“Americans like loud cars, so we had to make this one sound extra good for them,” a Honda engineer tells me with a grin. I’m standing next to the trackside tire barrier of the handling circuit at Honda’s Tochigi Proving Ground, watching and listening to the automaker’s next-gen hybrid prototype being lapped by American journalists. It sounds good. Real good. A Honda four-cylinder sounding good is hardly unheard of, but compared to the Honda Prelude prototype I’d just been watching and driving a couple of hours prior, this sounds like a vast improvement.
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