Sexy car! My friend's dad had one when we were all in H.S. Very luxurious by those days standards!
Just wondering why NSX owners would "graduate" from this car? I don't see any obvious reasons and I know it surely was never on my radar and thought of more as an old man's luxury car.
I can't speak for others but my perception of the Legend was that it basically depreciated to the point where it could be picked up by guys like me, in college and on a budget. It was nicer than an Accord or Camry or something else 'practical' but had many of the trappings of much nicer cars, including stupid little things like heated mirrors and moonroofs and coupe rear windows that rolled down and stuff. Although it wasn't a sportscar, it was still peppier and had better handling than its natural competitors, the Lexus SC300 and Infiniti J30/Infiniti I35.
The Legend is honestly what first drew my attention to an NSX in the first place. While doing research on the car (I had spotted one in the back of a used car lot, unloved because it was a manual transmission sedan), I learned the Legend had a weird Honda engine from the C-family. This was nothing like the D-series or B-series that racer types were hopping up and down over at the time; the C-series was found only in one other car ~ the NSX. That's what started my fascination.
After the first-gen KA1-6 Legends and the second-gen KA7/KA8 Legends, the lineage has since gone all sorts of bad, eventually donating the platform to the lower Vigor/TL line, then getting fat and inflated into the 3rd generation KA9 RL. The SH-AWD 4th-gen KB1 brought back some spice, but the current 5th-gen RL and RLX are leaning back towards the big-and-bland side of things IMHO.
Consider the firsts/quirks of this generation (KA7/KA8) Legend:
-FWD in a RWD-dominated part of the market, but still comparable performance-wise
-longitudinally mounted C32 motor in a FWD car meant 55/45 F/R weight balance
-stayed SOHC non-VTEC all its life, so it was the only Honda car with more torque than HP
-unlike the growing trend of platform-sharing across a car lineup, the Legend remained on a unique platform exclusive to it. The only other Honda like this was the NSX.
Eventually the Acura Legend fell victim to the alphanumeric naming scheme and split up its spirit across the TL and RL. Still though... it was a pretty cool car. It's not as natural a transition to go from Legend-to-NSX as it would be say, S2000-to-NSX, but there are a lot of here who 'graduated' from the Legend.
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There was also a lot of cross-community interaction back in the day. I dug up some old pics of simultaneous Legend/NSX meets I had the pleasure of attending several years ago before I too 'graduated.' Man... these were good times (many of these pics were by Randy/FuryNSX):
Alright that's enough reminiscing for now.
