The good news is that Honda has decided to slash nearly £10,000 from the price of their long-established, two-seater supercar, the NSX. The bad news is that this only brings the cost down to around £60,000 - or, to put it another way, £30,000 per seat, which means the NSX is still, even now, more expensive than taking your family to see The Lion King.
Still, you don't look a gift car under the bonnet - not when What Car? is busy pointing out that this is "one of the biggest price cuts in motoring history". The magazine reproduces Honda's claim that the reduction has been made to "harmonise" prices across Europe, while adding its own darker but equally plausible interpretation - that the cut is more specifically designed to bring prices in line with the NSX's biggest rival, the Porsche 911.
If so, is this a head-to-head battle the Honda can win? The Porsche is a long way down the road in terms of brand awareness. Some, however, would perceive it to be an advantage in the Honda that it has none of the unfortunate baggage that tends to come with a Porsche - baggage accrued over long years of people associating the 911 with the wearing of red braces and the having of too much money.
Fairly or not, probably only owners of Range Rovers experience more on-sight opprobrium than Porsche drivers. The NSX, by contrast, has an attractively pure anonymity about it - if one can speak of anonymity in relation to a car that has a very big, proud-to-be-loud engine at the back and goes from nought to Cornwall in the blink of an eye.
It may be mildly less pushy than a Porsche, but the NSX most certainly does its share of jumping up and down and pointing at itself. My quest to be left alone to drive my Honda supercar in peace was hindered somewhat, not just by the vehicle's long, low, attention-seeking shape, but also by the paint job - a truly luminous, sunburst orange colour, as favoured by progressive rock guitarists for the bodies of their instruments in the 1970s, and for the most part only otherwise available in boiled sweets.
I parked the car in a bay on a crowded high street one morning and rolled out on to the pavement with as casual an expression as I could muster. It is still a source of amazement to me that I did not get beaten up, right there and then. I can only assume that people were simply too dazzled to make a move. My tip to any prospective NSX owner: pick one of the darker colours. And pack a weapon anyway, just in case.
When the car was in transit, heads turned, fingers pointed and jaws dropped. Children shouted, babies spat their dummies and cried, and builders leaned out of white vans to express their admiration and to wish me well for the long journey ahead. Or something like that.
Actually, apart from gaining some kind of insight into what it must have been like to have been Sven-Goran Eriksson last weekend, I was having a high old time. The becoming thing about the NSX is that, though geared to rapidly achieve vomit-inducing speed out on the open road, it actually behaves modestly in slow traffic.
Unusually for this type of vehicle, you do not have to battle with the pedals to rein it in when at a crawl. Given that one's driving life in Britain these days is roughly 19 parts crawling to one part thrashing it, this could turn out to be a very persuasive feature. At speed, of course, the car absolutely howls along, yet sticks to the road and handles in an extremely reassuring way, making this all in all a very good, dangerously fast car to have if you are not as skilful behind the wheel as you are always telling people.
Adjustments on the latest, re-thought edition of the NSX are chiefly cosmetic: new bumpers, bigger alloys, moulded headlights in favour of the old, fancy, pop-up ones. If anything could have benefited from an overhaul, it is the cabin, which has lots of unfashionably clunky buttons and switches arranged on a dull bank of leather-effect plastic and which might put you in mind of a bachelor's living room, circa 1973. There was a slot in the middle of the hi-fi whose purpose puzzled me until a social historian informed me it was a cassette player. I didn't think they made those any more. And I suppose ideally, for £60,000, one would prefer not to have to lean on the boot to get it to close. But we are shopping in the bargain basement here, and there is no time to get sniffy.
On the subject of sniffy: the engine heats up the boot space to domestic oven standards in no time at all. I put some groceries in there and they were nearly cooked by the time I got home. It occurred to me that you could turn this to your advantage as a major time-and-labour-saving device, if you learned to master it.
So, 10 grand off - and it roasts meat. The 911 is looking less attractive by the minute.
