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HOWEVER the WDP does come with ebony interior but again only if you choose the Dynamic pkg.. )
Is the dynamic package the same as the ground affects?
I would like to have a whit ext. with ebony/black interior but have not seen that as an option???????????
Break-In - Thanks all for your comments, but I meant 2500 as a steady speed, say on the freeway. This is around 70 or so, so no problem, but I did keep it at 60 for a couple hundred miles. During accelleration, 4K was common. May or not be necessary, but cheap insurance to me.
Bra Paulg -This is L.A. so anything goes!
debis Nice pics! The car looks great - what a nice color ; ) The coming storm looked a little nasty though. A tip for pics of white cars - the camera's auto-exposure makes white too dark, so you may want to brighten the pictures up a little. Same for snow pics.
billyperks Yours is out there waiting for you!
My appraisal of these cars being outstanding stems from thoroughly investigating them, in comparision with the other vehicles on the market that are positioned as direct competitors. The assessment is not off the wall, and has been validated in virtually every print and electronic media devoted to these things. It's also supported by anecdotal reviews from numerous owners of both these vehicles, in forums such as this one.
In large part, it also stems from my ownership of 29 or so, high-line cars, over the last 30 years including Jags, Porches, Vettes, BMW's and 16 or 17 Benzes. This gave me a persective from which I think I can tell an "outstanding" car when I drive one, even without spending thousands of miles of seat time in them.
We owned 2 S-Class and 1 E-Class Mercedes (which are also generally considered to be outstanding cars) until last month, when we traded one of the S models for a '04 Nissan Quest SE. The second S should be replaced by an '04 TL w/Nav, hopefully before 12/31. The E Model should be gone and a GX in it's place within 30-45 days.
Perhaps then I'll be in a position to provide useful information.
Was catching up on the postings here, and noticed a few regarding color combos on the new TL. I recently bought the blue/camel combo and love it!
I was interested in the green/camel as well, but when I saw it in person, the camel looked too much like orange. The dark blue gives the camel interior a nice rich look. Another nice combo might be the black and camel. Dark-colored cars do require more effort when it comes to cleaning them, but I think they look really sharp.
As for squeaks, rattles, noises, etc., I have had none so far. At just over 1,000 miles, this car is great!
Have a good Christmas!
Thanks
The much-touted DVD-Audio 5.1 surround sound system fell short of expectations. Through a couple Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac selections provided by Acura and selected by the system's developer, Grammy Award-winning music producer/engineer Elliott Scheiner, the most discernible difference between the 2-channel CD/DVD system and the 6-channel DVD-A 5.1 system was just that, four more channels. Granted, the sound was physically more surrounding, but it was no fuller or richer. We're not audio experts, but we recall the dimensional depth Dolby added to analog recordings as being a bigger leap forward.
As for VSC, I bet Acura engineers incorporated error checking in the circuitry. It is correct, however, that repair bills in 10 or more years will be high because of these electronic bells and whistles.
As for employing VSC, I think it is best to treat this like anti-lock brakes, a safety feature that is there for emergencies and is not routinely employed. Using this logic, VSC should only be employed a small number of times during your vehicle's life and will not become a dependency. It statistically improves safety but does not provide a guarantee against accidents resulting from a skid.
Airbags obviously help in the vast majority of wrecks, but they occasionally cause problems that result in large settlements. VSC will probably be the same way. For every 1000 accidents it prevents, it may cause or make more serious 50. In those cases, the insurance companies will be writing very large checks and this is the incentive for car companies to implement it correctly. As long as it results in a net savings for the insurance industry (including their liability coverage for automotive manufacturers), they will continue to encourage the development and adoption of these systems by all vendors. We may think our driving experience is mostly about catering to our desires, but much of it is about insurance, lawyers and money. On the whole, this process does improve the quality and safety of our vehicles, but occasionally (as with navigation systems) it may slow down early adopter progress.
More automation is inevitable. I think VSC will become pervasive unless the statistics change dramatically. In the next 10-15 years, it will actually become practical to build cars that drive themselves and this will profoundly change our driving experience. Drive by wire (which is already beginning to control our vehicle performance envelope) plus navigation will become a full autopilot and the insurance industry will encourage the change. They will make sure the autopilots drive without aggression resulting in a statistical drop in accidents while reducing emissions and improving fuel mileage. It may eventually become more expensive or impossible to buy a car you can actually control yourself. Those who actually enjoy driving better enjoy the cars like the TL (or even higher performance cars) while they still exist because profound changes are coming.
The typical scenario for me with 2003 TL-S was: the light comes on about 1/8 of the scale before the Empty mark. I fill up at Empty or a little past emtpy and put in about 15 gallons.
However, the ability to provide sound from multiple directions can give you a great improvement in enjoyability. The artists and producers can and will place sounds AROUND you as well as in front of you. Individual sounds can be separated more, so they don't all get mushed together. Surround sound is more natural. Room ambience can be properly reproduced so that playback of live performances and symphonies can now sound like the hall they were recorded in.
Presently, THIS is the state of the audio art, and only the TL has it.
Did you mean some other color besides white (ext). I cannot find in the brochure where you can get white ext. with black int.
White Diamond Pearl & Ebony
Nighthawk Black Pearl & Ebony
Satin Silver Metallic & Ebony
Anthracite Metallic & Ebony
Redondo Red Pearl & Ebony
Dynamic Package includes:
1) 6-speed close-ratio manual transmission with Limited Slip Differential
2) Brembo® 4-piston front brake calipers
3) High Performance Summer Tires (235/45 R17 W)
4) Large Diameter Stabilizer Bars
5) HandsFreeLink™ wireless telephone interface with steering wheel mounted controls
to be useless to have a 17 gal tank that the guage
and trip computer indicate your out of fuel.
Other cars that I've owned had about 1.5 to 2 gal
when the light came on and owners manual stated
approx reserve. The Acura manual states nothing about Reserve.
Dealer tried to tell me that my remote got reset by being in my pocket. Bought it the first time but not the 2nd and 3rd etc.
I then contemplated getting one, when buying my 2003 TL-S. I didn't get it, but regretted my decision.
Then came the 2004 TL with the new super-cool the-most-awesome-gizmo NAVI ever. And I really didn't have a choice ;-). Yes, it's $2,000-$3,000 difference right now considering that NAVI versions sell at a smaller discount. But I don't look at it like that, I think it terms of a few extra dollars a month for having the BEST and the most entertaining gizzmo out there. I absolutelly love it; I know I would never keep the car for more than a year or two, if I decided to go cheap again and didn't get the NAVI.
There is a very good reason the NAVI versions of the car are in such tight demand: this is the best and very useful system to have.
As far as those PDA-based GPS systems go, you have GOT to be joking. I've used that crap and found it to be completelly unusable. You have to know in advance where you're going and load the map and route for that destination into the PDA. It is not the same type of system as in-car NAVI; the two only share one purpose: getting you to a pre-defined known-in-advance location. The in-car NAVI in the TL will serve to do so MUCH more:
1. Get you to any location you want to go on a whim.
2. Show you various alternative routes and let you choose on the fly which one you want.
3. Provide you highly precise spoken instructions that really do allow you to turn where you're supposed to, instead of 1/8 of a mile too early or late, as is common with pocket GPS.
4. Allow you to continue your route, even if the system temporarily looses GPS signal.
5. Reroute you automatically and smartly, if and when you get off your route. In my experience, following a pre-defined route is possible maybe 3 times out of 4.
6. Allow you to determine your position very precisely at any time and show you that position at a variety of levels of magnification.
7. Allow you to plot a route home from any point in the US just by saying "Go Home".
8. Almost the most important feature: allow you to quickly and easily find places of interest of almost any kind from post office and citi hall to sushi restaurant. This is a kind of feature that you will find yourself using much more frequently than once or twice a month.
9. Program several destinations for the day. Like if you were going furniture shopping, you wouldn't have to print out multiple chained sets of directions from Map Quest. And what if you make a mistake and print directions from home to store 4 instead of store 3 to store 4?
10-50 other useful things....
Thanks
Just my $0.02
I too would have rejected Navigation systems in the past but will likely go for one in the future. I was impressed with the Acura system on the 2004 MDX and assume the TL system is the same.
However, I won't kid myself. The TL/MDX are fine vehicles that should easily last 8-10 years and 150k+ miles. However, by about 2-3 years from now, the evolution of electronics will produce a 10" screen, a CD/DVD recorder that will allow you to "record" 200 of your favorite CD's into the car system, a wi-fi internet link and an automatic coffee maker.
Too bad you need to keep trading a perfectly fine $35k car (or in the case of my friend, a $75k car) to get the latest technology. It's not like I need to sell my house to get a new computer or TV. It would be my desire to see Acura, BMW and others come up with some way the Navigation unit was "plug and play" that allowed you to pull it out and replace it down the road.
P.S. Another friend is with a firm that is doing engineering consulting for Honda. The "in-house" cost to Honda of the Navigation system based upon 100,000 units annually?? Try under $600. Not a bad profit center.
The same mic is used for voice commands for the phone as well as the Navi.
The idea of an upgradeable system could be workable for predictable upgrade paths (the approach doesn’t work well for major discontinuous technology changes). This would include XM Radio based feeds to provide traffic updates to the NAVI. Honda has been providing a similar integrated capability in Japan for several years. The stumbling block in the US has been a workable radio feed that covers our vast country. Honda owns a piece of XM and they have been making R&D investments geared towards using the XM signals for the traffic updates. This is a predictable upgrade path. The details are yet to be resolved, but I think Honda will offer this type of feature for US markets with some type of radio link for real-time traffic flow based rerouting at some time in the next 3-5 years.
Other predictable upgrades include more powerful voice integration, heads-up displays and integration with our general-purpose computers (where we might integrate our schedules and planned trips with the NAVI capabilities). The BlueTooth interface for a phone is a beginning, but I really wish they had looked at the broader issue of interfaces and adopted a design enabling easy development and field installation of adapters for various interface technologies. (Does anyone know if this is possible/practical with the current design)? I am afraid that many manufactures of phones and other consumer devices will skip right over the current generation of BlueTooth and this may be an Achilles’ heel for the TL. Many of these capabilities could be contemplated in a plug and play type replacement unit dropping into a passive bus, but the car companies really want to use these advances to encourage new car sales. Thus, there is little incentive for them to spend money on building field upgradeable systems. Alpine (who builds most of the best NAVI units) might want to pursue this strategy themselves, but they are probably restricted by their agreements with the major automotive companies.
Industrial computer system designs tend to allow lots of field upgrades, but the market for general business and consumer type computers has become very different in the age of the microcomputer (PC). Field upgrades of CPUs are generally limited to computer nerds and passive backplane designs haven’t been emphasized (or very successful when tried). A working industrial computer solution may be kept in place for 10+ years (similar to a car). General business and consumer PCs are typically on a 3-year replacement cycle with field upgrades generally limited to storage, networking, software and peripherals. This approach has lead to somewhat more innovation, but the market also lends itself to sales pitches based on emotions rather than hard financial analysis. In any event, I would be happier if we could at-least get this type of upgrade capability for our automotive systems rather than being limited to software and database upgrades.
For today, we can only decide if the current generation of built-in NAVI is good enough to justify the 2.5K$ premium on the new TL. Personally, I am still struggling with the decision.
I haven't tried the Aucra HandsFreeLink yet, but I'd be shocked to find out that it were half-duplex. Even cheap speakerphones these days are full duplex thanks to cheap digital technology. I haven't read any bad reports of sound quality, so one can safely assume it's full duplex.
I didnt push her on it, but dealers always start high, so I would probably start out in negotiations asking for $1500 off MSRP.
debating on Black/Black, Black/Parchment, or Anthracite/Black all with NAVI of course...
The front ground effects are obvious, but the sides are still not really ....
The side skirts look barely different on the A-Spec than the one without it. The cool thing
is the low profile tires, and the slightly different steering wheel.
I believe it also comes with the Brembo brakes.
Being in NY, I would probably shy away from the A Spec package, because the low profile tires would not be good for winter weather.
And I dont feel like buying a whole new set of tires for $800 just for winter...
However, I do like how the front looks with the ground effects...the back end has this gray plastic looking lower back, but yet doesnt look like it is any lower than the TL without the A-Spec...perhaps someone can clarify here..
I wonder if you can pick apart parts of the A-Spec package that I like, and buy it "a la carte" ?
I'm getting the full set of spoilers on my new TL and am paying $1260 for it. This was the quoted "dealer cost", including installation. I beleive they originally asked for somewhere on the order of $1600 for it when I first started negotiations.
I don't know about the rest of the pieces that come with the a-spec package, but you can check on acura.com for prices.
I see you are clearly spun up on the NJ dealers. But I thought I read in a earlier thread that you bought here in DC. Am I mistaken?
AND - Yes, half-duplex like a cheap speakerphone would be dissapointing. Since the TL unit is DSP based, I am sure it is full duplex. Reports on another TL forum state that that hands-free works very well with little noise heard by the caller.