Gadgetory

as you can tell from the grill here or if you've seen the recent Avengers movie this is an Acura now this is acura smallest SUV the RDX up for the 2013 model year it's gotten bigger just a little bit bigger prominent on this car the 2013 model they made this more subtle it used to be pointy stick out it was really noticeable and you don't really see a bumper here either everything is molded neatly in place it just kind of comes out from the side and goes smoothly across the front a cure changed the styling on the quarter panel here it used to be much more vertical now we have this nice contour in the side graphic now we come back here behind the car and where are the exhaust pipes what happened to them well they're actually hidden underneath here it's a nice subtle premium element but now let's go inside and check the tech from all these buttons on the steering wheel and on the center here not much has changed with Acura with this technology the maps are only in 2d but they look good and if you really scroll down you can actually see the outlines of buildings in an area and I like this interface - it's not bad we've got this big knob here and it's easy to zoom out or in now as you can see we've got the Zagat listings the Zagat listings are pretty detailed you actually get the scores for the restaurant and you can even go deeper and get into actually comments about the restaurant so you can really do a little digging here if you don't want to pull out your phone and look up Yelp Acura Honda's always had great voice command and here it's taken to a really good level so I've got an iPhone hooked up to the car via the white iPhone cable down here so if I push the talk button iPod search play album Fleetwood Mac but now here's the thing that I don't like about this cabin tech is you go back to the navigation system you can see it shows traffic information on here and that's really useful but if I were to program a route that went through that EPIK it would have no problem just sending me into the worst traffic possible we also have the EOS audio system in this car or space treble the usual stuff and Acura puts this nice little pattern that shows the speakers around the car unless you tune the fader the balance even the center channel and the subwoofer there's 10 speakers it's a really good sound accurate tries to make the RDX look pretty sporty for example we have this red engine start button here we also have these sport paddles here for manually shifting the six-speed Automatic doesn't shift very fast so you're not going to be really powering down through the corners and down shifting really fast because once you try to hit one of these paddles of the downshift you have to wait a little bit for that ship to actually occur under the hood we have a very different engine than they used to find in the RDX there used to be a 2.3 liter four-cylinder with a turbocharger now we have a 3.5 liter v6 the reason they went to this bigger engine is because the older one really wasn't a good application to the car it never got really good fuel economy even though this is a bigger engine than the old four-cylinder it actually gets decent fuel economy the EPA ratings are 19 miles per gallon city 27 miles per gallon highway this v6 makes 273 horsepower and power comes on pretty evenly - there's much remarkable about the way the RDX drives it's it's pretty easy to drive in fact it works a lot like you'd expect of a premium SUV you can jump in and just go without really fuss or worry the ride quality could be a little smoother actually in decent roads it feels ok you don't really notice much but then when you're on when you get into some little slight rough stuff some imperfections in the road you really start to feel it a little more than I would expect in a premium level vehicle when I get into the turns with this car it's actually fairly stable the suspension is really built and you know maybe that's one of the trade-offs with getting feeling some more of the the rough pavement it's not a super fantastic handler though because the all-wheel-drive system it has is just Acuras really standard all-wheel drive it's not they're super handling all-wheel drive system and the suspension is also it's just a fixed suspension it's not a dynamic suspension like they have in the MDX and RDX is just not that vehicle you'll see a base price for the 2013 acura RDX of about $35,000 but now that's not the car you want Acura puts all their technology in a trim package so that's the Acura RDX with tech that goes for about thirty nine thousand dollars but it brings in the navigation system Bluetooth phone system the stereo that Els stereo system you'll want all that and then you can also bump up to all-wheel drive for about forty thousand total now that's hit or miss I mean if you take the car out into the snow and stuff like that you might want thought wheel drive but if it's going to be kind of a suburban runabout let's get the front-wheel drive and you'll get better gas mileage