Another Look

2005 Acura RL Sedan: So perfectly...nice

The 2005 Acura RL sedan is a very nice car. This all-wheel-drive sedan is comfortable, luxurious, easy to drive, forgiving – almost everything you’d want in a luxury sedan.

Yawn!

Still, it should sell very well. Stepford husbands who 40 years ago would have bought Buicks and 10 years ago gone for Lexuses should be thrilled with the RL. It elevates competence to just short of an art form. Aside from making extra dry martinis, there’s almost nothing this Acura won’t do. And you know it probably will never cause trouble. Given its advanced “Super Handling All Wheel Drive (SH-AWD),” it will always go where you want it to when you want it to. Even better, one touch on a steering wheel button, and, like the perfect Stepford wife, the car shuts up and listens for your next command, always eager to obey. Everything works. Everything looks good.

Yawn!

The RL reminded me of that old science fiction story where mankind entrusts its future to some Benevolent Supercomputer. This BS creates a fantasy world, where all risk is removed, all challenges overcome, everything’s perfect and always will be. It takes some Charlton Heston type to realize that without struggle, life becomes a meaningless series of unending days.

Yawn!

What’s wrong with paradise, you may ask, and well you may. Nothing is a very good answer, and if that’s yours, the RL is the car for you. There are clearly lots of you out there. In May, Acura reported, “Demand for the all-new RL luxury performance sedan continued to grow with sales of 1,404, up 225.7 percent compared to 2004. Year-to-date RL sales of 6,867 surpassed last year's total by 191.8 percent.” I’m not surprised. The RL would make a fabulous commuter. This is the kind of car you can depend on each day to get you going and bring you back home, safely too, given its plethora of advanced safety systems (The 2005 Acura RL earned 5-stars in all three components of the government’s safety tests, the only one of 18 vehicles tested). Its 300-horsepower, 3.5-liter SOHC V6 pushes out all that power, you guessed it, so smoothly you won’t even know it’s there. The SH-AWD, named Best of What's New in the Automotive Technology category of Popular Science Magazine's 2004 Best of What's New list, distributes the optimum amount of torque not only between the front and rear wheels but also between the left and right rear wheels, achieving cornering that’s amazingly predictable, steering that’s neutral and a vehicle that’s as stable as, well, a Stepford wife. I would be willing to bet that in winter, when the SH-AWD focuses on keeping you on the road, not just performance, it will do that so well you will be tempted to hitch up a snowplow and go make some extra cash.

Yawn!

There’s a whole lot more to the RL, and driving back and forth from Boston in Acura’s flagship brought out the best in it. This is as good as a machine gets. There was never a moment when I was not happy to be safely cocooned in the RL. When it was time to give it up, I did it without a second’s hesitation. Never looked back.

My problem with the RL was that it really was as good as a machine gets, but no more. It was so competent, it lacked that edginess of say, the TL, which makes its younger brother more of a handful to drive, but so much more fun. The RL is a Wintel computer as opposed to an Apple – it’s got a great price, runs all the programs, is much less fussy, but nobody loves Windows. Apple, quirks and all, is like the TL – it inspires emotion, devotion even. The RL, well, who falls in love with a toaster?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Auto reviewers, after all, have the luxury of loving cars. Most people have to buy them and live with them. Auto reviewers can swoon over the kind of car you don’t take home to mother, knowing there’s no commitment involved beyond a week. Car buyers, on the other hand, may not want a superfreak. For them, the RL may provide satisfaction enough.

Maybe even too much! The controls on the RL’s dash lend a certain masculine air to the sedan. The look was quite a surprise for a Honda-designed vehicle, from which I usually expect a certain simple elegance. This had more knobs and buttons than a NASA control room. It was, in a sense, the polar opposite of BMW and its iDrive, with two buttons never enough when just one would do. I counted 15 buttons on the steering wheel alone. The only similarity with the faux simplicity of the iDrive is that the Acura’s multiplicity of controls can drive you just as crazy.

My mother has a friend, a woman of a certain age, who bought one of the first 2005 Acura RLs. She loved the car, but traded it in after just a couple months because, in her words, she felt overwhelmed by it. Looking at what looks like the instrument panel of an F-22 can do that to you.

The other side of that is that the RL comes with just about as many technological advancements as a fighter jet. It starts with the key, or rather the lack of one. Your key need never leave your pocket. With it firmly ensconced someplace safe, you can open the car, start and drive it, then lock it when you’re done. It starts with a keyless switch, and opens and closes with just a touch, all as long as it is receiving the signal from the key. Aside from the unfortunate fact that you can drain the battery by leaving the switch in the on position, then walking away from the car, this is near perfect, and no system will ever completely eliminate human error.

Everything one would expect on a top class luxury sedan is here, from the advanced all-wheel-drive to safety systems that not only protect the passengers in the car, but are designed to minimize danger to the passengers in the other car in the event of a collision. The voice recognition system on the navigation worked wonderfully, and the system as a whole was superb. Paddle shifters on the steering meant one could control the SportShift 5-speed automatic from there if one chose, though I didn’t. Even the active front lighting system helped make driving better. OnStar, a tire pressure monitoring system and a million airbags are among the standard safety systems that add to the ultra luxurious RL cockpit. The only disappointments were the lack of an ultrasonic parking assist system – the rear deck of the RL made seeing how close you were to the front of the car behind you difficult – the lack of a V8, and anemic 18/26 mileage figures.

A personal disappointment for me was Acura’s touted Real Time Traffic System. The XM satellite radio kept me satisfied, but I never got a traffic alert even when I was sitting in a traffic jam. However I’m sure that will improve; being on the leading edge of technology has its own problems.

Being on the leading edge of pricing may be what I found most exciting about the Acura RL. There were no options on my test car. There are no factory options on the RL. The price you see in the ads is real. Everything comes with that base price, a very reasonable $48,900, with a $570 destination charge additional. Acura deserves applause for treating its customers like responsible adults who don’t need to be fleeced into making a decision on the 2005 Acura RL sedan.

The sedan is attractive outside if not distinctive, and I found it to be quiet and comfortable. This was not a sedan that was lacking in much, except that certain unrestrained exuberance some of us like in both cars and friends. But the 2005 Acura RL is always tasteful, always competent, and anyway, even outside Stepford, unrestrained exuberance can sometimes seem so unrefined.

posted by Andy Mais @ 4:55 PM