Acura RLX |
|---|
|
| Topic Navigation |
|---|
|
Wikipedia: Acura RLX
Page Sections History Article Index |
History
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Acura RLX page on 8 August 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Acura RLX is a luxury/executive car manufactured by Honda and sold under their Acura division, released in 2013. Succeeding the RL, the RLX was discontinued in 2020.
Acura Legend was a very successful vehicle to launch Acura as a separate division, and combined with sales of the Integra this resulted in Acura outselling longtime luxury marques BMW and Mercedes-Benz as well as Toyota's new luxury division Lexus. However, its successor RL were sold below the expectation typically due to relatively tight interior for its size, lack of V8 performance engine option & the better handling rear-wheel drive experience, and/or relatively expensive compared to the rivals.
An October 2009 Car and Driver blog cited a dinner with Acura executives who acknowledged that the introduction of the new, larger, and in some guises, more powerful, fourth generation Acura TL made it difficult to market the then-current RL. In November 2009, an Autoweek article reported that new Honda CEO Takanobu Ito told Automotive News that Acura is going to change course. Speaking of the worldwide economy before the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, Ito said through an interpreter, "Pre-Lehman, we did have the idea to produce more multicylinder engines... I see the future of Acura as a merger of BMW and Audi -- something between high performance and high technology." As a result of this midstream change, Acura will be in a "low-growth period of developing new products," Ito said. "We were thinking that we could come up with glamorous, gorgeous products that would sell. Now, our premium products will be expressed in advanced environmental technologies, rather than glamorous things attached to the product," he said.
| Date | Article | Author/Source |
|---|---|---|
| 22 September 2016 | 2017 Acura RLX presents attainable premium comfort, style and safety  | Parks McCants, TorqueNews |