2001 Acura Mdx Touring on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Here's a sneak peek at the 2023 Acura Integra interior

Photos: Zac Palmer / Autoblog DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Acura staged its Integra Prototype at a display at the Rolex 24 at Daytona this weekend, inviting enterprising amateur and professional photographers alike to sneak a peak at the interior thanks to the bright Florida sun. The photos you're looking at here are ones we took at Rolex, and they essentially reveal what the 2023 Acura Integra's interior will look like. If you recall from the car's initial reveal, Acura did not show photos of the Prototype's interior. Before we dive too deep, though, we can tell that while the design appears to be final, some of the finer details are still a bit rough. Not all of the plastics, surfaces and badging look final, so don't expect everything you see here to directly port over to production. That said, this is still an awesome sneak peek at the upcoming Integra that we weren't expecting to get. From what we can see here, the interior design seems to take a cue from the Integra's underpinnings, which can be traced back to the sporty Honda Civic Si. Photos posted to integraforums.com show the prototype's dash before Acura's reps covered the upper portion to hide it from view. In them, you can see the mesh air vent design that debuted on the Civic, albeit with a different execution here (that treatment runs the full width of the dash in the Honda). Plus, the touchscreen infotainment rising from the dash is also in plain view. The seats look like Acura's latest seat style as opposed to Civic Si seats, and they even feature a neat two-tone black and white design. What does appear to be a direct Civic rip is the steering wheel, which gains an Acura badge and what looks like the rough outline of an A-Spec badge for Integra duty. We'll note that this likely means that the Integra will be offered in A-Spec trim, just like every other new Acura on sale today. The original Integra was never sold as an A-Spec in the U.S., but the RSX Type S (named Integra outside the U.S.) was available in A-Spec trim. Another difference between the Integra interior seen here versus the Civic is a new door panel design. Very little changes in the rear bench, though, as it's featuring the same drop-down armrest and pair of USB ports for rear occupants. The Integra Prototype is notably longer than a Civic Hatchback, but we didn't see any discernible increase in utility in the back.

Is your new-car warranty good at the race track?

We've all heard the horror stories. Your buddy knows a girl that was dating a guy whose best friend's brother once broke his brand-new, recently purchased performance car while making runs at a drag strip or laps at a track day, and the manufacturer wouldn't cover the repair under warranty. True story? Urban legend? Complete crap? Yes, no, maybe. One thing's for sure: Automotive warranties have always come with caveats. In 1908, an ad in the Trenton Evening Times clearly stated: "All Ford Cars Guaranteed for One Year." Although it changed over time, by 1925 the Ford New Car Guarantee only covered 90 days on material and 30 days on labor, and it clearly stated that that there was "No guarantee whatever on Fan Belts, Glass, Bulbs, Wiring, Transmission, Bands, Hose Connections, Commutator Shells, Rollers, Spark Plugs or Gaskets." Whether or not Ol' Henry would pay to fix your Model T if you broke it shaving a tenth off your lap time at the local board track seems to be lost to history. We're guessing no. But what about today? Do new-car warranties in 2017 cover cars when they are driven on race tracks? We researched the warranties of 14 auto brands to find out, and the answer is yes, no, maybe, depending on the brand, in some cases the model, and whether or not your car is modified from stock. Acura has been out of the high-performance car game for a number of years, but jumps back into the party in 2017 with its hybrid-powered $173,000 NSX supercar. And Acura's warranty, as well as Honda's, clearly states that it does not cover "the use of the vehicle in competition or racing events." View 33 Photos So we asked Sage Marie, Senior Manager of Public Relations for Honda and Acura. "If the car is stock, the warranty covers it on a track just as it does on the street. No question," he told us. "However, if the car is modified, say with slick tires or other components that would put higher stresses on the vehicle's parts and systems, then we would have to investigate the circumstances further." Marie went on to say the same would be true for any Acura model or Honda vehicle, including the new 2017 Honda Civic Si. This became a common theme. Chevrolet actually started this practice with the fifth-generation Camaro on the high-performance ZL1 and Z/28 models.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.