The reason for this is that in the late 90's Honda (at the board level most likely) decided they wanted to be Toyota. At the time, Toyota was cranking out ultra-reliable, vanilla people movers, growing to be the largest car company in the world and raking in the cash. They did all of this with almost no performance/sports-oriented products except for the Celica (the Supra having been terminated). Honda was no doubt envious and took a look at their own product line, concluding the cars, while reliable and excellent, were too expensive to produce, over-engineered and overly-focused on niche markets like sports cars. The Old Man was long dead, so they made a major corporate strategic decision to model the big T. In a few short years, they put a bullet in the head of the NSX, S2000 and Prelude. The Integra also disappeared. The Civic ditched independent suspension for a cheaper McPherson strut. The HSV was shitcanned and the company focused on "EarthDreams" and cranking out MDXs to suburban soccer moms. As a corporate strategy, it all worked. Today's Honda/Acura lineup is a comfortable, profitable mishmash of uninspiring automotive blobs, all running on tired VTEC technology from the 1990's. The Pilot, CRV, Accord, Civic, MDX and ILX all look the same- a sort of bland, company-car image that evokes visions of a middle manager at some leviathan data processing mega-corporation. I imagine these cars all parked in a line at some huge, soulless suburban office-park. It's just so sad that the brand has devolved into this.
The only hope for the future is John Conner, er, the NC1 NSX and the new RDX, which appears to be designed by people who actually like cars. Honda likely will never choose the Porsche model because, well, they don't have to. They are making tons of money with the vanilla Toyota model. Though, even the big T sponsors racing and even campaigns in NASCAR!
What always has preplexed me is Ito. He was a chassis engineer on the NA1 NSX project and you would think that would make him a friend to the enthusiast. But, it seems he had a board and shareholders to whom he must answer. The new CEO, Takahiro Hachigo, has a product background of developing the first Odyssey minivan. My hope for the future is therefore not strong. Honda needs its vigor and mojo back, and it is not with minivans. They should look back to the 80's and 90's and go back to that- their golden years.
