Start with what the Acura Legend is: a 2-door coupe / 4-door sedan with 2.0 L C20A V6, built from 1985 to 1995, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Tetsuya Mizuno, Yukio Kurosu, Yoshio Ui (1982, 1984).
The background
The Acura Legend is a mid-size luxury car sold in the United States and Canada by Acura, the luxury division of Honda, from 1985 until 1995. It was the first flagship sedan sold under the Acura nameplate, until being renamed in 1996 as the Acura 3.5RL. The 3.5RL was the North American version of the KA9 series Honda Legend.
The opportunity for Japanese manufacturers to export more expensive models had arisen with the 1980s voluntary export restraints, negotiated by the Japanese government and U.S. trade representatives, restricting mainstream car sales. The initial success of the Legend and Honda's Acura division in competing against established European and American luxury manufacturers would lead to Toyota and Nissan creating the Lexus and Infiniti brands, respectively, to compete in the luxury car market.
The engineering
The engine is 2.0 L C20A V6; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. Drive goes through a 4-Speed Automatic / 5-Speed Manual. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is Sedan: 108.7 in / Coupe: 106.5 in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Where it sits
In the Acura line-up the Acura Legend has a clear place: it handed the line to the Acura RL / Acura CL (Coupe); the factory was Sayama, Saitama (Sayama Plant), Japan. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the SEAT Ibiza, the Ferrari Testarossa, the Toyota MR2. Its Acura stablemates include the Acura ADX and the Acura ARX-06.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Acura Legend — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.