Honda NSX interior
You get a decent amount of equipment in the Honda NSX as standard, but neither the digital screens nor the standard materials look particularly upmarket
Style
Once you’ve become accustomed to the Honda NSX’s bonkers exterior, you might feel a little underwhelmed by the reasonably conventional cabin design. Sure, you get plenty of soft plastics where you rest your arms, a supple leather finish for the dashboard and loads of aluminium-effect trim pieces, but the pixely central infotainment display looks like it belongs in a £10,000 hatchback not a £150,000 supercar.
Thankfully, a few splashes of carbon fibre on the thickly padded steering wheel remind you that you’re not driving around in a Civic and the sweeping dashboard design and tall centre console make you feel cocooned in (rather than perched on) the NSX.
Unfortunately, some of the Honda NSX’s buttons and switches feel a bit low-rent compared to the gorgeous metal items you get in the likes of the Audi R8. The central rotary dial for switching between different driving modes feels fairly posh, but the plastic climate control shortcuts and the buttons on the steering wheel really let the side down.
It’s not all bad news, however – you get a digital driver’s display as standard – just like the Audi R8’s virtual cockpit – and a pair of cosseting seats with plush leather upholstery and loads of back support.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to be as brainy as the engineers who designed the high-tech Honda NSX to operate the infuriatingly complicated infotainment system
Infotainment
Every Honda NSX comes with a 7.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system in the dashboard but the clunky graphics and confusing menus mean it’s nowhere near as easy to use as the systems you get in an Audi R8 or BMW i8.
Navigating your way around the menu screens means taking your eyes off the road for too long and the fiddly shortcut buttons on the centre console don’t do a particularly good job of helping you switch from one key feature to another.
You’d expect sat nav to come as standard in an expensive supercar, but it’s a rather costly optional extra. If you do hand over the extra cash, the blocky maps aren’t a patch on the gorgeous high-resolution Google Maps satellite imagery you get in the R8.
Thankfully, you get Apple and Android smartphone mirroring as standard so you can use your phone’s navigation apps through the NSX’s screen instead of Honda’s own system, although pairing your phone isn’t a particularly intuitive process.
Even more irritating are the awkwardly placed climate control buttons below the touchscreen. These are all too easy to hit with your hand when you’re typing in an address or tweaking some of the system’s more detailed settings.
Helping the Honda NSX claw back some points is the second digital display you get in front of the steering wheel. This replaces conventional analogue dials with a high-resolution screen that displays a combination of rev-counter, speedometer and sat-nav directions right in your eyeline. It’s not as sharp as the screens in an Audi R8 or BMW i8, but it does come with an eye-catching animation that spins the virtual dials to match the position of the physical dial on the centre console.