Not My (Proto)type: The Internet reacts to the 2023 Acura Integra

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After a few weeks of shadowy teasers, the crew at Acura introduced the new Integra mid-November on a stage in California. Showing up in bright yellow paint with a restro-esque name banner stenciled along its lower flanks, the five-door hatchback – equipped with a manual transmission and turbocharged engine – marked a return to the brand’s halcyon days, to say nothing of deploying a real name instead of the dreadful alphabet soup that’s dogged Acura vehicles for the last two decades.

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But that real name is laden with history and evokes a certain type of response from most gearheads. Appending it to an affordable machine with a performance bent is not without risk, especially since the vast majority of society often looks at the past through a set of heavily tinted rose-coloured glasses.

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How’d the internet react to the Integra’s arrival? We donned our hazmat suits (standard Postmedia issue) and waded into social media and various comment sections to find out.

Our own coverage elicited some positive comments, including from a current Honda owner who idly wished they knew this thing was on the horizon before pulling the trigger on a 2020 Accord.

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Others were similarly complimentary.

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But, since this is the internet, there are no shortage of complaints.

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What these nimrods – most of whom weren’t even born or were in diapers when the original Integra (heck, even the much-loved third-gen model) was being sold – fail to understand is this model has always shared a great deal with other members of the Honda family. Only a very small percentage of old Integra production was comprised of the vaunted Type R, with the remainder made up of frankly average coupes and sedans.

Yes, sedans ! Any so-called ‘enthusiast’ blathering online from their mother’s basement that appending the “Integra” name to a five-door hatchback is some sort of sacrilege is conveniently forgetting that’s precisely the body style which contributed to a great number of Integra sales. Sure, the two-door model which showed up piloted by Wankster Ja Rule in the first Fast & Furious movie is the one we all seem to remember, but there was no shortage of Crew Cab Integra trims back in the day.

I’m not alone in this assessment of these keyboard warriors.

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I like it a lot and everyone else can deal with it

— St8 N8 (@norskracer98) November 12, 2021

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Thank you, random voices of reason. And if you think Acura isn’t going to make a Type S variant in the next couple of model years, we’ve a Colorado bridge in which you may be interested.

Good on ya, Acura. We’re glad to have Integra back into the fold — four doors and all.

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