When was the last time you saw a luxury sedan with a manual transmission?
Murilee MartinHonda beat Toyota and Nissan to the luxury-brand game by a few years, introducing two brand-new Acura cars here for the 1986 model year: the Integra (a luxed-up Civic) and the Legend (the result of a collaboration with the Austin Rover Group). While the Legend’s Sterling siblings had a bit too much Prince of Darkness to stay on the road for long, these first-generation Legends held together very well and have only recently become hard to find during my junkyard travels. Here’s a well-cared-for ’88 with the rare five-on-the-floor manual transmission, found in a yard near Denver, Colorado.
Murilee Martin
I see discarded 1980s Hondas with better than 300,000 miles on a regular basis, but not even half that distance traveled beneath this car’s wheels during its life.
Murilee Martin
A manual transmission (first a five-speed and then a six-speed) was available for every year of the Legend, and it made the car quite a bit cheaper as well as being more fun to drive—but nearly every example sold in North America had the optional four-speed automatic. I can’t recall the last time I saw a Legend with three pedals.
Murilee Martin
The 2.7-liter V6 in this car made 161 hp, 34 more than its similarly sized BMW 528e rival (though, to be fair, the Bavarian had 170 lb-ft of torque versus the Acura’s 162), while costing about two-thirds as much as the entry-level 5-Series. Of course, the Legend had front-wheel drive, which would hurt sales once the rear-wheel-drive Infiniti Q45 and Lexus LS 400 showed up in late 1989.
Keyword: 1988 Acura Legend Sedan Is Junkyard Treasure