Gadgetory

Acura's middle card child the TL it has a huge role in making Acura the comedy you think of for high value luxury tech so let's see about the 2012 TL super handling all-wheel drive and check that 10 when the fourth-generation TL came out as a 2009 a lot of folks gasp what's on the front of that thing a beak a breastplate a huge bottle opener such questions aren't cool when a ride has to account for half of Acuras car sales thus we have this Rhino plastic redo let's see what else got worked on smoother less aggressive less ugly they had a lot of friction in the showroom from consumers who came in and said I like the car but Wow kind of a harsh look now it definitely says sedan with a coupe like roofline and notice on the back light it remains indented a bit or recessed so they maintain those very slight sail panels on the inside of the back light kind of a key feature on the TL that looks really good from a rear three-quarter view now inside the TL has not changed dramatically you've still got these two kind of scooped eyebrows this is Honda / Acuras newer head unit thankfully you can tell by the really smooth map graphics the basic menu has not changed dramatically though you've got this idea of rotating among these menu items around a sort of a rectangular circular pattern and again the system is largely oriented toward navigation but you do have a home button here to take you to audio we'll get to that in a moment entering a destination is simple enough you can either punch in the address here big clear indications there's no touchscreen of course it's all through the Acura controller you can also use voice command which is pretty good typically on these cars now speaking of voice command you can also do something else in this car that's kind of new that is the idea of calling out a piece of music an album name a track name whatever it is whether it's on the hard drive or your iPod or on a USB Drive on that same pigtail on the console play laugh out loud so laughs out loud it's certainly better than rotating through playlists which no matter how the carmaker implements that it's never really slick like it is on your iPod your other sources on this guy are AM and FM of course but no HD radio Acura's not doing that XM is your satellite flavor you've also got weather and traffic on this guy through Acura link your disc player is this single slot optical up here you have a hard drive on this car as well you can rip - you can tell because you have hard drive and aux on that button right there and you've also got bluetooth streaming audio though I was never able to get it work with my droid and there's a lot of complaints about that out there on the board so this is one of those where you do want to go to the whatever Acura comm / Bluetooth phones that won't piss you off / whatever to find out if your phone actually works here now because we're the tech package in this car we've got the Els audio system that will take DVDs but only DVD audio yeah because you got a lot of those like you even know what it is you do have Dolby PL - that's Dolby's a really good quality synthetic surround sound from digital sources it won't work with a.m. or FM broadcast for example but it will work with anything digital you pump in here it can create some pretty good synthetic surround as I mentioned the USB pigtails down here for iPod as well as for USB drives you've also got a good old standard aux that'll work with anything the 60 gig hard drive spares out 15 gigabytes of space for your music but with an increasing rush to the cloud like Pandora or Amazon Cloud Player on your phone this sort of tech is starting to lose its shine before it was even mainstream most of us don't need or want another hard drive to fiddle with the tech package also brings us this guy which is our rear view camera if you've got your distance markers but you've got no trajectory showing up there you can also get that all a card if you want same thing goes for backup parking sensors those are all acardo now what's unusual about the TL line is it depending on the drivetrain you get the engine size changes we have the super handling all-wheel drive that means a 3.7 liters sidesaddle v6 if you don't get the fancy all-wheel drive you get a three and a half liter now this guy the bigger motor delivers 305 horsepower 273 foot-pounds of torque and gets this car up to 16 about 6.3 seconds while delivering 1826 mpg that can be either through a 6-speed manual or in our car we have a new 6-speed automatic that replaces the outgoing 5-speed automatic in the previous model year nice improvement the manual transmission by the way is a no-cost option you can just pick that instead but it will reduce your mpg by one in the city and one on Iowa these tiel's always feel like about the right point they have a nice sort of plan of this power comes on right now I mean I've been Drive like I mentioned my doing anything to improve the shifting and what I wanted to get on some just now it was right there it didn't get stuck in sixth gear saying I'm in love with sixth gear because the EPA wants me to be no it was happy to shift down here very nice okay let's price this TL 2012 model we're looking at here super handling all-wheel drive is about forty thousand dollars but to go see that style you got to take it up 1/2 that tech package trim level that adds 3730 that gets you the hard drive navigation system you've also got some hard drive space for your music the rear camera the ELS audio full keyless access and some other high-tech niceties that's gonna be an important package to get