2015 Acura RDX — compact luxury SUVhttp://blog.sfgate.com/topdown/2014/07/28/2015-acura-rdx-compact-luxury-suv/#24504101=0Acura, Honda’s upscale line, has apparently learned that there’s little profit in changing a good thing. The good thing, in this case, is the Acura RDX, the company’s luxury compact SUV that bowed in the 2013 model year and has gone on to be a successful feather in Acura’s cap.
The car reminds me of a smaller version of the MDX, Acura’s grown-up luxury SUV, but there are several differences, including such mundane matters as engine, weight, length, width, height, looks and general ambience.
The RDX is the car for people who have looked at the BMW X3, Infiniti QX50, Audi Q5, Mercedes-Benz GLK, Volvo XC60 and Cadillac SRX, among others, and still can’t decide what to buy. What you find in the RDX is a car that’s fairly conservative in its look and executes its mission without making much of a fuss. Think of it as a Honda with a more expensive set of clothes. It’s unobtrusive and it doesn’t complain or whine.
The RDX comes in two versions – front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive. FWD cars start at less than $35,000; the AWD version that we drove included the tech package – navigation, rear view camera, surround sound system with 10 speakers and a power tailgate – and had a bottom line price of $40,890, including $895 for “destination and handling.” (When you buy a TV set, do you pay a separate fee for destination and handling? What is it with the car makers and this destination and handling fee?)
What makes the RDX a suitable car for a lot of people is the fact that it’s not trying to prove a lot of things – some of them extraneous to the job at hand – and is simply a leather-clad, fairly roomy wagon that offers no surprises.
Inside, there’s a straightforward gear lever that does not wander all over the console, with jogs here and there for various gears. The shift stick simply goes in a straight line, fore and aft. Those in the Ricky Racer frame of mind can move the lever one position past D to S and then use the steering column-mounted paddle shifters. But it’s not necessary. The car drives fine in Drive.
Behind the front seats, there’s a cargo area of nearly 77 cubic feet, with the rear seats down, and 26 cubic feet with the seats up. There’s enough room in the back for three passengers and they will be fairly comfortable for a trek across the county, but maybe not across the state.
The seats: the 8-way powered driver’s seats offers all the positions you’ll need; less so for the 4-way powered front passenger seat, which has no up-and-down facility. Hey, Acura: short people want to see out the windows, too.
On the road, the RDX is very quiet and powerful enough to get the car down the road at extra-legal speeds, given its 3.5-liter, 273-horsepower V6 and six-speed automatic transmission. Fuel economy runs 20/28 mpg, city/highway in the FWD version and 19/27 mpg in the AWD car.
A note about the ride: for some reason, Acura has given the RDX a fairly harsh or bouncy ride. You don’t notice it on the freeway, but once you start driving over poorly maintained city streets or especially over railroad tracks, you sense a kind of teeth-chattering hard suspension. It’s not as taut as the ride on an RDX I tried when the model was introduced, more than a year ago, but it is noticeable. But this is not a deal breaker; you can live with it.
The other thing you can live with, in this car, is the attention to detail on instruments, layout of the navigation screen (tucked under a shelf and therefore shielded from glare) and the way switches, like the window lifts and outside mirror adjustment, fall to hand. Somebody put some thought into it.
Compact SUVs are something of a contradiction in terms. When you think of how these wagons are defined, they are usually bought to haul a lot of people, along with a lot of people’s stuff. A compact version may be an anomaly.
If so, Acura has figured out this particular anomaly quite well and has told customers they don’t actually have to buy a humongous SUV to get the job done.
For more consumer information on cars, check these Web sites:
Safety data can be found at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Reliability information can be seen in the dependability studies conducted by J.D. Power; and at Consumer Reports.
Fuel mileage figures are available at this site, maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy.
For trivia lovers: the sticker you see on the window of every new car for sale in the United States is known in the auto industry as the “Monroney.” It is named for U.S. Senator Almer Stilwell (Mike) Monroney, the Oklahoma Democrat who sponsored the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958, which required all new cars to have labels that detail the price of the car and its options.
