Ohio's Supercar: the Acura NSX

In the winter of 1967, a fleet of tiny, foreign cars crept through the snows of the American Midwest. Battered by winds whipping across the flat terrain, they nonetheless struggled onward, each one a seed of ambition looking for fertile ground. The fields lay dormant, frozen by the weather. But spring was coming to the heartland, and with it, a new crop. Something of which to be proud.

The cars were Hondas; N360s pulled from the line in Japan and fitted with 600cc two-cylinder engines. They were thrashy little hot-rod things, cobbled from sand-cast parts and cranking out around 45 hp. They weighed almost nothing.

At the head of the column was Bob Hansen, one of American Honda's first employees, and a man close enough to Soichiro Honda himself to have talked the company’s founder into developing the ground-breaking, four-cylinder CB750 motorcycle. Hansen's opinion carried weight with Honda's Japanese executives, and the decision was made to bring the N600 to America. It was Honda's first car for the American market and, incredibly, serial number one of these tiny machines still exists.

From that first seed, more than two hundred acres of industrial area were planted in the heart of Ohio. Four million square feet of factory space were built out. Production of engines and transmissions, bodies, and doors. An Accord good enough to be exported back to Japan. And, almost fifty years after those first prototype N600s came crawling across America, Ohio began building its first supercar. Production of that car, the second-generation NSX, is coming to an end.

Honda's Performance Manufacturing Center, the PMC, sits one mile west of the main Marysville factory, about an hour outside Columbus. Across the road–Honda Parkway–there is, of course, a cornfield. There are a lot of cornfields around here.

The PMC is both factory and showcase. Out front is a special parking spot for NSX owners who have arranged to get an up-close look at how the machines are assembled. Security buzzes visitors into a small foyer that houses a couple of current NSXs, one a cutaway, and one of the rare Zanardi-edition original cars, built to celebrate the racer's double CART championships.

Behind the Zanardi NSX, frosted sliding doors obscure a view of the factory floor. They are inscribed with the kanji form of “Yume,” meaning “dream.” The intent is to deliver a big, dramatic reveal when the doors slide open to show a cavernous, open-plan space. It's physically impressive, but the story's more about the who than the place.

About a hundred people work here, each one wearing the same uniform that all Marysville Honda workers have worn since 1979. The jacket has buttons tucked behind a cloth flap so as not to scratch any paint, and the breast pocket is covered by a patch upon which the worker's first name is embroidered.

Being Ohio, these names are Chuck, and Kevin, and Jenny, and Vaughn, and Susan. Every one of the hundred people who work here came from American Honda's other operations, and many are veterans with more than twenty-five years service. The application process sought out highly skilled workers, but also involved a lottery. I asked Jenny Purtee, who has been on the assembly team since the first American-made NSX was built, why she threw her hat in the ring.

Purtee is from the town of De Graff, population 1400, about thirty miles from the plant. She's Ohio born and bred, and says her family has a racing streak. “My son drives a stock car, my grandson's been into go-karts since he was four.” Because of a unique program at the PMC, she's taken an NSX home to give her extended family rides. “Gave the whole town of De Graff rides,” jokes another technician in passing.

Most of the staff here has experienced an NSX first-hand, either riding shotgun on a racetrack or on a road route through Ohio mapped out by a couple of PMC workers. Such is not the case elsewhere. In a past interview with a Master Engine Builder from GM's performance division in Kentucky, the builder in question described getting a ride in a CT5-V, then calling the technician who had actually built the engine. “I told him, you have no idea what we're building here.”

The PMC's master technicians do. Purtee says that there's a sense of pride in her family in knowing that the NSX is built here, by people like her. Being able to share what she builds with them directly lends a sense of ownership to the process.

Acura is proud of its PMC showcase. The place has plenty of high-tech innovations, particularly in the paint department, but the main difference from a higher-production factory is in the amount of manpower and time spent on each car. So yes, there are trick wireless-connected torque wrenches that ensure that each engine-mount bolt is precisely torqued and recorded before assembly, but also the weather sealing is hand-applied. There are multiple checks and rechecks before every NSX leaves the place.

Kevin Joseph–KJ to everyone here–works in the welding section of the PMC, and has thus been hands-on with the underpinnings of every second-generation NSX made. An ex-Navy man, he drove long-haul trucking before coming to work for Honda. “I never thought I'd be working on something like this,” he says.