Driving Impressions
reviewed by
The most fun you can have with an Acura RDX is driving it through corners like a sports car. It does a great job of this. The paddle-shifting transmission shifts smoothly and obeys your input.
This is the first turbocharged car Acura has ever made. Honda has been the technology leader with small engines for a long time and this 2.3-liter turbo is about as high-tech as they come. The turbocharger changes the power characteristics quite a lot from the more peaky Acura TSX, although it doesn't smooth out the engine. It has 260 pound-feet of torque, and no turbo lag, but when the transmission is in Drive, it kicks up and down a lot when you're driving casually uphill. Apparently the turbo confuses it, something we'd seen in the past with Volkswagen's 2.0T turbos. To stop it, you have to use the Sport mode and shift manually.
In the Sport mode, the transmission obeys your manual-shift commands except when you downshift at an engine speed the system thinks is too high, or upshift at one it thinks is too low. Then at least it tells you that it's rejected your input with a flashing light.
In stop-and-go freeway traffic, we found it difficult to accelerate smoothly. It has a drive-by-wire throttle; we have found many other cars with this type of electronic system also to have very sensitive throttles, and we wonder if the technology still has a ways to go. In any case, this does not make the RDX a great commuter car in heavy traffic.
A bigger flaw than a quick throttle or unsettled transmission is the ride. A front-seat passenger said she could feel every bump, especially on the freeway. We could feel them too. It was like a jolt over the freeway ridges.
Of course, this firmness in the suspension enables the RDX to perform like a sports car around the corners. Acura boasts that it will out-corner a BMW X3, which was developed on the Nurburgring circuit in Germany. So, good for the RDX. But is it worth the trade-off, if the suspension can't also offer a comfortable ride on the freeway? Maybe. You decide.
We drove one RDX in California then spent a week in another in the Northwest, just in time for snow and ice. We tested the ABS by slamming on the brakes going down a steep hill with hard-packed snow at 20 miles per hour. The response was beautiful; it took a long time to get stopped, but we were able to steer anywhere we wanted, without sliding, while our foot was mashed to the pedal. We should point out that the P235/55R18 Michelin Pilot tires are considered high-performance all-season, meaning they weren't made for this sort of thing; all-season means three seasons, winter not being one of them.
Then we went to a slushy parking lot, and tried to cut donuts at hard throttle, to test the VSA electronic stability control. The RDX just turned in tight circles, without much sliding; it was pretty amazing.
A couple days later the slush froze into sheer, lumpy ice and we returned to the bottom of our steep hill. The city had put up barriers because the road was considered dangerous. We drove around the barrier and charged uphill, and it was fascinating to feel the all-wheel-drive work, and watch the readout on the instrument panel indicate with bars which of the four tires was getting the torque, based on how slippery it was under each tire at any moment. The all-wheel-drive system, which can send 70 percent of its torque to the rear wheels, struggled for grip, its computer sensors playing the throttle and brakes on and off at four separate wheels at lightning speed, and we made it to the top. This was very impressive, especially with those high-performance, wide-profile, all-season tires that were not intended for dealing with such severe conditions.
In winter conditions like these, you can't beat a high-tech vehicle, with all-wheel drive, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, six airbags and xenon headlamps, not to mention heated seats and heated mirrors.
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