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Acura ILX headed for Civic-like early upgrades

The not-yet-ready-for-primetime 2012 Honda Civic saw it quickly returned to sender for refurbishment, now the Acura ILX is headed in the same direction in its very first year. Automotive News reports that the small, Civic-based sedan from Honda's luxury brand isn't meeting sales expectations, with an annualized rate of 22,000 to 24,000 sales instead of the 30,000 the company is after. More telling is that the ILX "is being outsold by the Buick Verano, Volkswagen CC and Audi A4," and, except for two months since it launched, it has also been outdone by the Acura TSX it is meant to replace.
Part of the cause has been the 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine: its 150 horsepower to motivate a sedan that can weigh up to 2,970 pounds doesn't offer the kind of performance or value experience that buyers in the segment respond to. Another big issue is that the top-level 2.4-liter engine is only offered with a six-speed manual even though most buyers of the highest trim don't really want to shift their own gears. Lastly, the ILX might not put enough space between it and its frugal underpinnings - our first drive review pegged it as "the world's nicest Honda Civic."
An automatic transmission is on the way for the 2.4-liter, but it isn't clear when. And while Honda admits that the 2.0-liter is underpowered and Automotive News says it's on the way out, the company hasn't yet said how that situation will be corrected.

Acura Integra to capstone combustion era as EV transition begins

The recent launch of the resurrected Integra nameplate is just part of a larger shift in mission at Acura. Its leaders have repeatedly said they want Acura to be the performance brand of Honda, where driving fun and dynamics come first. However, in a new report, Acura says it plans to go big on fully electric vehicles, at even greater speed than its parent company, by skipping the hybrid step altogether. According to Acura assistant VP of sales Emile Korkor, the Integra was a capstone to the internal combustion era at Acura. It marked a sort of homecoming to the marque's performance pedigree, and once Integra is launched, the brand will move forward with electrifying its lineup. The company's plans were revealed in an Automotive News interview, where Korkor said, "We're going to bypass hybrids altogether. So our shift is going very rapidly into BEV. That's our main focus." At first blush, that seems to be at odds with brand boss Jon Ikeda's public statements about Acura. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Ikeda was saying that he wanted to take the Integra racing, as something of a mascot for the "fun" brand at Honda. Perhaps we've been desensitized to automakers making big proclamations about EV transitions a la Jaguar, Land Rover, Bentley, and Infiniti, but typically the green messaging has not been about performance in the traditional sense. Says Korkor, "We're not just dipping our toe in the water with electric at Acura, we are jumping all in. And that's not just because we need to. It's because we want to. Acura is really focused on performance, and electrification is one of the greatest ways we can augment that performance." While electrification and performance are not mutually exclusive, we have yet to drive an EV that connects to the road as beautifully as a 1990s Integra or NSX did. Acuras have never been about power and torque. Yet they were still compelling performance cars thanks to brilliant steering and driving dynamics. Then there's the issue of what Acura represents. Back in February, Ikeda said that Acura was purposefully holding off on an EV strategy because it needed to re-establish its performance bona fides. Now, Korkor says, "The benefit of returning to the Integra right now is that it's going to help shepherd a new generation of customers and build loyalty as we move into a new era." The problem is, the Integra alone isn't enough to establish that performance cred.

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura 1.6 EL

Drivers from Mexico or Canada who take their cars across the border into the United States may drive them legally here for one year, after which they must drive back home or go through a registration process that ranges from arduous to impossible, depending on the state. As a result, quite a few Canadian- and Mexican-market cars end up marooned and un-registerable here, and I find some of them during my junkyard travels. Today, we've got a Canada-only Acura that showed up in a Northern California boneyard recently. I'm always looking for junkyard odometers with very high final readings (right now a 631k-mile Volvo 240 holds the record), and at first glance I though I had come across a Civic sedan with nearly 450,000 miles. Then I noticed the metric speedometer and realized that I was looking at a non-US-market car. 448,538 kilometers is 278,709 miles, by the way. A look at the build tag and emissions stickers showed that this car was built and sold in Canada. I'd found a second-generation Acura EL in a Colorado junkyard a few years back, so I knew that I'd just found a first-generation EL. Like its Acura Integra contemporary, the Acura EL was based on the Honda Civic. It replaced the Integra in Canada for 1997 and production continued through 2005. It differed somewhat in appearance from the Civic and had a nicer interior but was mechanically nearly identical to the US-market Civic EX sedan. A version for the Japanese market was built in Canada and exported across the Pacific as the second-generation Honda Domani. The engine is a 1.6-liter SOHC four-banger with VTEC, rated at 127 horsepower and 107 pound-feet. This one appears to be a loaded EL Premium, with the optional four-speed automatic. List price would have been C$22,000, or about $30,676 in 2023 United States dollars (using the exchange rate for June of 1997). The decklid had an EL-only spoiler, so a local Honda expert must have bought it for a Civic sedan. Since this car was old enough to be federally legal under the 25-year rule, it could have been registered legally in some US states… but California's strict emissions regulations would have made the process too difficult to be worth undertaking on a near-300k-mile machine that isn't particularly exotic.