Next Gen NSX Makes its Way to GT5
Did all of you catch Acura's triple whammy yesterday? The RDX gets a cleaner design and ditches its turbo for a V6, the Civic matures into the all new ILX, and the 2nd generation NSX was announced. No one ever expected Honda/Acura to pull such an impressive 180 after such shortfalls of killing off the Integra/RSX, letting the RL stagnate for what seems like decades, and shoe horning a carrot peeler onto every Acura nose. Granted the NSX will feature a hybrid powertrain, but if "Earth Dreams" is as good as Honda has led on then we can expect a decent competitor to Nissan's GT-R or Lexus' LF-A. We can only look back and be somewhat relieved we didn't get the front engine, RWD, V10 batmobile. This concept keeps the mid engine, low slung look we all expect out of the NSX without compromising too much to price/packaging. Even more surprising is that Acura is confident in its Ohio team to develop and produce this car within the next 3 years. That's quite impressive and shows Honda/Acura means business with this NSX - tailored for us by us. So until we get to sit in one of these and dream of a exotic sports car lifestyle at an affordable budget, let's watch it virtually spin around the tracks of GT5! Pretty....
New Car in the Import Junkiez Garage
Looks like Christmas came a little early for us! I took a quick stroll halfway up the California Coast and picked up a 9th generation Civic. Instead of waiting 3+ months for an allocation, it took us about two week to find this little guy, well maybe not so little as the Civics have grown into the slot the Accords once held. Yup this Honda head spent time and money to actually buy a 9th generation Honda Civic Si - the sedan kind with the navigation. Yes the same 9th gen Civic that most reviewers and auto blog sites were hugely disappointed with, because not much has changed from the previous generation or at times much worse. The same 9th gen Civic that was stopped in the middle of its development to "cheapen" the car for American buyers who just saw the housing bubble burst in 2009 while in Japan they decided to nix the entire line. The same 9th gen where the Honda CEO, Takanobu Ito, took responsibility for the Civic's poor reception in North America while the President of American Honda, Tetsuro Iwamura, suggested that the company would consider moving the Civic's mid-model refresh from the usual model year of 2014 to 2013 (which means production would begin by the end of next summer) to fix the decontented Civic. There are no Car and Driver Best awards, MotorTrend COTY, or Consumer Reports recommendations for the line. Specifically for the Si, the shoehorning of an Acura TSX engine into the tiny Civic didn't win over the hardcore enthusiasts, just alienated them even more since the introduction of Honda's green initiative. Even with all that and a lack of an actual temp gauge, I still wanted one.
Hit the jump to find out why...
Way Back Machine: BuddySol’s Garage
When battling boredom, or most recently, passing the time watching a sleeping baby, I have been known to go on Google binges - the kind that seem to flow like one of those Bing commercials. Where a search on the color of baby poop ends up with how to code in HTML5. I don't know how that happened but it did, with key stops at the history of bocce ball and the nearest place in LA to get Italian ice. (I still don't know where to get the latter...anyone?) Well, one random search string ended up here: BuddySol's Garage. How I ended up here I have no clue, but when I saw the link staring back at me on Google's search results I was sucked back into time. Buddysol's Garage is a page I made years ago as a concept side project to add to a small online aftermarket car parts store front, Import Junkiez.
Jumping into the history of this site here, Infamous and I had just opened up shop and were still tweaking away at inventory for the store. After finalizing the storefront, there was still a lot of unused storage within our hosting plan. With a hosting plan not being fully utilized I figured why not try to make people stay a while instead of just shopping then leaving. At the time, I was a regular member of HondaVision/AutomotiveTech.org forums, the TeamSolCal.com forums as well as a mod for HF. So while planning out this addition to Import Junkiez, I did not want to add on a forum because there were already dozens dedicated to imports, as well as running a forum would be pretty time consuming for just one person on the backend. So going off my love for my little sun bucket, I figured this should be more of a landing page for all things del Sol, with some commentary here or a mod build there. More bloggish - less forum flame war. After fleshing out BuddySol's Garage with Angelfire's WYSIWYG web builder I was quite happy with how it initially turned out. Too bad that was the end of moving along with that idea.
There really was no reason why it never got off the ground other than I decided to go in a different direction. Also, Team Sol had extensive walk thrus on many of their chapters' pages and a lot of what I wanted would just be regurgitated from TSI. There was also my fading interest with the del Sol - remember, at some point Buddy hadn't been washed for what seemed like years, let alone I had given up on changing the car's oil. So instead of BuddySol's Garage becoming a part of an expanding Import Junkiez universe, the IJ store would be the main draw of this site until Infamous and I decided to close up shop. In the end though, I was inspired by the blog approach to a web page so I kept the URL/site hosting and started to mess around with some crude blogging program made out of PHP. I haven't looked back since that first post. I still have a copy of the original posts hiding on a hard drive somewhere. Maybe at some point I'll integrate them here, but I think for now we'll just leave those in the lost files of Import Junkiez. I would rather leave you with the gallery from BuddySol's Garage. Who knows how long they'll be up at Angelfire so I've decided to import them here. There's some hot Sols in there - keep in mind tho, most of them came from TSI 
Hit the jump for the gallery!
Honda’s Interactive Commercial
Honda has always been on the cutting edge of technology and with a new technique called "screen hoping" they further solidify that fact. Pretty much how screen hoping works is: watch the commercial (whether on your tv, computer, or even another iPhone), then reach out with your iPhone and grab the characters as they appear on the screen. It looks pretty cool, and the applications look endless. Try it out and let me know how it goes ( I would try it out myself but I don't got an iPhone) Enjoy!
download app
watch the commercial "Unpredictable Life"
-infamousjj
Power of Dreams: Failure
Earlier last year, Honda had released "Dream the Impossible" a series of clips that document the meaning of its current campaign: Power of Dreams. My favorite of the bunch is the following clip entitled "Failure." We are shown short snippets of interviews with Honda engineers, designers, and people close to Honda, talking up on how they took various failures and made them major factors in creating something great - be it winning IRL or making sure that orange isn't part of the Civic color choice in America.
I like to come back to this clip cause to me its the best clip out of the series. Sometimes it gives me perspective when in a rut, and let me tell you, these past couple months have been very rutty. Even though the posts may have slowed up a bit again, I have been doing some changes to the backend and slowly implementing a new layout for the blog. We are now up to the latest installment of WordPress and will be taking advantage of the nifty features it offers. So bear with us as things start to change here at Import Junkiez. Some things should click, but I expect others may not. So keep an eye out for new things to start popping up and let us know what you think. Until then, check out the vid and feel good about making a mistake or two
If there was a part 2 I hope they contact the entire Acura Division or maybe the designer of the 2011 Honday Odyssey. Oi!
Pimp My Stolen Accord
Here's an odd story: NYPD was able to recover Amanda Pogany's stolen Accord, after 3 years. Now, usually when stolen cars are recovered, they are usually stripped, but when Amanda saw her car again, it was not an empty shell - it was heavily modified. In the time she had forgotten all about her family hauler, it had gotten a new leather interior, a manual swap, an engine swap, some aftermarket crap, a Dominican flag, and a wooden cross. What's a Jewish 8th grade teacher who doesn't know how to drive stick to do? She doesn't know, but I know what I would do: Part that sucker out! Except when selling the parts, I probably wouldn't want to use the article's description of some parts:
Amanda Pogany's once-humble white 1996 Honda Accord was returned to her drag-race ready, with a brand-new V-8 engine, tinted windows, oversized tires with special hubcaps - and custom valve stem caps shaped like bullet casings.
V8 engine? Special Hubcaps? OH RLY? :/
Forum Madness: Don’t You Just Hate It…
...when your flywheel dislodges from your car and takes everything with it?
Found on the pages of SpeedClubPR & Honda-Tech, it's not so much a record breaking thread, but the video is a record of the off chance of a flywheel taking out the whole front end of a CRX.
[from SpeedClubPR / Honda-Tech]
Honda CR-Z. Mugen Style.
Straight from Mugen comes their take on the CR-Z. I want those wheels. I probably could do without the LED grill-bumper. Overall, not a bad looking car. Hybrid Tuning...its like the old adage, "All Show. No Go." Maybe this round there'll be some "go" considering the amount of Japanese tuners willingly getting behind the Prius and Insight.
The FN2 Civic Type R Rally Car
Oh I love rally. And oh how I love the European Civic Type R. Put those two together? *gasp* Here is Honda Australia doing shakedown runs of their rally Civic. Tuned by JAS Motorsports and powered by Mugen, this little guy will be driven by Evans Motorsports driver Eli Evans and co-driver Glen Weston in the 2010 Australian Rally Championship.
The 2010 ARC starts this weekend and will be pitting my beloved hatch against the likes of Eli Evans' brother, Simon, in a Subaru WRX STi along with a field of TRD Toyota Corolla hatches and Mitsu EVOs.
2011 Honda Odyssey Concept
I can admit it: I like minivans. I could really care less if people think soccer mom status, minivans are awesome vehicles too. When modded out, they are drop dead gorgeous. Chevy Astros, Toyota Previas, and Honda Oddys top my list in best looking minivans. Well, except that 3rd Gen Oddy - it was beaten with the Honda Ugly Stick that has been going around Hondas/Acuras since 2000. Looks like the stick missed this Oddy Concept. It's clean, modern, and overall a good direction for the Oddy. Let's hope the Honda Ugly Stick doesn't come around for production finalization cause I'd be very disappointed. We shall see this fall when the 2011 Honda Odyssey is set to debut.
