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Acura replaces chief Accavitti with designer Ikeda

Acura is shaking up its senior leadership, as Honda ushers the current chief of its luxury division out the door and replaces him with a new one. Exiting stage left is Mike Accavitti, who held the reins at the premium automaker as its senior vice president and general manager of the Acura division. Taking his place will be Jon Ikeda, one of the Japanese automaker's most senior designers. Accavitti (pictured above at left) had been promoted to the job from his previous position as senior vice president of auto operations after Honda separated the Acura brand into its own division. He had previously served as a senior executive at Chrysler, rising up the ranks to run the Dodge brand, and joined Honda in 2011 as its chief marketing officer. At this point it remains unclear why Accavitti is leaving and where he might land, but Honda says he's leaving the company altogether. To replace Accavitti, Honda has named Jon Ikeda (pictured above at right), a veteran designer with the company. A graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, Ikeda has worked for Honda on both sides of the Pacific since 1989. He previous headed up the design and product planning divisions at Honda's American R&D operations, and was instrumental in creating an independent design office for the Acura brand, separate from Honda's. This isn't the first time we've seen Accavitti replaced in his role as a senior executive by a design veteran. After only four months at CEO of the Dodge brand, he was replaced by Ralph Gilles, who retained his role as senior vice president of design for the entire Chrysler group in parallel. Gilles was ultimately replaced as head of Dodge as well, but was recently promoted to serve as head of design for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Related Video: Acura Announces Leadership Changes TORRANCE, Calif. July 27, 2015 – Acura today announced that Jon Ikeda has been promoted to Vice President and General Manager of the Acura Division of American Honda Motor Co., Inc. In this role, Ikeda will oversee all Acura brand activities including sales, marketing and parts and service. Ikeda was formerly Division Director of Auto Design at Honda R&D Americas, Inc. (HRA). He began his career at Honda in Japan in 1989, joining the advanced design studio in Tokyo, where he worked on the award-winning Honda FSX show car. After six years in Japan, he returned to Los Angeles in 1995, to continue his career at Honda R&D in Torrance, California.

Honda's Euro Civic hatch getting facelift, too

Honda's freshening of the Civic line isn't just limited to the North American market, as proven by these images of the Euro-spec model testing on Her Majesty's motorways.
According to our spies, this new Civic boasts a heavily restyled front fascia, with headlights and taillights that draw a quite a bit of inspiration from the Civic Type R Concept from the 2014 Geneva Motor Show.
The restyled front fascia has a sportier lean, with more significant lateral intakes and what looks like a slightly larger lower intake. It's more difficult to make out details on the rear of the car, although we can spot a modest little diffuser and a larger integrated spoiler.

2012 Honda NC700X

Honda Builds The Crossover Of Bikes
Here in the land of Harleys and highways that stretch to infinity, Americans don't care much for sensible motorcycles. Unlike the majority of global bike buyers, North Americans tend to choose escape over utility, performance over practicality - that's simply how it's been done in the land of the free, at least until a funny thing happened on the way to the global recession.
As bank balances thinned and fuel prices crept skyward, sales of puffed up sportbikes and cartoonishly endowed cruisers plummeted. Americans rediscovered that motorcycles could be used for tasks like workaday commutes and trips to the grocery store, not just for riding into a Marlboro Man-approved sunset, fringe in tow. As consumers matured, manufacturers slowly responded with bikes better suited for purposeful priorities.