The new Acura TL
the TL has been one of the most controversial, at least from a stylistic perspective. It all boiled down to that so-called beak. The car’s chrome-bright proboscis served to polarize onlookers to the point it became a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. I happened to fall into the latter group. The revised front-end styling sported by the 2012 model tones down the look without deserting the corporate identity. In this regard, the 2012 TL is a much sharper-looking car. Better news is that the TL loses nothing in terms of its ability to wow the driver.
As before, there are two distinctly different flavours of TL. The base car drives its front wheels; the uplevel car powers all four. The latter model represents a big step forward from the driver’s perspective. Acura’s Super-Handling All-Wheel-Drive (SH-AWD) system not only divvies up the power front to rear, it also looks after the left-to-right power split at the rear axle. Entering a corner at speed sees the system feed up to 70% of the power rearward. It then sends more torque to the outside rear wheel (up to 100%), which physically turns the TL into the corner. This yields two key benefits: First, there is less steering input required and, second, the tendency to run headlong into understeer is moved out to the point where it is basically a non-issue. The second benefit is particularly significant given the sedan’s 59/41 front-to-rear weight bias.
