Honda is set to make a resounding return to the performance car market. After years in the ‘white-goods’ wilderness it seemed to have fallen into, new Honda President, Takanobu Ito insists ‘sportiness’ is right back on Honda's main agenda.
 
One of Takanobu’s first decisions in late 2009 was to task his design team with creating a successor to the legendary NSX supercar, a car on whose chassis development he worked on in the 1990s. Known internally as the 'Super Sports Car', Honda showed a teaser image of it during a pre-Tokyo show presentation at the Motegi test track, before later confirming a concept will be shown at the Detroit motor show in January 2012.

Details are still a little hazy, but it looks like the car is going to be based around the company's very clever new SH-AWD system. It’s a new hybrid drivetrain that links a front-mounted 3.5-litre, 300bhp direct-injection V6 petrol engine (delivering its power to the front wheels via a six-speed twin-clutch gearbox) with two 20KW electric motors operating on each of the rear wheels and a third 30KW electric motor acting directly on the front axle. Thanks to clever on-board electronics, each motor can be operated independently, allowing a degree of torque vectoring to sharpen the dynamics. Expect more news on a ‘new NSX’ at Detroit.

Meanwhile, this week’s Tokyo motor show has yielded two new concepts. The EV-STER is a compact, electric-powered roadster that’s effectively a modern-day Beat kei-car (and is sadly unlikely to make it to Europe once production starts), while the AC-X is a hybrid GT. Both feature Honda's radical TLS (twin lever steering), which the company admits testing for real on its F1 car at Suzuka a few years ago. It proved to be a great success, enabling drivers to lap a remarkable 3.3sec quicker than they did in identical cars fitted with a conventional steering wheel.

Back in the real world, Honda’s confirmed to evo that the UK will once again see Type-R models, and it’s currently working on at least two variants. The first will be a new Civic Type-R, which should arrive in 2012. No word yet on its powerplant, but everything from turbo petrols to hybrid drivetrains have been mooted after emissions regulations killed off the naturally aspirated VTEC-powered Type-R in 2010.

All the 2011 Tokyo motor show news is here