Acura RL

Among the 35 Acura entries in the MotorJury library, the Acura RL holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1995. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Acura RL 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 BMW BMW Z3, the Honda Honda CR-V, the Toyota Toyota Tacoma — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Acura RL reads like this: the record lists its engine as 3.5 L V6 C35A1; kerb weight is recorded at 1,660–1,778kg (3,660–3,920lb); drive goes through 4-speed automatic; 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.

Its place in the Acura story

Within Acura's own catalogue the Acura RL sits alongside the Acura ADX, the Acura ARX-06, the Acura CDX, the Acura CL-X. The record names the Acura Legend as its predecessor and the Acura RLX as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Mitsuhiro Honda / Tamotsu Okamoto (1993). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Sayama, Saitama (Sayama Plant).

On the record

For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 20 mpg combined, which works out near $3,800 a year in fuel at current prices.

How this catalogue works

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

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.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Acura RL was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.