[jcp123]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Not when you think about it, though. The cost of that engineering could be spread over millions of vehicles sold each year, where the more expensive exotics have to recoup their engineering costs from a few percent of the sales volume.

Certainly from that standpoint, you're right. What I'm getting at, though, is that we still had relatively crude expectations from compacts and economy cars at the time. Honda could certainly have dulled the mechanicals hidden far from John Q. Public's eyes, and still have had a winner (a formula they followed with the 7th gen Civics). But at that time, they didn't, and we're all just a little bit better for it.