It’s not often you get to spend a substantial amount of time driving a true cult car that you don’t own. If you owned it, you would be in the cult. If it’s someone else’s car, you can just check out what the appeal is without any commitment, oaths, special drinks, etc. Well, the Honda S2000 has a ton of appeal to just about anybody not immune to the charms of a traditional sports roadster.
Recently I wrote a full CC profile on this model. Today, I’ll talk about my dad’s S2000 and give my personal impressions from the brief time I was the car’s caretaker and salesman.
My parents have owned Honda cars exclusively since 1991, and my dad had long had Honda motorcycles until the early 2000’s when he had a couple close calls. He gave up on motorcycles, but not the desire to drive an open vehicle with a large H on it. The S2000, which came out for the 2000 model year, was a natural fit to replace his 1994 Civic Del Sol. He wasn’t in position to get one until 2009, as a used 2005 with ~45k miles. He really babied it, always having it as a third car that was never relied on for driving on anything but nice sunny days. He even had a one-car garage built for it, and when they relocated to another house, he built another one-car garage. My parents probably spent more in garage-building than they did on the car! He also kept it pretty reclusive as far as I was concerned. I only rode in it once, and when I asked to drive it, he demurred. In fairness, whenever I visited and we went anywhere, it was also with my mom and/or my family, so there wasn’t much occasion to use a two seat car when there.
My mom passed away last year and early this year my dad’s health took a turn for the worse. We had to do an emergency relocation for him from their home in North Carolina to a retirement facility near us in Houston. This included selling their house and everything else that wouldn’t be needed in his new, downsized situation. My cousin and I went back and spent four hectic days in NC packing, selling, donating, or trashing everything in a house overfull with many decades of accumulated stuff. The last step was having the S2000 picked up for transport. At least that was Plan A.
This was in April (2026), when fuel prices were majorly up and the transporter backed out of the reservation, saying no trucker would pick up the trip in their little town in the mountains of western NC. So a Plan B was quickly conceived to rent a trailer and tow it behind the U-Haul. On the trip, I lost track of the number of thumbs up and gas station comments I got.
Once in Texas, it needed an oil leak fixed (cracked oil pan, apparently from the trip), existing fabric top tear repaired, and a deep, professional cleaning inside and out. The car was overall in very good condition with 73k miles. I finally got to drive it because it needed to be assessed fully and then test drove. Take it from me, it needed lots of test driving. At all speeds. Top up and down. Someone had to do it. You can never be too sure!
It’s definitely a fun car. There is never any forgetting that you are in a sports car. The cab is very cozy, not specifically cramped in any dimension (I’m 6’2″ and not especially wide), though my wife found it claustrophobic. The steering column is fixed and the seat doesn’t height adjust, but everything feels appropriately placed. The ride is firm, though once you get used to it, it doesn’t call attention to itself. The handling has no comparison with regular cars, even my Mustang GT with Performance Pack. You get the impression that slowing down for turns is fully optional at pretty much any speed, with precise (electrically assisted) steering and almost no perceptible body lean. You’d find yourself grinning like I was. It feels really small at first, then once acclimated, even a Mustang feels huge!
Drivetrain-wise, it’s undramatic in normal driving. Exhaust is lightly audible and tastefully tuned. Shifts are precise and the clutch undemanding. At socially responsible RPMs it never lacks for acceleration in traffic, though also doesn’t give the impression it is champing at the bit to be let go. However, reports of it being a fiend for high RPMs seem to be completely accurate. When you push the tach up towards the red bars, the little engine is fierce! Acceleration is very healthy and the sounds emitted remind one of the racecar technology roots. Just try not to grin!
I was tempted to keep it and give myself over to the cult. I think I could have talked my dad into not selling it if I paid the insurance…then my lack of open garage space and not unlimited budget brought me back to reality.
It cleaned up good, as the pictures show, and only took about a week listed on Facebook to find a local area cult member anxious to pay full private seller book ($28k) to put it in his garage (he sent me a pic).
These days, you’d pay a lot less for a BMW Z3/4 or early Porsche Boxster, but you wouldn’t have the satisfaction of belonging to the benign Honda cult and they probably wouldn’t be as reliable or even as fun.
Related reading:
COAL: 2006 Honda S2000 – Lucky Deuce By JJPowers. Unlike my brief possession, JJ drove his car extensively and goes into delightful detail on his experiences with it.
A woman friend of ours, who’s well into her sixth decade on earth, maybe even seventh, has a silver S2000 as her daily driver. She and her husband have had crossovers as second cars to fit both of them and their big dog, but she doesn’t like their stodgy handling and I’ve only ever seen her driving them once. She’s an avid cyclist and her S2000 has a hitch receiver and rack for the bike.
This is pretty much the ultimate antithesis of my new open top four cylinder “car”. More on that later.
But yes, the joy of riding in a very open vehicle on a warm late summer evening (as we did last night) is very real, no matter which end of the performance or handling spectrum it belongs to.
When I used to own a convertible, summer evenings were my favorite time to go top down!
Can’t wait to hear about your new open ride!
In Australia, I reckon the ONLY time a convertible is sweet is a summer evening (and it is a glorious thing to do). The sun is just too harsh in daytime, even on a sunny winter’s day.
My parents’ neighbor added a one-car garage for his own AP2 S2000 some years back. I wonder if he still has it. I drove one a bunch of times fifteen years ago. It was the most solid open car I’ve ever driven, and I’ve driven many of the celebrated German convertibles.
Yes, remarkably tight for a drop top!
superlative write up it must have been tough selling a member of the family and I’d bet your father would have let you keep it, garage or not, in a no salt area
the guy who bought it got a great deal since it is unmodified and I suspect that willing little thoroughbred will appreciate smartly as time moves on
looked it up, a standard, well-kept Honda S2000 now routinely commands between $30,000 and $55,000 on enthusiast auction sites, rare, low-mileage variants like the S2000 CR (Club Racer) have skyrocketed – pristine examples of the CR have cracked the six-figure mark, commanding up to $144,000
read that Honda is bringing the Element back, I wish they brought this one back too, but not likely I’m glad you got a chance to experience your father’s joy
Thanks! I would not have wanted to keep it without a garage spot. In Texas, the damage doesn’t come from below (snow and salt), it comes from above (copious amounts of rain and sun).
Selling it locally was the simplest thing. Maybe a national auction would have brought more, but I don’t think it was below market for a private “classifieds” listing. I had it listed at 29 based on all the listings I could find. Got a couple lockers over the first couple days, then a buyer at $28 on the 3rd or 4th day. Altogether a pretty easy process, which suited me since I wasn’t looking to drag the process out to push the price as high as possible. My dad was happy to get more than he paid for it.
Also, it had a few imperfections, so it was only Very Good condition, not Excellent.
The idea of a far-flung dash to empty an entire house, and get the remnants all home – and a car – is just intimidating. Pretty dramatic change for your dad too, no doubt.
I missed your last post on these, and so only found out just now from there that these had become a cult, with matching prices. Normally, I react against these things, mainly because cultists are usually, er, shall we say, a bit shiny-eyed and inflexible in their views. But Japanese-car cultists – though as mad as cut snakes, like any such – aren’t like that. They’re enthusiastic in the bouncy-dog way. And the S2000 deserves it on many grounds.
I forgot Pininfarina gave the base for these: the great subtlety of the result shines through. They are a kind-of hidden-handsome car, dismissed as too bland only by those who’re not looking properly (and I’ll confess that originally included me at first). In short, the looks are a definite core part of the appeal.
I’ve never driven one, alas. Some nutbag Integra thingy with the 8K redline is as close as I’ve come to the joys. The only person I know who owned one parked it on its roof, and he was a good driver too (it was the snap oversteer thing). He would’ve actually kept it, but his wife, who was also on board at the time, said no. She WAS upside down at the time. (That could be true: she’s a very funny person).
I was going to say “peak Honda”, but that isn’t really true. The last new one I went in, a “dull” lowish-level ’22-ish Civic, was still a demonstrably excellent machine.
I would likely get along well with your dad as I have been a lifelong Honda fan of both the two and four-wheeled varieties. I currently own a 2005 S2000 as well as a 2013 CB1100 (which I’m pondering selling as my riding days might be behind me at this point as well). Like you, I came by my love for Hondas via my own dad who was riding their motorcycles as far back as the 1960s, sometimes with me riding on the back. He got me started on a small Honda of my own when I was 7 or 8 and every Honda I’ve owned since then has been a positive experience. Yet while I’m Honda fan, I tend to find most things with wheels and an internal combustion engine to be of interest and find particular enjoyment learning about vehicles I’m unfamiliar with.
Well anyway, I just happened upon this site as I was looking for information on the Mazda RX-4 like the one owned by a kid I knew back in college. As I began exploring the site further, I wound up finding this review as well as the S2000 overview that you wrote. I’m commenting here as I wanted to let you know that for not being a S2000 fanatic you did a really good job writing both of these pieces. I think you made the right call when it came to pricing your dad’s car. One of the crazier aspects of the S2000 in my opinion is just how much the paint color impacts values with the silver cars seemingly taking a particularly unfair hit in this regard. Though maybe that’s an aspect shared by other “modern classics” in the limelight these days, who knows? I acquired my S2000 back in 2017. While I feel that it is a fantastic sports car worthy of the many accolades received, I’m still surprised by just how much these cars have appreciated since the pandemic. Perhaps it has something to do with many in the media continuing to compare cars like the Miata and the BRZ/GR86 to Honda’s 50th anniversary celebration car.
Im suprised at the prices these cars command. 25k is about the floor for a decent one with no stories and a clean title.
Honda made about 66,680 of these for the US market, which is a lot for a niche sports car. Its not like the Supra, NSX or FD RX-7 where they sold just a few thousand us spec cars.
Maybe its that the survival rate is lower than say something like a c5 corvette. Honda guys tend to actually drive their cars. And some of them are real meat heads who mod the hell out of them, really beat on them and wreck them. I know these were sub 10k cars about 10 years ago if they had some miles on them, in budget for the broke ricer crowd who would drive them into the ground