‘Precision engineered luxury for peanuts’

Plush Honda flagship saved from the scrapyard

James Walshe

How about a precision-engineered luxury car, equipped with a silky smooth and powerful state-of-the-art six-cylinder 3.5-litre engine, for the same price as a food blender? This giant Honda flagship – a mid-nineties KA9 – benefitted from research and testing carried out on the iconic NSX supercar and is completely unrelated to the Rover 800. The one previous owner – with whom I got chatting in a pub in Cornwall – was about to scrap the car, having serviced it at the local dealer regularly throughout its 78,000 mile life. ‘I know it’s not worth much. Nobody wants it and it hasn’t had an MOT for 18 months’ he grumbled. It could, of course, have been a disaster.

Electric avenue

Clutching folders of bills and a fully stamped history book, I drove it straight to the MOT station where it passed with no advisories. I then took it to Honda UK headquarters in Bracknell where Heritage Fleet chaps Jason Ryder and John White greeted it with great glee. They gave the car an enthusiastic thumbs up in an immaculate workshop, where sits a pre-production NSX once driven by Ayrton Senna. It certainly looks a bit more exciting than my car and that £150 food blender is more visually charming. The Legend is also the same colour as an aubergine. Or a boil. But none of this matters when you’re lounging in a meticulously well made electrically heated leather armchair and cruising in silence at 70mph… for £150!