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Acura builds 345-horsepower RDX A-Spec for SEMA

The 2019 Acura RDX is great — a return to form for the sporty compact luxury crossover. So there's no real harm in giving one the SEMA treatment, especially since it entails a real motorsport tie-in and some legitimate performance parts. As for the giant graphics, well, it's SEMA after all. Graham Rahal races for Honda in the IndyCar series, and he also has his own performance parts company — named, sensibly enough, Graham Rahal Performance — which he started in 2017. They sell some private-label bits manufactured by other companies to their spec, some off-the-shelf parts, and they do tuning and installation work on customer cars. Acura gave the job of building the SEMA RDX to Rahal. There's a fair bit going on under the hood to get the RDX to 345 horsepower from the factory 272 ponies. The 2.0-liter turbo engine gets a bunch of enhancements. The turbo, intake, exhaust manifolds, downpipe, and cat-back (a GRP design) are all aftermarket. There's a customer intercooler, too. KTuning did the ECU with a custom map. On the handling front, the RDX wears Eibach springs, StopTech brakes, HRE wheels at 21 inches, and Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires. The RDX started life as an A-Spec model in Apex Blue Pearl, and from there GRP applied carbon fiber garnish to the mirrors, grille accents, and lower fascia. Troy Lee Designs did the exterior graphics, and inside there's more carbon fiber and a custom steering wheel (courtesy of Max Papis's MPI Innovations shop). The RDX will be on the show floor if you'd like to check out the Rahal shop's handiwork. Related Video:

Honda confirms 2014 Odyssey and Acura MDX for New York

Look beneath the seats of a Honda Odyssey and you'll likely find a handful of that iconic loop cereal loved by toddlers nationwide. And to show that Honda understands its minivan's target market, it is using the breakfast staple to announce its plans to reveal the updated 2014 model at next week's New York Auto Show. While the announcement is creative, it unfortunately lacks much in the way of information, leaving us with little more than a vague teaser alluding to "some innovative new features."
As expected, Honda has also confirmed we will see the production version of the 2014 Acura MDX in New York. We expect the 2014 MDX to look very much like the prototype we saw in January at the Detroit Auto Show with only slight differences. The 3.5-liter i-VTEC V6 will be offered with all-wheel drive or, in a first for MDX, front-wheel drive.
You'll find the official press snippets for both below, and we'll have live images and details on both from the New York show. Until then... Cheerio!

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.