2005 Acura TL Test Drives

2005 Acura TL

Honda changes the metal and adds more pedal. Is the TL a BMW beater now?

News that Acura is planning a revamp of its moribund RL flagship this coming fall shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who follows the car business. No, the RL is not the subject of this review -- the less-expensive Acura TL four-door is.

But we mention the RL in this context because its fate has a great deal to do with that of the just-revised TL -- and of course with the fate of the entire Acura line. Acura, you'll recall, is the luxury division of Honda. Sales of Acuras were uneven last year, with numbers holding steady or going upward on models below $30,000, but above that mark Acura got spanked. For instance, the RL tanked more than 27%, with a volume just a smidge over 6,000 cars. By comparison, Toyota's Lexus line sold four times as many LS 430 flagship models, and that was a down year for the LS 430.

Which points to one key problem with the Acura label -- it has never really stood for luxury or performance worth paying top dollar for.

HIGHS: Fast; generous cockpit, strong styling LOWS: Torque steer throws the handling off.

And there are two chief reasons: not enough power and a front-drive-only drivetrain. See, while rivals from Japan, such as Nissan's Infiniti, are switching to rear-wheel drive to showcase superior handling (Lexus long ago added rear-wheel drive in order to gain on its German competition), Acura has stood pat. Officials there have always insisted that inline four and V-6 engines with power sent to the front wheels made the most sense from a production and space-efficiency perspective. And they are right about the latter -- if you don't have a driveline stretching from the engine bay to the rear wheels, a flat cabin floor is much easier to create. And you can more readily make a spacious cabin without having to make a long car.

However, there are a few big negatives as well. One is weight distribution. With no driveline reaching backward and an engine pushed forward to make a small car roomier, you wind up with a nose-heavy machine that won't corner as neutrally as a vehicle with 50-50 weight distribution. Another problem is torque steer (the tendency of the front wheels to fight steering inputs under hard acceleration). Acuras have never suffered from severe torque steer, but that's unfortunately changing. The reason is there's a horsepower war going on in luxury-performance cars that sell for $30,000 and up, and everybody is coming with rear-wheel drive or all-wheel drive.

So whether that's General Motors' Cadillac or Infiniti, or Ford Motor's Jaguar or Lexus, Acura has to keep up. But more power sent to the front wheels eventually results in torque steer -- there's just no way to get around it.

Still, the choice to go with less power doesn't look very good in ads, either. So that's why the $32,650 Acura TL gets 270 horsepower, way up from the old TL's 225-hp output. After all, this car is meant to contend with Infiniti's 260-hp G35, Cadillac's 220-hp CTS (you can also get the CTS with 400 horsepower as well, but it costs $49,300 versus $30,490 for the base model), not to mention BMW's 225-hp 330i. And, yes, a few Lexus options, as well as the Audi A4 with all-wheel drive and the Mercedes-Benz C320.

But while a 270-hp, 3.2-liter V-6 engine under the hood of the TL certainly makes it at least as quick in a straight line as its rivals, it also makes this a car you have to think about more when driving it hard. And there are some other drawbacks (having nothing whatsoever to do with performance). More on these -- and still more on the RL -- when you click below.