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Ludacris discusses Fast and Furious 7 and his 1993 Acura Legend

It's easy to think of most wealthy celebrities as egotistical, materialistic individuals who own a Ferrari for every day of the week. The reality, though, is often much less severe. See, they can get attached to things, like cars, just like normal folks. Take Alfred Morris, for example. A 22-year-old running back with the Washington Redskins. Morris still drives the 1991 Mazda 626 that he had in college, despite a healthy $2.2 million contract.
Rapper/actor Ludacris is an even more extreme example of automotive loyalty. With an estimated net worth of over $70 million, Luda has the money for his own private plane. Yet that wealth doesn't stop him from regularly driving the 1993 Acura Legend he has had since before he found fame.
Ludacris, whose real name is Chris Bridges, recently discussed his old Acura during an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneris Show to promote his new album. It sounds like he's put 10,000 miles on the trusty sedan since it last popped up online less than a year ago, so it's pretty clear that he drives it on the regular. In fact, Ludacris says he still pens new songs sitting inside it, just like he used to back in the day when he was starting out.

Acura built just 91 examples of the ILX last month, here's why

The short life of the Acura ILX has been vexed by one glaringly odd standard equipment choice, mediocre reviews, getting outsold by its competition as it posted slower-than-projected sales and a pledge by Honda to upgrade its supposedly upgraded offering. Therefore, when Automotive News reports that just 91 of the Civic-based Acura sedans were manufactured last month - after a string of production months in double-digits - it would be easy to press the button for the alarm bells.
But that would be hasty, because it is actually the 2013 Honda Civic that is crimping the production pipeline of the ILX. The vastly higher sales numbers of the Honda meant that all three North American plants that produce it needed to crank up output to satisfy dealer inventory needs, including the Greenburg, Indiana plant that makes both the Civic and the ILX. As the classic guns-vs-butter Economy 101 lesson taught us - in which making more of one necessarily means making less of the other - well, the Civic is the gun.
Honda prepared for this eventuality by cranking out the Acuras while it got ready for Civic production. The ILX has held steady at about 500 units shy of company projections every month, and the current inventory represents about 90 days worth of sales. That makes Greenburg's ostensibly low numbers in line with the realities of the ILX, and the situation probably won't change much as Acura gets ready for the improved 2014 ILX.

Acura NSX owners receive custom short teaser movies of their personal car

In a neat bit of fan service for those who've ordered Acura's new NSX halo car, the company will make a short film that reflects the way the car's been configured. Those films are on their way to future owners as you read this. In addition, they'll get a 1:18 scale custom model of their own car, reflecting every appearance option inside and out. That's neat. So neat, in fact, that we decided to commission our own video. We got together and configured a car in the lovely Nouvelle Blue Pearl, and sent our build over to Acura. They put together a video that's mostly representative of what an owner would see. You can see our build plate (hint: it says "Autoblog – Precision Crafted By Performance Manufacturing Center" on it), and that's "our" car on the dyno starting about 22 seconds in. If you want to check out someone else's film, you can compare our build to Jay Leno's. The reason Acura can do this is that there simply aren't that many available configurations for the NSX. This is at the root of one of the main criticisms some of our editors have about the car. An NSX starts at darn close to $160,000, and there are eight paint options (not too bad), four interior color options, and three seating options. All well and good, but compare that to the 16 paint and 12 interior color/material choices in a 911 Turbo, for example, choosing a similarly high-performance car at a similar price range. And there's a further wrinkle: Porsche will paint your car to match a sample you provide, so in reality the ability for an owner to make the car uniquely theirs is infinite, if you don't mind paying for it. See also the BMW Individual program, or McLaren's MSO one-offs. We're not just talking about the MSO Defined options, but the MSO Bespoke program itself, which will basically do anything you want to the car as long as it's road legal and your check doesn't bounce. We've been to MSO, and they're not kidding: they'll build anything. So yes, these custom videos are nice fan service, and they'll certainly jazz up the buyers who've already ordered one of these dynamically impressive cars. It's a move that builds loyalty, and certainly doesn't have much of a drawback. But for us, already a bit sensitive to Acura's conservative option list for the NSX, it serves to highlight the gap between Acura and the more established brands in catering to well-off customers' desire for bespoke range-topping creations.