Acura Begins Selling 3,000 Reproduction Parts for the 1991-2005 NSX

American Honda began US sales of more than 3,000 Genuine Honda Reproduction Parts for the 1991-2005 Acura NSX on November 2, the first car covered by its Honda Heritage Parts program. The parts go through Acura dealerships and the Honda DreamShop, and the company says the catalog will expand. Honda ran the same program in Japan starting in April.

Honda did not publish a parts list, a breakdown by system, or pricing, so the only hard number in the announcement is the count. Mamadou Diallo, an executive vice president at American Honda, framed it as keeping the cars on the road rather than as a collector play.

The reason that matters more than most heritage parts news: the first-generation NSX had a fifteen-year production run, so the cars are now 21 to 35 years old, and what usually keeps one parked is not the engine. Honda built the drivetrain to outlast the body trim. It is the cracked bumper cover, the seized window regulator, the interior panel that nobody reproduces that moves a car from the garage to the back of the garage.

The transport angle

Parts availability changes the economics of a car that has been sitting, which means cars start moving. Restoration-bound NSXs move the hard way: no fluids, flat-spotted tires, dead battery, and often no working brakes.

The numbers on our first-generation NSX page set the loading problem. At 4.5 inches of ground clearance, steel ramps at a normal approach angle are out, and the car needs a winch onto a low-angle or liftgate trailer rather than a drive-on load. At 3,153 pounds it is light enough that a single-car winch pull is routine, so the constraint is equipment, not capacity. Our liftgate versus ramp loading guide covers which to ask for, and the non-running vehicle guide covers what a broker needs to know before dispatch.

The body is the other half of it. The NSX is an aluminum monocoque, and tie-down placement that would be fine on a steel unibody can deform an aluminum suspension arm or subframe ear. Soft straps around the tires, not hooks into the chassis. Our soft versus hard tie-downs guide has the specifics, and it is worth confirming that whoever loads the car has done an aluminum-bodied car before.

Values are the quiet problem. Clean low-mileage first-generation cars have long since left the range a generic carrier certificate was priced against, and a restored car coming off a lift is worth more than the one that went on. Carriers in our broker network work to a declared value, so the return leg from a shop frequently needs that figure revised upward before the car is loaded. Our enclosed shipping insurance guide explains how the declared value and the per-vehicle cargo limit interact.

What to do about it

If a car is coming out of long storage for parts work, say that at the booking stage and be specific about which of the three problems applies: no brakes, no steering, or no roll. Those route to different equipment, and discovering it at pickup is how a load gets refused.

Give a project car ten to fourteen days of booking lead time rather than the three or four a running car needs. Winch-equipped enclosed capacity is a smaller pool than enclosed capacity generally, and it does not reshuffle on a day's notice.

Photograph the car before it loads, including the underside if the storage was long. An aluminum car that has sat on a damp floor can carry corrosion that nobody wants to argue about later.

On the return trip, re-declare the value. Our cost model puts enclosed moves for this car in the range of $2.20 to $3.80 a mile depending on lane and season, which is reporting on our own figures rather than a quote, and the insurance step is the one owners skip. The classic transport service page sets out what the enclosed tier includes.