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Daily Driver: 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybird

Daily Driver videos are micro-reviews of vehicles in the Autoblog press fleet, reviewed by the staffers that drive them every day. Today's Daily Driver features the 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid, reviewed by Seyth Miersma. You can watch the video above or read a transcript below. And don't forget to watch more Autoblog videos at /videos. Show full video transcript text [00:00:00]Hi y'all. This is Seyth with Autoblog. I am driving the 2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH All-Wheel Drive, or SH-AWD, as we like to call it. Any way you slice it the name is a mouthful. This version of the RLX, the hybrid, incorporates an all-wheel drive system that includes three electric motors: one up front, two in the rear turning the rear wheels in [00:00:30]addition to the 3.5-liter gasoline engine. Now, that powertrain effectively makes it the performance version, hence the sport, of the RLX line. It's got a total system output of 377 horsepower, and 341 pound feet of torque so there's plenty of go juice in this hybrid. Clearly Honda had some performance in mind when they were putting this system together in addition to the sort of typical hybrid good gas mileage. It's rated at 28 MPG in the city, and 32 on the highway. [00:01:00]I've been seeing around 28 in two days worth of driving so far, and playing around with it. It's not the fuel-sipper that you're going to buy ... not a car that you're buying for economy exclusively. The good news is that when you really get into it, the car does feel quite quick. You still have that electric torque so you're really getting a lot of torque push from the rear wheels. You really do feel like kind of a performance all-wheel drive experience [00:01:30]more than a front-wheel drive experience like you get in the typical RLX. Now, it's not a sports sedan. It's pretty squishy. There's not much steering feel. Really throwing it from bend to bend isn't that rewarding. The car that I'm driving today is loaded out to around $67,000. I think you can spend a little bit more than that if you really try, but it kind of is at the top end of the RLX range. I feel like everything does come together kind of neatly. I don't think that this interior is going to feel very old in a couple of years. I think it'll age pretty well because it's a [00:02:00]conservative design frankly. The downside is that, unlike some cars, particularly a lot of the new Mercedes coming out right now, nobody's going to sit down in this RLX and think, "Wow.

2015 Acura TLX

Immediately after landing at Washington's Dulles airport, an Acura representative handed me the keys to a 2014 TSX with fewer than 180 miles on its clock. The four-cylinder engine started and I pointed its signature beak towards a destination in Middleburg, VA. It was a curious move by the Japanese automaker, especially considering that I had flown no less than 2,300 miles to drive the discontinued vehicle's ostensible successor, the all-new 2015 Acura TLX.
Yet spending a solid 40 minutes with a sparkling-new version of the outgoing model that still smelled showroom fresh, allowed me an opportunity to scrutinize the dropped sedan and remind myself why it had never really blown me away - it was good at doing many things, but truly great at doing none.
Time with the TSX also started me thinking about the Acura TL, the second model that the TLX will effectively replace. I have better memories of the slightly larger sedan, especially the SH-AWD 6MT trim - it's a solid driver's car - but it, too, fell short in areas where competitors, including the Audi A4, BMW 3 Series, Cadillac ATS, Lexus IS and Mercedes-Benz C-Class, excelled.

Hands-on with Acura's novel touchpad infotainment interface

After Acura's Precision Cockpit was unveiled here in LA, I sat in the, uh, driver's seat of the wheel-less interior mockup to get a feel for how this new touchscreen-free touch interface works. There are a lot of good ideas inside. Here are 11 things you should know. It's less like a trackpad and more like a remote-control tablet. So instead of letting you move a cursor relative to its last location like the trackpad on a laptop, each point on Acura's trackpad is mapped to a corresponding point on the center display. If you want what's in the upper right corner of the display, you touch and click in the upper right corner of the trackpad. Simple. I figured it out in two minutes. Maybe less. The whole thing is surprisingly intuitive. The ease of use is helped by the fact that the targets on the screen are pretty big – no tiny "buttons" to fiddle with. The clicks are real. The trackpad actually moves when you press down, so no need for simulated haptic feedback. In their research, Acura engineers found that accidental touches and presses are a real issue. We could have told them that – hit a bump while using a finicky remote interface like Lexus's all-but-abandoned joystick thing, and you select an item half-way across the screen from the one you intended. The placement of the trackpad in this concept interior also helps avoid unintentional inputs – it's not in the middle of the center console where it might get brushed or bumped, but instead in its own little cave at the base of the center-stack waterfall. (Acura's low-profile button-based transmission selector suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.) View 13 Photos Lots of cues cut down on distraction. You hover over the option you want before positively confirming the selection with a hard press. There's no cursor to find and reposition like in the Lexus trackpad system The red highlight gives the necessary visual cue that you put your finger in the right place. The pad is slightly dished to give you a tactile cue of where the center and edges are. It allows you to build up muscle memory, sort of like how you know generally where the "keys" are on your smartphone or tablet's virtual keyboard by now. Or at least I do on mine. You look at the screen, not what you're touching. The problem with touch screens is that they have to be low down in the car so you can reach them. That means you have to look down from the road to stab at what you want.