It wasn’t that long ago that I brought you news about Honda purchasing a Porsche 911 GT3 and the funny message Porsche left in its engine bay after a recall was performed. Now more news is surfacing via Autocar that says Acura also bought a Ferrari 458 Italia. You might think that the car’s successor, the 488 GTB, would be a better candidate for benchmarking purposes, but the 458 stayed at the top of the charts for a long time.

So, Acura must have felt it could learn something from the now discontinued supercar, but what Acura did after it was done with the 458 isn’t going to sit well with Ferrari. Apparently, a company inside has told Autocar that once Acura engineers were done, they cut the car into pieces and tossed it into the dumpsters at Acura’s research and development lab in Japan. Really?

So, a car as great as the 458 Italia, was cut up and thrown out for Otto the garbage man. Seems pretty wild, doesn’t it? The question is whether Acura just didn’t want to deal with auctioning the car off or whether the engineers thought the car was crap and gave it a suitable death. Either way, once Ferrari gets word of this, people in the upper offices are going to lose their minds – we all know how sensitive and arrogant Ferrari is about its cars.

Autocar

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In case you’re wondering, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. Acura bought that Porsche 911, and it’s likely that it experienced the same fate. Furthermore, other manufacturers are just as guilty of using competitor vehicles to help design their own. If I recall correctly, Toyota did it with the Mercedes S-Class when it was still developing Lexus and Mercedes, in turn, did it with the Lexus LS400. The latter was probably just to make sure Lexus didn’t steal any of Mercedes intellectual property in the process, but this stuff does happen. I just don’t think most manufacturers get disrespectful enough to cut the cars up and throw them away – that’s kind of a low blow if you ask me, especially when it comes to something like the 458. Oh well. That’s the world of auto manufacturing at its best.

Why it Matters

Read our full review on the Acura NSX here.