Acura's RLX Is a Lovely Car That's Hard to Love

Acura puts out an impressive hybrid that should shine in the midsize, midpremium sedan segment. But it can be hard to love

By
Dan Neil

2014 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD Honda Motor Company

NOW, WHAT WAS YOUR HANDLE there, partner? The 2014 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD? SH-Shawd, is it? Nice.

There are many mysteries in life. Giraffe husbandry is apparently more subtle than one would expect. But I would like for someone to explain to me, in very small words, why I don't want this car, Acura's replacement for the RL and its advanced-hybrid entry in the midsize, midpremium sedan segment (BMW 5-series, Cadillac CTS, Infiniti M35h, Audi A6). Why is my heart an interstellar void, a timeless dharma of no thanks? I just don't want it.

Objectively, this is a great machine (around $60,000 to start). It might be called the best car in its class, but when you look at it—an all-wheel-drive, gas-electric hybrid, midpremium sedan—the RLX has a class to itself. This car boasts a pair of pretty stellar numbers: 377 horsepower (system net) and an EPA-estimated 30 miles per gallon, combined, effectively offering V8 power in a five-passenger sedan with four-cylinder fuel economy. It has class-leading rear-passenger space and a trunk that can stow four lightweight golf bags (12 cubic feet). Acura says the RLX's powerful, jeweled LED headlamps have the greatest illumination in the segment, and only occasionally cause insanity.

From an engineering and packaging perspective it is 10 pounds in a 5-pound bucket. Concealed about the person of the RLX Hybrid: a 3.5-liter, 310-hp direct-injection V6; a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission with its own integrated e-motor/starter; a power-electronics module the size of an otter, situated in space formerly reserved for a drive shaft; a 1.3 kwh battery pack, which itself is the size of carry-on luggage.

And, most salient for our purposes, there are two goodly electric-traction motors (36 hp and 54 pound-feet apiece), arrayed at the rear axle line, each powering, or de-powering, a rear wheel as needed to help the car turn, much as paddling forward on one side and backward on another turns a canoe. This is the eponymous Sh-shawd system.

Imagine this: You roll into a tight curve, brushing the brakes and steady throttle (by now, of course, you've pressed the "Sport" button on the RLX's handsome gear-selector console; doing so, the media materials assure us, initiates maximum Takaburi, or "exhilaration," at the will of the driver, or Inomama).

As the dual-clutch gearbox ticks off quietly lusty downshifts, you turn the wheel, and to comply with the directed line, the system lags the inside rear wheel with regenerative braking (negative torque) and over-drives the outside rear wheel (positive torque), imparting a yaw moment, a turning force, in the car.

I took this car for a flog in Bay Area hill country and it was a revelation. When the inside rear wheel checks up in a corner—sometimes trail-braking hard enough to chirp the tire—the yaw acceleration picks up quite palpably, and the car whips around a corner like its skirt is caught in a cab door.

The RLX's handling is pinpoint, sparkling, with a physicality that you don't expect in a car of its burgher-esque aspirations. I have every confidence that the RLX Etc., will wear out an Audi A6 or Cadillac CTS on a road course, and do so with quiet confidence and total lack of tire histrionics. You point the RLX and it goes. And the car I was driving was fitted with not-particularly sporty M+S radials. I'd like to drive this car with summer rubber on it.

Also surprising is the pace. With three torque-y electric motors and a responsive, high-tech V6 at its disposal, the car can exploit both efficiency and performance opportunistically. Below 50 mph, with moderate throttle demand, the car will rely mostly on its electric propulsion. At times of sudden demand and extended high output, the system entrains the V6, and it catches a brisk gas-powered tailwind. A full-throttle launch will take the RLX Hybrid to 60 mph in about 5.5 seconds—plenty quick for a V6-powered, 4,354-pound sedan—and if you're in the mood the RLX will gladly rev and snarl. In Sport mode, downshifts are met with trills of engine revs as the computer automatically rev-matches, or "blips" the throttle.

You will have to listen closely, however. A huge amount of noise-damping syrup has been poured over this car. The twin-motor unit, for instance, has its own elastically isolated subframe. The engine's shuffling on and offstage is likewise silenced by an actively damping engine mount. Other noise attenuation includes noise-cancelling output from the audio system, acoustically laminated window glass, and antihowl silencers built into the alloy wheels themselves. In the normal order of business, drivers will be unaware of the car's algorithmic dealings as it shuttles among seven drive modes. It will just hum.

With your permission, a historical footnote: Torque vectoring—the asymmetrical application of torque across and between axles to affect higher steering response, linearity and vehicle stability—is the hot dynamics technology, enabled by hybridization and the supple modulations of torque possible with electric-traction motors. The Porsche 911 GT3 Hybrid race car I drove a couple of years ago did what the Acura does, except the Porsche's powerful electric motors are twinned on the front axle and not the rear (Acura's reborn mid-engine exotic, the NSX, coming later this year, will be arranged similarly).

But it is the RLX, actually, that has brought fully articulate torque vectoring to the mass market. Hmmm. Yeah. No, still don't want it.

I concede. It isn't rational. The RLX is spacious, especially compared with the old RL, with rear seat legroom that dare I say even a euthanized giraffe would appreciate. It gets full marks in crash safety (full marks from the Feds, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). It bristles with driver-assistance features, including optional active cruise control with low-speed follow (call it "auto stop and roll"); and optional lane-keeping assist and departure warning.

The rap against Acuras used to be that they are front-drive cars posting up against authentic rear-drive luxury cars from BMW and Mercedes. But Audis are likewise front-biased. Not only that, thanks to the 357 additional pounds of distributed mass in the RLX Hybrid, weight distribution is improved, to 57/43%, front/rear, compared with the non-hybrid's nosy 61/39. Another objection down in flames.

And yet, nada. I am a barren land where Acura's seed can find no purchase. It might be something as subtle as what designers call "stance." Its German competitors (Audi A6 and BMW 5, including) emphasize a broad and low presence, signaling a low center of gravity and road holding, with lower belt lines, close-fit wheel wells, fuller body contours along the rocker panels. Beneath the RLX's relatively high belt line, the aluminum skin weakly retreats to the car's underside, visually suggesting less athleticism than the car actually possesses. It could be because the RLX Hybrid looks very much like what it is, an outrageously expensive clone of the company's Honda Accord.

Where styling does intrude on the RLX Hybrid, it does so weirdly: The hockey-stick curve of the front wheel arches; the full-on-crazy, actress-on-a-rampage headlamps.

In any event, thanks, thanks immensely, but no. I'd rather eat giraffe.