Normally, we wouldn't report on cars being released in the Japanese marketplace, especially if the vehicle in question has been on sale in markets such as ours for a good long time now. However, we thought it would be appropriate to cover the launch of the Acura/Honda NSX in Japan. Though it seems rather unusual at first, it does mark a curious case of a car company going full circle, as Automotive News points out.

First, a brief history lesson. In 1982 Acura's parent company, Honda, opened its inaugural assembly plant in the US, thus becoming the first Japanese car maker to set up a factory in the States. Fast forward 34 years and the facility in Marysville, Ohio, is still churning out many Honda and Acuras models. The Acura NSX is built there, albeit in its own special factory dubbed the Performance Manufacturing Center. The new NSX being built in Ohio really brings this the whole "going full circle" theme out. The original built-in-Japan NSX found considerable success in the US (nearly half of the production run was sold in the USA), and now the American-built second-generation model has just gone on sale in Japan.

Although the NSX isn't a fully American-built performance car-Honda's Japanese R&D team has the greater claim to being the mastermind behind the NSX's very clever and complicated hybrid powertrain-the fact that pretty much everything else about the NSX has been sorted out in Marysville is testament to how far things have come since the factory was originally opened. Prior to the 1980s Honda was still a company that produced a vast majority of its vehicles in its native Japan, and now Honda's in the position where it can use the talented workforce at the Marysville factory to bring a huge chunk of its hybrid halo model to life. Make no mistake, the NSX coming full circle is a pretty big deal when you look back at Honda's history.