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Honda's Acura NSX masterstroke: building the factory in Ohio

When Honda announced it was going to build its NSX supercar in Ohio instead of Japan, it caught everybody in the industry by surprise. No one expected this proud Japanese company to build its most technologically advanced sports car anywhere but in its home country. Now Honda has a supercar production facility in rural Ohio that would be the envy of any Formula One team. The people at Honda call it the PMC, but its official name is the Performance Manufacturing Center. It's a building that started out as a shipping facility for suppliers, but Honda invested $70 million to transform it into a showcase facility that will build the NSX. Honda benchmarked the assembly operations at Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, and Bentley before work began on its facility. The 200,000 square-foot building will also double as a customer reception center – Honda will open the doors for customers to come see their car being built. It's also going to offer them high-speed test drives at the gigantic Transportation Research Center just down the road. No one expected this proud Japanese company to build its most technologically advanced sports car anywhere but in its home country. Inside, the layout is wide open and well lit. There are no stripes or lines on the floor and none of the different departments are walled off. This creates a more welcoming appearance and lets you get a comprehensive view of the entire process at a glance. And with an eye towards future lessons learned, most of the equipment is of a modular design that can be easily reconfigured or moved. The body shop and paint shop are enclosed by glass walls so that anyone can see what's going on inside. And while you'll see some automation here and there, the idea was to achieve a blend between man and machine, not to try and automate everything. This is a low-volume facility with production targeted at only eight to ten cars a day. The plant runs four days a week with one ten-hour shift. Don't expect to see rows of new NSXs parked on any dealer's lot. The car will only be built to order. Honda is obsessed with ensuring the NSX is built to the most exacting quality standards. The plant people pored over the JD Power Appeal study to determine what supercar customers care about the most, then looked at which aspects of that directly tie into manufacturing. They developed their quality control strategy with three goals in mind. First, they wanted to build everything right the first time with no adjustments.

Acura introduces a sleeker self-driving test car

As we creep ever closer to an autonomous-car future, one thing is for certain, most of the driverless cars we see being tested look hideous thanks to all the sensors strapped to the roof. Today Acura introduced its second generation Automated Acura RLX Development Vehicle with updated sensors and a more pleasing aesthetic. Gone is the spinning LIDAR system replaced with a more compact and robust version of the light detection and ranging technology. It's also got updated RADAR, camera, GPS and higher performance GPUs and CPUs as well as what Acura is calling "more intelligent software algorithms to support more complex testing scenarios." Acura and its parent company Honda have been testing autonomous cars at its GoMentum Station in the Bay Area since last year with a specially outfitted RLX (shown in the video above with the spinning LIDAR system). This new car will replace that vehicle. This article by Roberto Baldwin originally ran on Engadget, the definitive guide to this connected life. Green Acura Honda Transportation Alternatives Technology Emerging Technologies Autonomous Vehicles Videos Sedan transportation gear

Daily Driver: 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybird

Daily Driver videos are micro-reviews of vehicles in the Autoblog press fleet, reviewed by the staffers that drive them every day. Today's Daily Driver features the 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid, reviewed by Seyth Miersma. You can watch the video above or read a transcript below. And don't forget to watch more Autoblog videos at /videos. Show full video transcript text [00:00:00]Hi y'all. This is Seyth with Autoblog. I am driving the 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH All-Wheel Drive, or SH-AWD, as we like to call it. Any way you slice it the name is a mouthful. This version of the RLX, the hybrid, incorporates an all-wheel drive system that includes three electric motors: one up front, two in the rear turning the rear wheels in [00:00:30]addition to the 3.5-liter gasoline engine. Now, that powertrain effectively makes it the performance version, hence the sport, of the RLX line. It's got a total system output of 377 horsepower, and 341 pound feet of torque so there's plenty of go juice in this hybrid. Clearly Honda had some performance in mind when they were putting this system together in addition to the sort of typical hybrid good gas mileage. It's rated at 28 MPG in the city, and 32 on the highway. [00:01:00]I've been seeing around 28 in two days worth of driving so far, and playing around with it. It's not the fuel-sipper that you're going to buy ... not a car that you're buying for economy exclusively. The good news is that when you really get into it, the car does feel quite quick. You still have that electric torque so you're really getting a lot of torque push from the rear wheels. You really do feel like kind of a performance all-wheel drive experience [00:01:30]more than a front-wheel drive experience like you get in the typical RLX. Now, it's not a sports sedan. It's pretty squishy. There's not much steering feel. Really throwing it from bend to bend isn't that rewarding. The car that I'm driving today is loaded out to around $67,000. I think you can spend a little bit more than that if you really try, but it kind of is at the top end of the RLX range. I feel like everything does come together kind of neatly. I don't think that this interior is going to feel very old in a couple of years. I think it'll age pretty well because it's a [00:02:00]conservative design frankly. The downside is that, unlike some cars, particularly a lot of the new Mercedes coming out right now, nobody's going to sit down in this RLX and think, "Wow.