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p According to John Norman, principal designer for the NSX interior, an objective was to make the interior of the car inviting, comfortable, intuitive, and yet nonintrusive. The car is about driving, so they worked to "support the driver and get out of the way," but still in a way that makes the person buying the car know that they are getting something that is worth the investment. sold; the division sold 167,843 cars and light trucks for the year), that's not a bad vehicle to have been on. Still, Norman says that when he heard that there was going to be a new NSX— "at some points we didn't think we were going to redo the car"—"I jumped at the opportunity." While he acknowledges that "as a designer, you have to be able to design anything," he actually was a guy who drove a sports car, a 2000 Porsche 996 was his daily driver for fve years, so he had more than just assignment- knowledge of the category. Still, there was signifcant benchmarking that was carried out when the new car was being developed. Norman says that early on in the program there was a ride-and-drive program which involved a collection of competitive and comparative cars ranging from a Lamborghini and a Ferrari to a Corvette and a Nissan GT-R. They started out in Hollywood, drove around that area, stayed in a swank hotel, and actually lived the lifestyle for a couple of days. They also had the opportunity to drive the original NSX on the back roads of Malibu, which was to have an efect on what Norman designed. Norman says that as a result of that drive on those twisty mountain roads, he got a sense of what the original NSX was about. "I had read about the 'seamless nature between man and machine,'" he says of the way the driver of the NSX was to feel. "I experienced it." So as a consequence of this, when they set about to develop the interior for the new NSX, it was done in a way such that there would continue to be the seamlessness. "We had to shrink the IP as much as possible. We had to make the A-pillars as thin as possible for forward visibility. We had to strip away as many buttons as possible. We had to make it very simple. We had to strip away all of the distractions. We had to support the driver and get out of the way." One obvious place where this is evident is in the IP. The benchmark for high- end cars seems to be the 17-in. screen used in the Tesla Model S. Yet in the NSX, the screen is just 7 in. Again, this gets back to the notion that it is the drive that matters. Norman explains that when you put a large screen in a vehicle, then you're AD&P; > May 2015 > FEATURE > Inside the NSX > Gary S. Vasilash > gsv@autofeldguide.com 42