How Honda Mass-Produced an Aluminum Supercar Everyone Said Was Impossible

May 1990, Tochigi Prefecture. Honda has just finished building a plant for one car, and inside it sits an unfinished NSX body on a table that rotates a full 360 degrees. There is no conveyor belt. None. A car built around an all-aluminum monocoque body that no Honda line had ever carried will never ride a moving line — and the plant will finish at most twenty-five bodies a day. Honda called the NSX a mass-production car, and it was the world's first mass-production car with an all-aluminum monocoque body. But that phrase is doing something unusual here. Twenty-five cars a day is a trickle. A rotary table instead of a line is not incremental. And the machine doing the joining didn't exist until Honda built it. Follow the weight spiral, the skeptical suppliers at Kobe Steel, the aluminum-bodied CR-X mule, the extruded cellular side sill, five alloys divided by job, and an original spot welder Honda Engineering had to build because no one sold one. From the January 1984 layout study, through Senna's one sentence and a raised rigidity target, to a plant where the floor was still — on purpose. #HondaNSX #NSX #Honda #Aluminum #AutomotiveEngineering #JDM