2007 3.7l Sport Pkg Sh-awd All-wheel Drive Used 3.7l V6 24v Automatic Suv on 2040-cars

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MotorWeek remembers retro icons, Supra and NSX

It's easy to poke a joke here and there about John Davis, the long-time host of MotorWeek. His voice is so monotonous that, from time to time, if you closed your eyes, you may think it's generated via a computer. But you have to give him and the rest of the show a lot of credit. The program has been on the air for decades, giving people direct, straight-down-the middle automotive reviews.
MotorWeek's massive back catalog of reviews are slowly making their way onto YouTube, and they provide a fascinating chance to look back on how performance cars rank against their contemporaries from back in the day. Two recent additions include the show's old looks at the 1986 Toyota Supra, the dawn of the third-generation model, and the now-iconic 1991 Acura NSX.
Both reviews are interesting in their own way. These days you hear nary a negative word about the original NSX, but MotorWeek isn't afraid to point out a few flaws. And the Supra really shows the progress of suspension tuning in the intervening decades because it has some serious body roll in the corners. Scroll down to check out both videos and get a blast from the automotive past.

Acura NSX GT3 to make public debut this week at Mid-Ohio

The new Acura NSX had a very long and very public gestation period. The car went through a number of redesigns and revisions, all while enthusiasts watched and waited. With the production version just now ramping up for customer deliveries, Acura revealed that it was working on a race car for FIA GT3 homologation. While the car was shown in New York, no one outside of Honda has seen it testing on track. This week, the NSX GT3 will make its public testing debut at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course ahead of the Pirelli World Challenge and IndyCar races. View 13 Photos While the car will be on track during testing and practice sessions, it won't actually be competing with the rest of the field. The car is still in the testing phase and won't be fully FIA approved until at least September. Acura is confident that the car will make its racing debut in 2017. The company also made it clear that this is not the final version of the car and that things like aero and engine tuning are still being worked out. Until now, the NSX GT3 has only tested at private events in Europe, Japan and the US. This week, the NSX GT3 will be piloted by Dutch racing driver Peter Kox. Kox drives for RealTime Racing, a team that currently campaigns an Acura TLX GT. This week's car will be the primary tester, though if something goes sideways there are multiple backup cars. The NSX GT3 differs in a number of ways from the road car, most notably its lack of hybrid all-wheel drive system. The NSX GT3 uses the same twin-turbocharged V6 as the road car, but sends all the power through the rear wheels. It also uses the same space frame as the road car. While the road going version receives final assembly in Honda's Ohio factory, final touches to the GT3 car are done elsewhere. Although the car will only be testing on Thursday and Friday, it will be on display all weekend in the paddock. For more info on this weekend's Mid-Ohio race, check out the Pirelli World Challenge page here. Related Video: Motorsports Acura Honda honda nsx acura nsx gt3

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura SLX

By the second half of the 1990s, the tremendous sales success of the Ford Explorer (introduced as a 1991 model) and Jeep Grand Cherokee (introduced as a 1993 model) had made it clear clear that the future of the American road would be trucks. Any automotive manufacturer not selling a full line of SUV-ish machinery here would be irrelevant soon after the dawn of the new century, and the car-and-bike-centric American Honda Motor Company was therefore in big trouble. The Civic could be used as the basis for a small crossover SUV (which debuted here as the 1997 Honda CR-V), but Honda needed to buy time to design and produce the platform that would underpin the 2001 Acura MDX and 2003 Honda Pilot. That time was purchased via a deal to sell rebadged Isuzu trucks as Hondas and Acuras. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those Honda-ized Isuzus, found in a Colorado boneyard. Honda began selling the Isuzu Rodeo as the Passport (recycling the name they'd used on the U.S.-market Super Cub motorcycle) for the 1994 model year, and Acura dealers started moving SLX-badged Isuzu Troopers in the 1997 model year. Just to make things interesting in the Isuzu-Honda world, North American Isuzu dealers sold Honda Odysseys with Isuzu Oasis badges at the same time. Isuzu had gone all-truck for the American market after the last Styluses (and closely related Geo Storms) were sold here as 1993 models. Sadly, Isuzu's final (non-commercial) new vehicles sold here were rebadged Chevy Trailblazers and Colorados, more than 30 years after Chevrolet began selling Isuzu Faster pickups here with LUV badges. Honda never did build any body-on-frame trucks, but that proved unnecessary in order to make some money during the CUV/SUV era. The SLX never sold particularly well, but it gave Acura dealers a luxury truck to park next to the Integras, TLs, RLs, CLs and NSXs in their showrooms. After 1999, the SLX was gone, leaving just the 2000 model year as a blank spot for Acura-badged SUVs. This truck held together like a real Honda product, getting fairly close to the 300,000-mile mark (I've found junkyard Accords with better than a half-million miles on their odometers, plus one apiece Civic and CR-V that got past 400,000 miles during their lives). The original owner's manuals were still in the glovebox when I found this truck. At the end, it appears that it was towed away for being parked illegally. Maybe the engine or transmission failed and its final owner just walked away.