Acura CL
Acura
Acura
The Acura CL is a midsize four passenger coupe manufactured and marketed by Honda's Acura brand across two generations from 1997–2003 model years. All first generation Acura CLs were manufactured at Honda's plant in East Liberty, Ohio with the Honda Civic.
The second generation CL, TL and the Honda Accord upon which the Acura CLs were based, are manufactured at Honda's plant in Marysville, Ohio. The CL was the first Acura to be built in the United States. With the release of the TL and 3.5RL in 1996, Acura transitioned to alphanumeric and/or two-letter names.
From the Wikipedia article Acura CL, CC BY-SA.
The Acura CL is one of 35 Acura models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1996. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Acura CL properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Alfa Romeo Alfa Romeo 156, the Škoda Auto Škoda Octavia, the Porsche Porsche Boxster — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Acura CL reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.2 L F22B1 I4 / 2.3 L F23A1 I4 / 3.0 L J30A1 V6; kerb weight is recorded at 3064 lb (I-4) / 3285 lb (V6); drive goes through 4-speed automatic / 5-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Acura's own catalogue the Acura CL sits alongside the Acura ADX, the Acura ARX-06, the Acura CDX, the Acura CL-X. The record names the Acura Legend (coupe) as its predecessor and the Acura TL as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Donald Herner, Harumi Okano, Kunihiko Tachibana (1997). Assembly is recorded at United States: Marysville, Ohio.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Acura CL costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.