The American automotive market is one of the world’s biggest meritocracies. If a car is good, it sells well, and if it’s not, well, it gets a shorter Wikipedia entry. Now some may argue that vehicles like the Toyota Camry are too bland and don’t deserve their success. Then again, there’s a lot to be said for consistency…ask McDonalds.
Every now and then though, a car comes along that, despite a long list of merits, never quite achieves the ubiquity that you might expect. Sometimes it’s style, other times marketing, and yet other times it’s simply because the car was “ahead of its time,” that is, not exactly fitting in with contemporary consumer tastes.
Do these cars deserve their fate as also-rans? Not to me…they’re all good, and if people would be willing to overlook one simple thing (OK, maybe more than one in some cases), they’d find themselves behind the wheel of some very satisfying machinery. On the other hand, look for some great values on the used market in the near future.
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These photos of the upcoming new Acura sporty-utility crossover coupe thing have been kicking around for a while now, but Acura now has given the beast a name: ZDX. It will debut at the New York Auto Show in April in a couple of weeks, but for now, there’s a little more information on the car.
First, clearly, it’s designed as a counterpunch to the BMW X6. Acura is calling it a “four door sport coupe,” but with the (blank)DX moniker, it’s obviously a crossover of some sort and not a sedan. Having driven the X6 and thinking it was, well, one of the worst BMWs on the market today, I’m a little surprised to see that it has spawned a direct competitor. In reality, the ZDX can’t possibly be considered a knock-off of the X6, since the product development time is too short. But with a similar profile and, I assume, mission as the BMW X6, the Acura ZDX proves that Acura at the very least cribs off BMW’s product planning method.
The Acura ZDX shown in New York will officially be a prototype. In Acura-speak, that means that it will be a thinly disguised production car, about 90 percent accurate to the final version. The photos Acura has released so far don’t show much, to say the least, but it looks mostly like an MDX with a chop-top. Considering that the X6 hasn’t exactly been flying off dealer lots, I’ll be curious to see how this thing does.
Photos of Acura ZDX prototype
5 Photos
The American automotive market is one of the world’s biggest meritocracies. If a car is good, it sells well, and if it’s not, well, it gets a shorter Wikipedia entry. Now some may argue that vehicles like the Toyota Camry are too bland and don’t deserve their success. Then again, there’s a lot to be said for consistency…ask McDonalds.
