2024 Acura Integra, A-Spec Tech, 6 speed manual

I bought a new car. It won't exactly be a project, but when I do stuff with it (and I do plan to do stuff with it), I will write about it here.

It's a 2024 Acura Integra A-Spec with the Technology Package and a six speed manual transmission.

There are a bunch of fairly long stories about how and why I ended up with this particular car, and I'll probably add them as we go, but I thought that an introduction was overdue, as I've had the car for about six months now.

Short version:

-I've wanted a new Civic Si since I first read about them here around March of 2022.

-I couldn't get one within a reasonable amount of time, and without spending an unreasonable amount of money over MSRP.

-I think the Civic Si is a better looking car.

-I spent more for this, but that's okay.

-I really, really, really like this car.

That color really looks good on that car. 

In for the stories.

So... I wanted a Civic Si. I love the Civic Si. I fell in love with them around 1986 or so. I was autocrossing something else, and the Civic and CRXs were dominating and never breaking. I remember seeing a 1984 Civic S when I was in high school. I thought it was cool, but ugly. Then a couple of really fast guys with red 1986 Civic Si's started showing up at autocrosses. The cars just seemed to work so well, and with the Mugen rear spoilers, I really started to love the way that they looked.

I spent the next few years searching for a used white 1986-87 Civic Si that I could afford. Unfortunately, all of the original owners seemed to love them as much as I did. There were never, ever any used ones for sale.

When the 1988 Civics came out, there were some major upgrades: Fuel injection across the board, double wishbone suspension front and rear, and sixteen valves,,which was a really huge deal at the time. But unfortunately, there was no Si in the lineup for 1988.

When the 1989 Civics came out, I was super happy that the Si was back. They had a little extra power (108hp vs 92), bigger wheels, sunroof, front and rear sway bars and really great looking sport seats. I had a friend who was the F&I guy at a Honda dealer, and we I we made a deal on the first car that they got in. I hadn't even seen one in person yet, but it was similar to the 1988 CRX Si, and $1000 less and not so much of an insurance hit, so I was comfortable taking a chance on it.

That was far and away the best car that I've ever owned. I did everything with it: Commuting, roadntrips, years of autocrossing, and I even used it as my truck when I built my house. I replaced the original clutch at 212,000 miles even though it was still working and then put another 100,000 miles on it, until the rocker panels disappeared and the sunroof started leaking. I still sold it for $1800 to the first guy wo came to see it.

I miss that car... If they still sold them, I'd still be buying them.

Photos of photos. 
 

Love the choice of car and color!

By late 1998, and after repeated bad experiences with cheap parts store alternators, I decided that it might be time for a new car. I was about a year into a new job, and I knew that there was a new Civic Si coming for 1999. I tried to buy one, but was told that they were still at least six months out.

I ended up buying the next best thing: a green 1999 Civic EX coupe. It was a great looking car, but the interior seat fabric, carpet and plastic panels were a huge step down in quality. I was disappointed with 135hp of VTEC power. I couldn't part with the old Si, so I pushed it into the corner of my apartment's parking lot.

I added some fat Yokohama AVS tires to the new car, a CAI, bigger sway bars, better brakes, and depowered the steering rack.

Meh...

I may have taken photos of that car, but I've probably never looked at them.

Very cool. Congrats!! This naturally sent me off to the local Acura dealer website which shows they have a few Integras in stock with a 6MT, including a Type S in my preferred color (black).  Unfortunately, this doesn't solve my "when would I drive this" problem...  

I wish I had pictures of my old 91 Integra GS, but that was before camera phones were as common and I started taking pictures of everything... I loved that car. 

I've been waiting for this thread - looking forward to all the details. 

Random Type R window sticker with 10,000 mile tire life. 
 

Datsun240ZGuy said:

Random Type R window sticker with 10,000 mile tire life. 

Where's the second sticker with at least $10k "Market Adjustment"? Or is that no longer a thing for the Type R?

So... back to the convoluted story of the '89 and '89 Civics. 
 

The '99 EX coupe had become my daily driver, but I wasn't loving it.
 

The '89 Si had gotten pushed aside because of a persistent electrical problem. The battery had died, so I replaced it, but the car quickly killed the new battery as well. I assumed that it must be a bad alternator, so I bought a rebuilt one from Advance Auto and installed it. I don't remember how long that lasted, but it wasn't much more that a week or two. I went back to Advance and they gave me a replacement alternator under warranty. I swapped it in, but again, I found myself with another dead battery a few weeks later. At that point, I thought that maybe I had a failed ECU and the car was probably done, as I'd never find a used one (early/pre-internet), and it would be too expensive to get a new one from Honda. I couldn't bring myself to part ways with the car, so I just moved to a corner of the parking lot. 
 

After a few uninspiring months of life with the new EX, I kept thinking about that Si. I decided to bite the bullet and charged the battery up again and drove it to the Honda dealership to have their service department take a look at it. At this point, the car had about 240k miles on it. 
 

They called and told me that I needed a new alternator. When I told them that I had just swapped  in two new alternators, they asked if they were Honda alternators. 

Well, um, no...

"You need a new alternator."

The Honda alternator was twice the price of the ones from Advance, plus the cost of installation. 

I drove that 1989 Si for another 65,000 miles.

At this point, the brand new, slightly modified but completely unloved '99 Civic was moved to the end of the apartment's parking lot, with a curb on one side, and a neighbor's equally unused motorcycle parked on the other side.  

One morning there was a knock on my door. Another neighbor had bumped the motorcycle and knocked it over into the side of my car. The damage was limited to the door, but it was bad enough to require a new door skin, and the body shop had to paint the whole side of the car in order to get everything to match. They did a fantastic job, but by now, I was really hating this car.

I had bought the EX in September of 1998, but it was a very early '99. I'd owned it about a year, but only put about 9,000 miles on it. It was super clean because I had driven the Si through the winter. I had gotten a really good deal on the car, and there were a couple of price increases from Honda over the course of the year.

I returned the car back to stock form, drove it to a Honda dealership, talked to their used car manager, and he offered me $400 less than I had paid for it. I handed him the keys and title, and he wrote me a check. 

If that 1999 Civic EX had been a 1999 Civic Si, this whole thing could have gone in a different direction.

The 1989 Civic Si was back to daily driver status, and I was now in the process of building my house. When my father's truck wasn't available, I used the Civic to haul lumber. With the rear seats folded forward and the passenger's seat reclined, I could haul eight footers inside. Ten footers and extension ladders went up on the Thule roof rack. I needed the truck for twelves.

I should also mention that I roadtripped that Civic Si as far north as Québec City, and as far south as St Petersburg Florida.

Probably the best car I have every had as a commuter car was my 87 Civic SI. White, 5 speed, same engine as a CRX SI, it had 95K on it when I bought it and it had 233K on it when I sold it. From what I heard from the 3rd owner, it went over 300K. All I ever did to that car was gas, oil, brakes and tires. I did about 120 miles daily to work and back, all highway so even the clutch was still good when I sold it. Great car, did all the things I needed a car to do and was fast and fun at the time. Sold it for something sexier (MR2 Turbo) but I still enjoyed driving that SI. FYI, I had a CRX SI as well but that car was fun but not as practical with two kids.

New Integra looks good, I see  they have either 200 HP or 320!

In reply to secretariata (Forum Supporter) :

They tell you privately and they told me it's $15,000 market adjustment.  

They told me the Si "was" $7500 but they reduced it to $5000 for the Black Friday Sale.  When I mentioned Penske had quoted no markup they went to a manager that said he could talk to the "big guy" and ask if he could do better. 

I promise to get back to the 2024 Integra ASAP, but I need to finish up the Civic Si stuff for context. 
 

That little white 1989 Si hatchback carried me through the house build, but by the following summer, the rocker panels had all but disappeared. On two occasions, I had to trim away rusted pieces to avoid cutting up my legs. 
 

But the real killer was the sunroof seal (NLA at the time).

I had just finished up a ten hour shift at work. It had rained hard all day, and when I backed out of my parking space at the firehouse, the car dumped about three gallons of cold water down the back of my neck. 
 

I drove home, dried out the car, and made one attempt at getting the old seal to fit tighter. But the car did it to me again about a week later. 
 

That was it. We were done.  I listed it online for $1800 as a parts car. Two guys showed up minutes apart and tried to start a bidding war, but I sold it to the guy who got there first for the advertised price. 
 

I've missed that little car ever since. 

So...where is the Motocompacto?

In reply to Appleseed :

We may get to that.

About a decade ago, and with both the Si and EX long gone, I stumbled upon the cleanest, one owner, unmodified 1988 CRX Si that I had seen in years... and it was for sale. I bought it immediately.

I took care of some deferred maintenance (new brakes, valve adjustment, etc) and cleaned it up a bit. 

It brought back some great memories and was an absolute pleasure to work on, but I really did have too many cars at the time and no place to keep it, so I had to pass it along.

I really wish that I could have kept this one, though.

Appleseed said:

So...where is the Motocompacto?

I was first in line for a Motocompacto.

When I originally contacted them, neither the Honda dealership nor the Acura dealership knew anything about them, but they said that they would investigate and get back to me.

I just got the call, and now they have my deposit. It should be here in about a week.

I'm going to try and wrap up the background stuff, so I can (finally) move on to the new car.

Fast forward to March of 2022. I read about the new 2022 Civic Si for the first time right here on the forum. I wasn't actively looking for another car (I had just taken delivery of a new Accord Hybrid a few weeks before), but the car sounded really interesting, especially considering the very reasonable MSRP.

I was starting to think about how great it would be to have a brand new car that I could run some track days with, without having to add a ton of modifications. Nothing too heavy or complicated (no AWD). I also wanted to buy one last new car with a manual transmission. And as a bonus, the Civic Si comes with a real limited slip from the factory.

I had been driving and enjoying the Volvo V70R for three years, but that car was starting to show its age. And I had just bought a nice Jeep Wrangler, but that quickly turned into an unreliable nightmare. I was ready to get back to some rock solid Honda reliability. I called the dealer that we had just gotten the Accord from and asked him to contact me when they got a new Civic Si in stock so that I could sit in it and see how well I fit. 

Every three or four weeks, I'd call or drop him a text, but each time I was told that they didn't have on the horizon. I kept checking Inventories at Honda.com, but they weren't showing any of them in the Tri State area. As it turned out, my dealer didn't get a single Civic Si for the 2022 model year.

Meanwhile, I read every review and watched every YouTube video on these cars. There were certainly cars out there, but they all seemed to be either down south or out west.

As 2022 turned into 2023, I was starting to get pretty annoyed. I had missed a whole season of track days and I still hadn't even seen a single example on the road or in any dealership around here. I was ready to take a chance, figuring that if I bought one of the cars sight unseen and decided that it was too small or something, I could probably sell it on without taking a huge loss.

In January, I called the dealer back, put down a deposit (at MSRP) and told him that I'd take any color except red. At this point, the Honda website was starting to show a small handful of the cars trickling into dealers in New York and New Jersey, but I still hadn't seen one in person. He said that if they didn't have one in his next month's allocation, that they would locate one at another dealership and arrange a swap.

By March of 2023, they still hadn't gotten a single example allocated to them, and said that no dealer that had one was willing to swap it for any other Honda. At that point, I had found four dealers in the state who were showing cars in their inventories, and a few more in NY and NJ, but they all wanted $5000 over MSRP, and I refused to do that. I even contacted Honda to see if I could by a car directly from them, but they said no.

Around this time, in the course of one of my forum rants about Honda making it hard for me to give them my money for a new Civic Si, the former Datsun310Guy / now Datsun240zGuy mentioned that Acura dealers near him were selling new Integras at MSRP. 

I hadn't paid any attention to the Integra when it was first introduced because the Civic Si looked like such a great deal, at least on paper. I went to the Acura website, saw that it had the same engine, transmission and limited slip, with some more extras thrown in, but quickly dismissed them, because in order to get the manual transmission, you had to jump up a significant ($5000) trim level to the A-Spec. I clicked out of there, ignored the Integras for a few more weeks, and went back to daily searches for a Civic Si within a few hours drive from home.

Eventually, I ventured back to Acura.com a few more times for a closer look. Before long, I realized that the A-Spec and the Technology Package actually included a bunch of stuff that I'd actually like to have in my next car. I checked inventories and found a handful of A-Spec Integras in stock within a reasonable distance. I scoped out a few dealerships when they were closed and was liking what I was seeing. Most were CTV automatics, but there were a couple of them around with the six speed manual. And all Integras had the Civic Si engine regardless of the pedal count. I drove a few six speeds, and one with a CVT, just because it was there. I didn't even hate the CVT as much as I wanted to.

I went back home to do some more thinking. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that an Integra A-Spec Tech, with all it's extra goodies (and a longer warranty) at MSRP, was a better deal than a Civic SI at MSRP + $5000, at least as far as I was concerned.

I had seen just two red Integras on the lots and really liked the color, but they were both CVTs. I went back to Acura.com, searched the inventories and found two dealers in New York who each had a single red 2024 Integra A-Spec Tech with the six speed manual allocated to them. I emailed them both and asked for a price. Both came back with MSRP. Period.

I made a phone call to confirm, drove to New York, drove a couple more 2023 cars in other colors, and then made a deal for one of the incoming 2024s at MSRP. It would be there in about six weeks (mid June).

So my quest to buy a 2022 Civic Si ended sixteen months later with a 2024 Six Speed Integra A-Spec Tech.

It was exhausting, but I am happy.

Great story - it's funny to me to see that I was part of your car journey.  It's amazing me being a tall guy how much headroom the Si has with a sunroof.  

In reply to Datsun240ZGuy :

I may have found my way to this car eventually, but you definitely pointed me in the right direction. Thank you!

And you're right, these cars have a surprising amount of room inside.