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Acura dealer association nabs retiring pitcher Mariano Rivera for New York spot

Mariano Rivera, considered one of Major League Baseball's best relief and closing pitchers, bought an Acura when he debuted in the major leagues in 1995, and has owned nothing but Acuras since. So it was only natural for the New York Acura Dealers group to strike up a partnership. The fruits of the deal can be seen in the latest New York Acura commercial, called "Legends," which stars Rivera and Acuras new and old. It's narrated by actor Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby "Bacala" Baccalieri in HBO's The Sopranos.
"The spots are a nod to Acura's history and the years it overlapped with Mariano's career," says Scott Rodgers, chief creative officer at Tier10, the ad agency that developed the campaign's concept. With the "Legends" campaign, Rivera and the New York Acura Dealers continue a partnership that has provided $800,000 to the pitcher's charity, the Mariano Rivera Foundation.
The hardest part of the commercial was was finding the cars to star in it, according to Douglas Sonders, co-founder of 8112 Studios, the production company that shot the commercial. "Social media saved the day for us," he says. "After days of cold calls and e-mails to all of our contacts, we ended up sourcing everything we needed in 24 hours after asking our online contacts for assistance."

Acura will sell its EVs exclusively online starting in 2024

Honda has big plans for the new year and electrification will play a huge part of that, the company's recently-promoted SVP of Sales, Mamadou Diallo, told reporters on Tuesday. Expect to see a lot more Honda and Acura hybrids on the road this year, ahead of a major EV push come 2024. Overall, Honda is officially aiming to move 1.2 million units in 2023, with Acura shooting for 160,000 units, a 20-25% increase over what they sold in 2022. And although the company managed to maintain a single-digit days' supply of vehicles throughout last year, it enters 2023 with a glut of cars and trucks and a 17-day supply. As such, dealers are going to be looking to move a lot of that inventory before this year's models start arriving so fingers crossed, we could potentially see some Tesla-level price cuts in the near future. "In 2023, we will see the strategies we've been talking about, including growing sales of light truck models, increasing volume of hybrid-electric models and the start of digital sales at Acura," Diallo said in a Wednesday press release. "All this leads toward our vision of 100-percent electrified sales by 2040 to fulfill our ultimately goal of zero emissions by 2050."  The ZDX and ZDX Type S will be Acura's first full-EV offerings and serve as the harbingers of the company's new, exclusively online EV sales strategy. Diallo didn't have much additional information regarding how the system would work — such as whether haggling was allowed or how individual vehicle prices would be set — but assured the assembled journalists, "as we get closer to [the ZDX debut], we certainly will be discussing this a little bit more with our dealer body and the press in general. For right now we're still finalizing all those details." Acura joins Ford, Volvo, GM and VW in shifting its electrified vehicle sales to the digital marketplace.  For its part, Honda is planning a significant increase in its hybrid vehicle production in 2023, starting with the newly-redesigned Accord and Accord Hybrid (they'll also be Honda's first with Google Built-In). The company "will continue to increase hybrid sales through core models as an important step in bridging customers to full electrified vehicles while reducing GHG emissions," the Wednesday release reads. Honda anticipates a solid half of this year's CR-V and Accord sales to be of the hybrid variety and its efforts bolstered in 2024 with the introduction of a new Civic hybrid.

Is the original Acura NSX a perfect supercar?

The long-awaited arrival of the second coming of the Acura NSX has naturally brought with it many deep retrospectives on the first Acura NSX. Xcar is the latest with a stint in the time capsule, lining up three NSXs to sample at a track in the UK. There's the red wonder that started it all, the standard aluminum-bodied car that went on sale in 1990, so simple and easy-to-drive, extracting more joy than many thought possible from a 3.0-liter V6 with 'just' 270 horsepower and 210 pound-feet of torque. The 25-year-old exotic shows its years, but mostly because of an automatic transmission that dampens throttle response and doesn't like changing gears. The praises it earned in the day, however, still remain, namely excellent steering, handling, and feedback. After that comes laps in the first NSX Type R, the model that lost more than 250 pounds by having no air conditioning, sound deadening, or stereo, and lightweight tweaks like carbon seats and thinner glass. Although it the tuning makes it much harder, the presenter wants to know, "Why isn't Honda making a car like this today?" Then there's the 2002 model, the one that would only last three years before closing the door on a fifteen-year run. It got better at the same time as it got softer, but by then the NSX had nothing left to prove; it hit every one of its targets, it realigned the segment in ways we're still benefiting from, and for at least half of its run nothing else could touch it. Based on the reviews so far, that might include the brand new, very good and very complicated NSX. Check out the video above for Xcar's take. Related Video: News Source: Xcar via YouTube Acura Honda Coupe Luxury Performance Videos xcar honda nsx