Yeah yeah. Greedy stealerships. Sure. That's all I ever hear about this subject.
Maybe American Honda should have not extorted every dealer to buy an absurd amount of tools and equipment to be able to sell and service the car. I won't say the exact number just in case dealer cost isn't exactly public knowledge yet, but selling a NSX at sticker price, given the extremely limited amount to go around...means we won't get to a point where we break even for many years to come with this car. Can you really blame us for not trying to recoup the costs before the next iteration comes out and they make us buy a whole new bunch of tools?
They required every dealer to have a comprehensive set of special tools to be able to remove and replace every single component on the vehicle. Yet if the NSX is in any kind of a major collision they pretty much said, it has to go back to the factory where they have to handle the frame assessment and repairs. American Honda has several very limited use special tools for other carlines that can be lent out to a dealer on a case by case basis...perhaps they should have done that with things like the fixtures required to remove the engine on the NSX instead of forcing all the dealers to outright buy them.
Also. American Honda sold the dealers a bill of goods in the way of how much demand to expect. They had us all believe that the hype they were going to generate was going to have lines around the block of people with much more money than patience willing to outbid each other to get this world beating super exclusive hypercar. They all but told us to markup to our heart's content with what they were implying.
This is all BS.
The Canadian dealers had to make the same investment and are selling their allocations at MSRP.
In fact Canada has sold more NSX's per capita than the US dealers.
Honda US is not allowed to set the US retail sales price, only suggest it, hence MSRP.
US trade law prohibits retail price maintenance
The US dealers trying to make some extra margin on early cars has cratered the whole Honda marketing plan.
And trying to blame Honda for a "bill of goods" on demand is sour grapes.
Each dealership knew what they were getting into.
Most US dealers got first allocations, chose not to sell the early allocations on to end users, and instead loaded them with options and priced them out of the market.
That effectively stopped sales.
Now there's unsold highly optioned inventory.
Honda US sat back and watched this happen while continuing to ship unsold cars to dealers.
Retail customers who had placed deposits had to watch dealers get these spec cars while they had to wait.
This launch in my mind is the stuff that the Harvard Business School and the like will study one day.
The sad thing is Jon Ikeda, who is responsible for Acura marketing, seems unable to make the hard decisions to sort this out.