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Anything about the RL? The TL is not on tomorrow's agenda.
M
With respect to the Auto Trans: 6speed please
With respect to the RL -- offer it in manual transmission form, too.
Focus on the interior. The new RL needs the bells and whistles that the current car lacks. Honda is very good at giving the average person everything they want and nothing they don't. But with the RL, they are not playing to the average person. They just need to give them everything.
1. A more aggressive (but conventional) rear end.
2. Most of the bells & whistles that Honda offers in JDM Accord/Inspire, including smart cruise control & CMS.
3. Offer Manual Transmission with "Sport tuned chassis" (not necessarily including cosmetic effects)
TL:
SH-AWD
TSX:
Hybrid w/AWD
ksso
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All this gets me to thinking .. why don't car companies set up an electronic suggestion box? Let owners and or/future owners write in and say what they are looking for in a new model. Granted, the car companies won't (or can't) heed all of the input, but presumably, some of those suggestions and requests might actually sink in.
Wishful thinking.
On tire monitoring system, it is nice to have, but from what I have heard, most of them are buggy (false alarms). Besides, it makes tire rotation tricky and complicated. There are several systems available now.
- one kind monitors tire radius. Inaccurate, false alarms.
- one kind has embedded monitor inside tire on the rims. That complicates tire rotation. You need to reset computer after rotation.
Any one with experience can comment on this.
Couldn't be easier and it includes the spare tire, too.
I wonder how many automobile deaths associated with underinflation could be averted each year with such systems? Certainly those owners of Ford Explorers with Firestone tires would have benefitted. (Of course, Ford did not help matters by lowering tire pressure values for the Explorer in order to reduce roll over tendencies.)
I talked to my local Acura dealer today - Santa Monica, Calif. He says the new RL will likely go on sale in October or possibly later -- Acura is still not telling them. He also says that in late August his sales people will go to an Acura briefing on the new RL (that could suggest September). He thinks it's going to have an MSRP around $50K.
One of his regular customers saw the car at the New York show and loved it. That customer sat in on a 20 person Acura RL focus group, which reportedly gave the car high marks, as is.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the marketplace will ultimately determine whether or not the new RL is worth more than $45K.
Acura people, pleased to finally have a flagship car to sell, may in their euphoria temporarily forget that this car is coming back from the living dead; from obscurity. Remember that they could hardly give these cars away over the last several years.
It is not a Lexus, nor a Mercedes E, nor an Audi 6 - thus there may be customer resistance to paying a like sum for a car that heretofore did not have the cache that these other cars have. I still feel that Acura would be smart to hold the line on the acquistion cost this year, and get a beach head with the new 2005 RL. Then, as Lexus did with the early years of the LS, start raising the price as the car becomes more noteworthy and more desirable.
Okay, so when I first read "boat mode", I thought you were talking about some kind of James Bond feature, where the car grows pontoons and a rudder. LOL!
I think that you summed it up very well, Shotgun. An overall feeling of richness and quality should envelop you as you enter the cockpit. The interior is not the place to scrimp or economize. Face it, that's how we interface with the car. We are sitting in the passenger compartment for hours on end. As such, the interior should be a comfortable, relaxing, and luxurious experience. It is, after all, supposed to be a "luxury car", is it not?
My 3 cents:)
Mike
Me thinks this gentlemen is new to the forum, so let's cut him some slack.
Welcome aboard "DC". We can always use new blood, because God knows, it does get bloody around here at times.
We've been busy solving a lot of Acura's problems. Now if only they would hire us on as paid consultants ...
True the Acura has the lure of the 300HP engine, but the torque figure is unknown and the Audi will have a 6spd (I believe lighter by 44 pounds) transmission and the Acura will be a 5 spd model.
The two cars may be somewhat close in 0-60mph numbers for folks looking to spend just south of 50 large MSRP.
I would think this might be a bit of a dilemma for Acrua since the Audi will come with 100% maintenance coverage including loaner cars and free washes (it adds up) for the first 50K miles.
The dilemma is the one I face now -- for I had almost convinced myself that the Audi would be several K more expensive, and here it seems to be priced about 3 or 4 K less than I had anticipated.
If you are in this market, the Acura despite its legendary (pun intended) reliability, doesn't YET have the "image" of the German (which has been getting mucho positive press of late).
A stealth move would be to bring the Acura RL out at say $46,950 full boat -- and just do some catching up.
Audi annual targets for A6 ~23K cars, US. Audi probably hates this, but the competition is the RL, moreso than the 5 or the E class, IMHO.
Local Audi dealer will have the new A6 for "show" in July as the crown jewel of a new state of the art dealership (we have 2 stand alone Audi dealers in Cincinnati, one has already built the new palace, the other palace is shaping up very nicely for a July Grand Opening!)
It just keeps getting more interesting all the time!
The current RL is a joke when compared to others in the 40-60K range. It pretty much competes as a larger, roomier Lexus ES300. That does give Acura a handicap.
But the new RL seems to be such a giant step forward, the lackluster performance of the old car may only give the new one a more striking first impression. For example, the Subaru Impreza RS was a lackluster car, but the Impreza WRX certainly earned the spotlight. The original Ody was a wash, but the 1999 redesign became the benchmark.
It's not easy to break into a new segment, but it's not impossible, either. Honda had never built their own SUVs, but the CR-V and MDX showed that they could do right on the first attempt. Honda hadn't built a roadster in something like 40 years, but the S2000 certainly nabbed some respect.
Anyway, my point is that the RL does start with a disadvantage, but I don't think it's impossible to overcome. Acura is on an upswing with the TL, TSX, and MDX. They've recently broken their all time sales record here in the US. There are also plenty of buyers out there who remember the Legend. So I think the RL has decent pole position to make a comeback.
Hmmm, you know Legendman, given the notion that Edmunds is the most popular car site, and it's forum posters are, without question, the most prolific and knowledgeable, you would think a lot of key and influential Acura management/engineering/marketing types would be lurking in the forum soaking it all up. What would be profoundly satisfying to me is if a senior Acura principal would (not necessarily in this forum) issue a statement, perhaps via a news release or story on their official web sites, that they do indeed cruise the various automotive forums, and proclaim..."We hear you!"
dcwong1, welcome aboard. People here have been through the "V8/RWD perspective" many times. It is not gonna happen. Honda CEO already proclaimed they will not do V8/RWD sedans. It is unlikely for a Japanese of his statue to eat his words. AWD would be a "save-my-face" alternative, and it makes sense.
Mark, I think Audi, like BMW, MB, needs to work on their reliability. German automobiles might still have special aurora to them, but it is fading quickly. They must carry satisfactory reliability for owners to proclaim their love toward their German vehicles. From what I have seen, many of my friends who owned German cars in the past would unlikely to own one again. Once you got burnt, it feels dumb to try again. People who pay north of $50K for an automobile do not enjoy standing by the highway waiting for help. That surely would get you famous in 5 minutes and miss whole day or work.
ksso
aurora borealis? or aura?
ksso
I have been in touch with their client services people about a half dozen times over the years. With the exception of one nice woman - who no longer works there - I have found them to be snooty, aloof, arrogant and generally condescending and unhelpful. In contrast, the men in the field, the District Service Reps, are much more engaging and helpful -- albeit contacted indirectly through the dealership's service manager.
Such behavior always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's off-putting. Curious if you guys have experienced the same, or better treatment. For those of you who own Lexus, Audi or Mercedes, what's your interaction been like with the parent corporation and its client services representatives?
This is where you see which company has the money to keep up. Honda is small as is Volvo (the S80 has been around forever) and Jaguar has a few models with too much age on them also. You can always tell this way.
BMW, Mercedes, Lexus (Toyota), VW (Audi) and GM (Cadillac) all have the money to do a new car every 5-6 years. We'll see what Infiniti does in this segment. They spent next to nothing on bringing the current M45 to the U.S. market because it was already in production for the Japanese market.
M