How hot is the Acura NSX supercar? The press kits are selling for $275 on eBay

After a decade of absence from the automotive market, the Acura NSX supercar generated much excitement when it was introduced at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Only a few days after the news broke, a number of journalists – or at least, people who were accredited as journalists at the show’s press preview on Monday and Tuesday – put their NSX press kits up for sale on eBay.

It’s common for automakers to offer elaborate press kits when they introduce new models, and the NSX kit did not disappoint. Packaged in a lovely tin box, it contains a USB thumb drive loaded with pertinent model information and a small metal model of the car.

One sold on eBay today for $167.50, and other online auctions ending later have received bids well in excess of $100. There’s even one enterprising individual offering a buy-it-now price of $250 for one of the kits.

Selling press kits is nothing new – the same thing happened when the new Corvette Stingray was introduced in Detroit two years ago.

GM sold one to raise money for cancer research, but many were then, as now, sold by opportunists who had been in the scrum after GM pulled the veil from the new sports car.

Many people make a game out of collecting press kits; it’s not uncommon to see an auto reporter’s desk overflowing with hats, miniature models, little sports car and truck wheels, calendars, bobble-head dolls and other bric-a-brac. One could even argue that it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want to sell all that stuff after a while.

But selling a brand new, unopened press kit when cleanup crews around Detroit are undoubtedly still disposing of all of the empty booze bottles left over from the numerous free parties thrown by automakers seems to take advantage of the industry’s riches.

But then, automotive journalists, who are often wined and dined in a fashion that might strike journalists in other lines of work as excessive, aren’t necessarily renowned for rejecting good swag.

Perhaps I’m foolish for not grabbing a shiny toy NSX, but all the information I needed for that and all the other cars introduced at the show was on automakers’ websites no more than three seconds after each veil was lifted.