Video: Acura RLX Concept
By Cars.com Editors
April 5, 2012
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About the video
From the 2012 New York Auto Show, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the Acura RLX concept.
Transcript
Cars.com Auto reviews. Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com and we're at the New York auto show, Checking out Acura's new RLX concept.
This is very close to the production car that will replace Acura's RL and become the brand's new flagship when it goes on sale in early 2013 we're told. Let's check it out. Not a huge departure In terms of styling, we see new samples kind of Acura's existing RL and maybe the TL and the headlights and the shield like grill as you move farther along Acura says the RLX is actually about as long as the outgoing RL. It's a little bit wider with a little bit longer wheel base as well. You get to the tail. That's when we actually see a lot of Toyota and Lexus here, especially kind of in the rear of the way it all comes together. Acura says all of the packaging allows it to have a significantly larger cabin than the RL, which was kind of a small car, especially in the backseat. So let's go check it out. Had the old RL had a very dense kind of center stack of buttons here. There was a real kind of forest of buttons going on. This has been cleared up a little. There's a couple screens here. The bottom screen has what Acura says is going to be a touchscreen with major controls for the climate and radio and stuff like that. This top screen up here closer to your line of sight is going to be purely for the navigation system. Now down here, you'll notice Acura did put a few physical controls below the touchscreen, which we like that means you're not going to have to be fussing around with everything only on the screen. Materials look to be pretty good in this obviously concept car, which is pretty close to the production car that we're going to see. You can see that there's stitching along the dash and the doors. That's something that Acura has resisted for awhile in the face of other automakers, kind of going in that direction. So well now here, you got it. Obviously, a ton of room here in the backseat. The front seats don't have any power in them, but if I was sitting up there comfortably, I'd probably have it a couple more inches back, still a ton of room, decent headroom back here too. One weird thing is that there's a pretty significant center floor hump here robbing some foot well space. Usually that's where you'd have a drive shaft. Now the Acura RLX won't have a center drive shaft coming down the center because the hybrid system actually gives each rear wheel its own electric motor kind of a cool system there. It can overdrive the outside wheel and break the inside wheel in a corner a little bit and kickback some of the power regeneration to the lithium ion battery. Now Acura has a name for this system. It's called the sport hybrid, super handling all-wheel drive system, which is S H S H A W D. If you tried to pronounce that to people, they would think they were just talking too loud. Acura expects the all wheel drive RLX to get 30 miles per gallon and make more than 370 horsepower with all wheel drive. Stay tuned for pricing and more specs. As we get closer to the cars on sale date early next year. For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog kicking tires.net.