Car - Acura

Type Luxury division
Founded 1986
Headquarters Tokyo, Japan
Key people Dick Colliver, V.P., Acura USA
Industry Automotive
Products Luxury vehicles
Parent Honda Motor Company, Limited
Slogan Advance


Acura (Japanese: アキュラ, Akyura) is the luxury vehicle brand of Japanese automaker Honda Motor Company. It primarily competes with Lexus, Infiniti and Cadillac among others as a certified luxury vehicle. It has been used in the US, Canada and Hong Kong since March 1986 to market Honda's performance automobiles and near-performance vehicles. The brand was introduced to Mexico in 2004 and to the Chinese market in 2006. The Acura brand will be introduced in Russia at the end of 2008. Honda plans to introduce Acura to the Japanese domestic market two years from 2008 or so.[1] With the Acura brand, Honda is credited with being the first to tap into a market for luxury Japanese cars outside Japan. Before Acura, automobiles exported from Japan were primarily economical in design and largely targeted at low-cost consumers.

Vehicle history

The Honda NSX, badged as an Acura in certain regions.
Modified 1998 Acura IntegraIn 1990, four years after the debut of the Legend and Integra, Acura introduced the NSX, a midship V6 powered, rear-wheel-drive sports car. The NSX, an acronym for "New Sports eXperimental", was billed as the first Japanese car capable of competing with Ferrari and Porsche. This vehicle served as a halo car for the Acura brand. The NSX was the world's first all-aluminum production car.[2]

Despite a strong start for the Acura brand (in terms of market acceptance), sales suffered in the mid- to late 1990s. Some critics attributed this decline in part to less inspiring designs. Additionally, during this time Acura switched to an alphanumeric nomenclature formula, dropping the Legend and Integra titles. The 1996 3.5 RL, which replaced the popular Legend, was seen by many as the epitome of this problem, namely because the RL designation was more anonymous than the former Legend title.[3] Also, the RL's 210 horsepower (160 kW) V6 (later increased to 225 hp) and front-wheel drive, together with a high price and styling that cautiously copied the larger and more powerful Lexus LS 400, did little against BMW, Audi, Lexus, and other competitors. During this time, the NSX also lost sales as Acura made few changes from its original 1989 trim. A year later, the Integra sedan was withdrawn, replaced by the Acura 1.6EL, which was only sold in Canada as a rebadged Honda Civic. The Integra sedan continued to be sold in the United States until 2001.

Despite these letdowns, Acura gained prominence in the 1990s with a young group of customers: tuner enthusiasts. Parent company Honda's reputation with this demographic as a maker of "easy-to-tune" and "rev-happy" engines rubbed off onto Acura, and the Integra became a popular tuner car. Norm Reeves Acura of Mission Viejo is set to open the largest Acura dealership on the West Coast in early May 2008.