2014 Acura RLX Sedan Release Date and Review

One of the bigger difficulties experiencing car manufacturers recently has been creating useful and secure connections for routing, stereo system, and hands-free cellphone techniques. With the 2014 RLX, Acura reveals off its newest effort at dealing with the interface task, but finishes up with a kludgey style that will keep motorists disappointed.

2014 Acura RLX Sedan

The RLX changes the organization's RL style as its leading automobile, and features enough changes to guarantee a different style name. It efficiently ups Acura's high-class quotient through the use of more high quality internal components and new technological innovation, yet still does not quite experience up to the big high-class of a Mercedes-Benz S-class or a Lincoln LS 460. However, it is not as expensive as those designs, either, placing it in a near-luxury category with new competitors such as the Kia Cadenza.

2014 Acura RLX Sedan

Acura technique, the RLX does not have manufacturer choices so much as different cut stages. This new style can be had in a platform cut or with a sequence of offers, each including functions to the past. The first update contributes routing and the next delivers in various technological innovation functions. An awesome Krell speakers comes in at the next stage, and the top program, which the car I analyzed had, contributes innovative car owner support functions.

The RLX is indeed fractionally bigger than many of its would-be competitors—$45,000-to-$55,000 stalwarts such as the Audi A6, BMW 535i, Cadillac CTS, Infiniti M37, Lexus GS 350 and Mercedes-Benz E350.

However, the scenario becomes complicated if your cross-shopping contains the luxury-wannabe Cars Genesis 5.0 R-Spec automobile with a 429-hp V8 ($46,800). Evaluating these vehicles is like seeing a killing. The Genesis has more liveable area than the Acura (109.4 vs. 102.1 cubic legs of EPA traveler volume), to begin. And, not insignificantly, it’s faster, less large, a lot more highly effective, with more ahead equipment (eight vs. the Acura’s six), a better, more magnificent internal, and…wait for it…rear-wheel generate.

In reality, all the other vehicles in this section deliver motor energy to the back wheels if not all four tires, like the Rolls royce A6. Rear-wheel-drive vehicles have natural benefits in managing, cornering and bodyweight submission. The front-drive RLX with the Enhance program, like our analyze car, has completely 64% of its bodyweight on the top side tires (2,432/1,565 weight f/r), as in contrast to the BMW’s nearly 50-50 bodyweight submission. Generally, motorists never come near to the cornering plenty necessary to experience the distinction, but in the RLX, the faster you go, the more the nose-heaviness exhibits itself in understeer, a propensity to reduce keep at the top side end while cornering at high horizontal plenty.

Now, at this factor, the Acura employees in the space would leap up and begin blathering about the RLX’s many managing countermeasures. It is, for example, prepared with a rear-wheel guiding program (Precision All-Wheel Steer) that allows the back tires to be indicated, individually, up to 2 stages of toe-angle modification in either route (in or out, adverse or positive), for 4 stages of connection. This program can do nice things like toe both back tires in, a little bit, under difficult stopping, to enhance balance. In a distinct area, it can toe out the back outside rim, improving yaw amount and assisting to reduce the effects of understeer. Meanwhile, there is some rule in the stability-control program known as Nimble Handling Support, through which the car, definitely stopping one of more tires, allows motorists keep their range with little guiding information.

These are brave treatments and I appreciate them, but the best the P-AWS can do is simulate the straight range reaction and cornering composure, the of a routine, the traceability, of a more weight-balanced rear-drive car. I’m not sure what value all these acronymic techniques have to the customer if all they do is recover the RLX to merely acceptable luxury-sedan performance. And, before making P-AWS: In low-speed controlling, the program changes the back tires out of phase which is to say, in the other direction from the top side tires. The factor is to reduce the automobile's switching group (another listlessness in front-drive cars). And yet, even with P-AWS crabbing the back tires, the RLX’s switching group is a still a relatively tremendous 40 legs (a Bmw E350′s switching group is 36.2 feet).

The problems is, the usual understanding was incorrect. The RL was not too little, and creating the RLX bigger repairs nothing. The RL’s issue, and now the RLX’s, is that the car looks and seems like an exalted, compulsively over-equipped Ford 7267.TO -1.25%Accord. That is what hails from its personality, its frothy inoffensiveness, its hand-sanitized sterility. It cannot take a position toe-to-toe with Western high-class cars and therefore cannot control the $50,000 cost tag of a common midluxury automobile.

Let’s take style. I’d first like to pile disapproval upon the RLX’s “Jewel Eye” LED-headlight devices, which are a finish visible failing, and extremely gimmicky besides. The car looks owned and operated by the devil soul of Liberace. With regards to figure, the RLX experiences the undisguised, nose-heavy ratios of a front-drive car. Actually, 42% of the automobile's finish 196.1 inches wide long consists of front and rear side overhang (for referrals, the BMW’s overhang amount is 39%).

2014 Acura RLX Sedan

There’s some psychobabble in the media kit about the automobile's “aero-fused” cottage outline and “decisive personality lines” along the fuselage. Please. The form is as sad as a ancient manuscript, and these unstable personality collections generate minutes of visible sag around the top side one fourth sections, creating the car look like a revocation link that’s jumped a few wires.

Nothing about this should shock Acura, the high-class adjunct of Ford. The RLX is a very measured item, and the computation is basically that the organization could preserve growth money by maintaining a front-drive system and successful over high-class customers with the RLX’s prosperity of on board driver-assist, comfort and enjoyment technological innovation. And man, there are processor places aplenty, from the unbelievable Krell speakers to the GPS-linked heating and cooling to the app-laden middle touchscreen technological innovation to the 8-inch shade Navigation display. This factor has more control buttons and reveals than a heart-lung device.