Honda will debut a new all-electric concept car at the 100th 2016 Broadmoor Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, which features further enhancements on last year’s electric powertrain.
The Acura all-electric, NSX-inspired EV concept car will compete in the Electric Modified Class during the hill climb on June 26 in Colorado Springs. The new concept car builds on the experimental, all-electric, four-motor super handling all-wheel drive (SH-AWD) powertrain that won at last year’s Pikes Peak Challenge Exhibition class.
Tetsuya Yamano, who drove last year’s CR-Z-based electric prototype at the hill climb, will return this year to drive the Acura concept car.
“We’ve been tuning the car for several weeks at Pikes and have advanced its performance significantly,” Yamano said. “We’re honored to be running at Pikes in this historical, anniversary year – an event respected by racing fans all over the world.”
The concept car has the world’s first technology that enables four-wheel independent torque allocation, Honda said in a press release. Compared to last year’s model, the powertrain on the Acura produces three times the total system output. This year, it is mated to an NSX body.
The concept car that will be unveiled this year is part of the 20 years of development work Honda R&D has been doing in super handling technology in pursuit of ideal vehicle handling.
Honda has applied separate twin motor units, which it considers the brains of the powertrain, to each axle to achieve independent torque distribution to all four corners, or four-wheel torque vectoring.
Taking what they learned from last year’s hill climb, Honda has equipped each wheel with more thrust by updating the system management of the powertrain.
Besides the SH-AWD concept, Acura will have two other NSX supercars competing in this year’s hill climb, and the Acura NSX, MDX and TLX will serve as official pace cars.
Check out this TFLcar video of a 2017 Acura NSX going against a classic 2005 version:
