- Primary Subject: Need for Speed / Forza Horizon (Automotive Licensing Analysis) - Key Update: An analysis of why major car manufacturers like Honda and Toyota historically avoided street racing video games and how licensing policies have shifted over time. - Status: Confirmed - Last Verified: July 30, 2026 - Quick Answer: Automakers avoid street racing games due to concerns over illegal themes, police chases, and car damage models, though Toyota eventually returned to sim racers. I have spent a stupid number of hours outrunning cops in cars I will never afford, and for most of that time I never questioned the garage. You take what the game gives you. It was only when I went hunting for one specific car and could not find it anywhere in the list that I started paying attention to the gaps. A racing game's roster gets settled in a licensing meeting long before it reaches the design team, and the two most famous holes in that roster belong to Honda and Toyota. The Honda Gap Is Real, But Not the Way Fans Tell It If you grew up on the Need for Speed tuner era, you remember the moment you realized there was no Civic to build. That absence hardened into folklore over the years: Honda hates street racing games and always has. The actual record is messier. Honda and Acura have appeared across the series for decades, just unevenly. The NA1 Acura NSX was in the original The Need for Speed back in 1994, disappeared, then came back as the NA2 in ProStreet in 2007. The second-generation NSX turned up in Payback in 2017. When EA rebooted the franchise as plain Need for Speed in 2015, Honda arrived in force, with the Civic and the NSX both drivable in a game built