Honda Reveals the Baby NSX, but It's Not What You Think

Honda has been on a bit of a teasing streak lately, showing us a brace of great concepts unveiled by Honda at the Frankfurt and Tokyo Motor Shows – concepts which may or may not evolve into anything we can buy on this side of the pond. Rumors also floated around about a little brother being created for the NSX. Adding fuel to that particular fire, patents were discovered for the latter.

As it turns out, those patents were absolutely real and a baby NSX is on its way… as a driveable machine in the Gran Turismo video game.

As it happens, a single full-scale model of the baby NSX does exist, but we’ll only ever get to drive the digital version. According to the company, the Honda Sports Vision Gran Turismo concept is a “human centred design,” which is odd, given that no human will ever sit in the thing.

This virtual hot rod is said to have a mid-mounted 2.0-litre turbo-four cranking out 404 horsepower, presumably before armchair racers spend their virtual Simoleons on a myriad of upgrades. The digital car has an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission and, since it’s made of zeros and ones, drivers have choice between manual and automatic shifting.

It sports an in-game weight is less than 2000lbs. No word if that includes all the plastic packaging and theft prevention gadgets applied by the workers at EB Games.

The Honda Sports Vision Gran Turismo was developed in collaboration with Kazunori Yamauchi and the rest of his Gran Turismo team. The exterior design done in Los Angeles. The GT team is well known for their exacting standards, so there’s little doubt this virtual machine will be fun to drive about a digital Nurburgring.

Building virtual one-off cars for video games is not a new concept but this time, the boffins working on Gran Turismo have made the practice an integral part of the game. Vision Gran Turismo is a project in which the world’s automotive brands design new sports cars that are then offered as gifts to Gran Turismo players.

To date, more than a dozen real-world car manufacturers have lent their styling and engineering chops to developing a car for the upcoming installment of the Gran Turismo franchise. Actual production models, such as the VW GTI have been tweaked for the game, in addition to one-off flights of fancy like this baby NSX and the Dodge SRT Tomahawk Vision Gran Turismo.

Digital dreams are great, but we sure would rather drive the real thing.

[Images: gran-turismo.com]