 MR2 Supercharged to a 91 NSX, several folks have asked me how the driving experience with the two cars compares. Over the 2 months I've had the NSX, I've been trying to analyze the differences, and I think I can summarize them now. I should warn readers that this is a bit long-winded.
First of all, the NSX is perhaps the optimum blend of luxury car and sports car; the MR2 is (to me) the optimum blend of sports car and practicality. So the NSX is definitely nicer than the MR2 for those times when it is advisable for license longevity to engage the cruise control and motor mindlessly down the freeway. The NSX is remarkably quiet in this mode, and the sound system is pretty nice, too. Moreover, the pleasure of ownership mixes with the rather unremarkable driving experience in *any* car in traffic. (By the way, the Supercharged MR2s are geared lower than normally aspirated models from 85-89, and are better and more economical freeway cruisers for this reason.)
The NSX is also "exotic". Part of the fun of having an NSX is having the only one on the road, not seeing another one for days and days, unless you live in a pricy locale. Young folks in Hondas or even in the crosswalk will grin at you, give you a thumbs-up, or tell you that you are driving their dream car. Folks who have no idea what it is will say "nice car" when you park it or get gas. And of course, if you drive obnoxiously, you will get more than your share of single-digit feedback as well. (That hasn't happened to me, but I've heard others report it.)
For sports car fans, the real question is how the car drives, not how it looks or how many modes the climate control has. In this respect, the two cars are much more different than their similar mid-engine designs would suggest.
The MR2 is a more playful car, in the positive sense. I autocrossed my 87 MR2 several years ago, and in the process learned much about the handling of cars with rearward weight bias. On those few occasions when I got everything exactly right, the cornering sequence went something like this:
Sometimes while autocrossing my 87 MR2 I could make two such perfect corners in succession, but experts can hit them all like this. Aside: If you want to practice these techniques on a vehicle which has the same handling traits amplified several times over, buy some laps at Malibu Grand Prix. It's cheaper than autocrossing, and you don't have to blow a whole Saturday for 6 minutes of run time. Also take the 1-hour Bondurant school that Malibu offers. After you get the hang of it, THEN autocross to learn how to read the much subtler handling cues of the car.
Reason not to try this on the street: In the MR2, if you enter a corner at 90 percent plus of the cornering limit, you are *committed*. If you try to slow down substantially, the back end will keep going, and you'll be continuing down the road sideways or backwards. Given that you entered the corner too fast, you need to keep your right foot down regardless. This makes blind corners at speed a real hazard to you, your car, and that bicyclist/pedestrian/stalled motorist hiding around the bend.
In contrast, the NSX is set up to understeer slightly at the limit. Where the MR2's suspension causes the rear wheels to toe out on deceleration, producing that fast rotation, the NSX's rear toe is essentially constant, within 0.5 degrees.
You won't notice the NSX's understeer unless you are really close to the limit, and the understeer *is* what most drivers expect a car to do when asked to turn at too high a speed. The Supercharged MR2 will also understeer in a turn if you are applying power, but not if you are decelerating.
The NSX will understeer even under mild deceleration, which makes it less "playful". You are less able to steer with your right foot. You ususally need to actually hit the brakes to make the back end step out.
Now that I have covered the background, I can properly make the comparison between the MR2 and NSX. Let's say you commute every day, and there is one particular curve with unlimited visibility and an excellent surface. Each day you gradually increase your entry speed in an attempt to determine the cornering limit.
If you're driving an MR2 (whether supercharged or not), when you get to 90 percent of the limit, you will feel the back end getting light and you will already be using some extra throttle after turn-in just to keep the back end stuck down. If you go beyond this point, you are really pressing your luck. A bit of gravel or oil, and you'll go off the road.
If you're driving an NSX, things are very different. You will feel NO CHANGE in handling as your cornering speed increases. You steer around the corner, and the car goes around the corner. Until the day that you finally have the courage to enter at a truly outrageous speed that is 1 mph too fast. Then it will get interesting, or so I'm told.
You will first get a little bit of understeer, but then the back end will likely slide out a little bit, which will undoubtedly surprise you. When this happens with the NSX, the correct reaction is to ignore it! That is, you don't need or want to mash the gas (though a very little extra throttle would be OK), but of course you don't want do anything silly like stomp on the brakes. You just drive around the turn and the car will take car of itself. A modest rear wheel slide is in fact the very first obvious warning you get of the cornering limit. When this happens, you are already past 90 percent of the limit, so you really don't want to do this on the street.
The magazines say that the NSX has more street-usable capability precisely because you can go easily up to 90+ percent of the cornering limit with no trepidation or special driving techniques. Is this good? That depends on your perspective.
If you want a challenge, the MR2 will reward good cornering technique and give you the credit for executing well. A good driver in an MR2 can do vastly better than a poor driver. As a car in which to learn how to drive skillfully, the MR2 beats the NSX hands down.
In the NSX, the poor driver can do almost as well as the good driver, because the car is doing the work and taking the credit. Some would call this boring, and it might be if the limits weren't so high: it's hard to be bored when you're taking a 15 mph curve at 45.
Yet on a familiar road in optimum conditions I can drive the MR2 with more confidence and satisfaction, because over time I can calibrate the limit of every turn, except the blind ones where safety demands lower speeds. No matter how familiar the road, I don't think I could similarly calibrate the limits of the NSX; the handling cues are just too subtle.
As an analogy, imagine you are walking with your hands tied behind your back within a room with invisible walls. The walls represents the cornering limits of the car, and their invisibility represents the NSX's muted feedback on the proximity of the limits. If your task is to find the walls, your nose will likely suffer a bit. In the MR2, you can see the walls as you approach them, though the room is smaller overall and there are some pitfalls near the walls.
So which do you prefer, invisible limits that are almost fully usable, or visible limits which are a bit lower and more challenging to use? For me, the answer would be different on different days and under different conditions.
On the street, especially on an unfamiliar road, for safe and fast driving, the NSX wins. Even a slight instinct for self-preservation will keep you below the cornering limits, and you have ABS and traction control to help out up when the surface gets poor. (Exception: in snow or very heavy rain the narrower tires of the MR2 give it an advantage over the NSX, though either car can be a handful in these conditions.)
Despite my preference for the NSX for most street driving conditions, I have to close with a counterexample from my own experience, a situation in which good technique with an MR2 saved an accident where the NSX would have left the road:
Two years ago, I was driving my 87 normally aspirated MR2 in the southern Sierra foothills, taking a route recommended in an old Car and Driver article. At the end of the long and flat stretch of two-lane, I came on a blind rise. Figuring that the road ahead was more of the same, I topped the rise at 50+. Big mistake. The problem was that I had been looking left during the brief instant when a sign on the right screened by bushes would have been visible. The sign showed a curving left arrow and a 20 mph caution.
When I topped the rise, I was staring disaster and several cows in the face. The road descended sharply to an off-camber left turn just 60 feet ahead. Past that was a dirt/mud shoulder, a wood fence, and a cow pasture. There was absolutely no way the car could make this turn.
For some reason I didn't panic, but I applied the brakes at close to the threshold of lockup to get the speed down as much as possible before leaving the road, as I was certain I would.
[With practice, the MR2 can brake as well as the NSX. Threshold braking is perhaps the single most useful skill you can learn on a non-ABS car. And it's completely legal to practice every day, if you like. Just check the rear-view mirrors first. :) When you *know* that there is enough room to stop using your well-honed technique, you will not panic and lock up the wheels.]
Releasing the brakes, I took the curve, attempting to stay on the pavement. The result, which I fully expected, was that the back end came around about 45 degrees, putting both rear wheels in the dirt with the fronts on the pavement. From autocrossing, I knew that the car would spin unless I applied full throttle. (If you haven't actually spun the car in a parking lot and practiced this several times, you will *not* be able to force your right foot down when this happens.)
The NSX is, by design, much more slow to rotate on its own than is the MR2. Due to this "stability", the front of the NSX surely would have understeered right off the road in this situation, whereas the MR2 was perfectly willing to let the back out slide out with the front still attached to the road.
My MR2 continued along for some distance, following the curve with the back end in the dirt. Then, finally, as the curve was ending the front wheels bit the pavement hard, and the car started to straighten itself.
In autocrossing, I had learned to start steering back as soon as the car starts to snap out of the slide, but on this particular day I wasn't thinking ahead. An MR2 or similar car acts like a pendulum. In this case I was steering to the right, and suddenly the tail was snapping back to the left. If you don't act in anticipation of this (and I didn't), the tendency to spin on the recovery actually exceeds that on the original slide.
As the tail came left into the oncoming lane (no traffic, fortunately) and as I struggled to catch up with the steering, which is very quick-ratio indeed on the MR2, I spotted a cattle guard 200 feet up the road. It had metal posts on either side which framed a relatively narrow passageway. I briefly wondered whether I would be going through the cattle guard backwards or forwards, but I realized later that the real danger was hitting the cattle guard fully sideways and flipping the car.
I sawed at the wheel and just barely kept the car from spinning left, then caught it again as the tail snapped back to the right again. The car straightened out just in time for the cattle guard. Whew! No damage to the car or me, except for bruised ego. As they say on the BMWCCA Driving Tips web page "I sure hope nobody saw that".
This is as close to an accident as I've had in many years, and the MR2's "instability" saved the day for me. Actually, it saved the whole weekend, since I was 300 miles from home. So you can see why I recommend having an MR2 to learn with, even if you do intend to graduate to an NSX some day.
I've promised my 5-year-old his own MR2 (a first-generation one) when he is old enough to drive. We'll buy one with a broken engine and rebuild it together, so that he has some sweat in it and will, I hope, be more careful not to wreck it. Maybe by then I'll even get another one for myself...
keith@tcsi.com (present email address)
jarettk@aval.com (starting mid-summer 96)
Keith Jarett
87 MR2 T-bar red/beige -> 89 MR2 SC red/black -> 91 NSX red/black
(there *is* a pattern developing here...)