While the interior would be familiar to any accord owner, the zebrano-looking wood accents gave it a European flair. What I found was a car that was at least as peppy as any Audi I’d driven, but remarkably lacking in torque steer. Thinking about my impending college graduation and dreaming a little, I decided to go and check out this car I’d read about reportedly combining Japanese reliability with German dynamics and was, frankly, more than pleasantly surprised. At the time I was a bit of a Honda/Acura junkie, with a bulletproof 1985 Prelude as my daily driver at the time having replaced a string of needy and unreliable European cars. I drove the Vigor when they were first released in 1992, at the dealership in Berlin, Connecticut just off the Berlin Turnpike. Again, unusual for the time but relatively commonplace today. I am also a fan of the flared wheel arches and (for the time) large alloy wheels with moderately low-profile tires. The Mercedes-esque door handles were one of the first applications of that detail on a Japanese car – something that most if not all of them have today. The large taillights are again distinctive, and the car’s long, low front and high tail give it somewhat of a slim, sleek profile. I am particularly fond of the inboard fog lamps that give the front end a distinctive look also reminiscent of the contemporary Integra, but with a grille. Still, it doesn’t look like every other car on the road, either. The Vigor’s styling remains distinctly Japanese on the whole, particularly with the frameless side windows that were all the rage from companies like Acura, Lexus, and Subaru in those days. Good examples are getting hard to find, but this clean example can be found here on Craigslist in Cornelius, Oregon for just $2,595, or click here for a listing of Vigors for sale from multiple sites. So they borrowed a page from Audi’s playbook – longitidinally-mounted inline-5, short front overhang, availability of a 5-speed manual tansmission, strong list of standard equipment, and zebrano wood – and built the Vigor. Honda’s Acura brand had taken aim directly at the likes of Audi, but lacked a mid-size sports sedan in their lineup – the Integra was too small and the Legend was a little too cushy. As their resurgence took hold in earnest, the folks in the land of the rising sun took notice. They looked a little like Mercedes, but sleeker. Before the UI debacle, they had been lauded in the automotive press for bringing to market stylish luxury German cars that regular people could afford. In the early 1990s, after being exonerated from the “unintended acceleration” scandal which concluded with the simple fact that drivers are stupid and resulted in the brake release for automatic transmissions that are law today, Audi came back.
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