Acura, the Honda subsidiary that brought back the NSX and Integra, is banking on the novelty of its huge crossover, the Precision EV Concept, and Honda’s commitment to electric vehicles to attract new customers. The Precision EV, first revealed during Monterey Car Week this year and more recently to select audiences in New York City, is a sleek electric vehicle that reinterprets the brand’s defining design characteristics.
“This is the first glimpse of our design orientation toward an electric future,” says Dave Marek, Acura’s senior creative director. When asked, “As a performance brand in the age of electricity, how do you express performance details without the typical enablers like quad exhausts, etc.?
Many of the designers behind the new Acura LMDh racing vehicle that will compete at Daytona and Le Mans next year stayed with more classic, athletic proportions, such as a long wheelbase and longer dash-to-axle arrangement, with the wheels pushed far out to the corners.
Despite the fact that big grille apertures are no longer necessary, Acura designers preserved many of the brand’s defining aesthetic features, including the pentagon-shaped grille. In addition, there is a big, lighted “A” logo placed front and center inside a slightly raised diamond pattern that is illuminated from behind. Moreover, the lower front and rear bumpers and the wheels are accentuated by an elaborate 3-D printed design that Marek calls the “glitch,” further distinguishing the vehicle. “We wanted to transform what you see digitally on a screen to a 3-D shape,” he explains. Like how “pixels glitch and then it focuses.”
A yoke-style steering wheel and driver’s display inspired by Formula 1 vehicles make up the driver-focused cockpit that Marek and the design team built, contrasting with the lounge-focused interiors of many electric show cars. In principle, the automobile could drive itself if the driver just switched into a “relax” mode. Marek, however, stresses that “we are a performance brand, so if the wheel doesn’t vanish, it’s not the end of the world.”
Acura (and parent company Honda) are developing critical relationships that will allow the scalability of its EVs in the future, even if the Precision EV Concept is only a concept study and isn’t based on a platform that will go into production. The next Acura ZDX EV will use the same GM Ultium platform as the Cadillac Lyriq, as was recently disclosed. Acura’s leadership have said that the business is working on its own unique electrified platform, however specifics on the resulting products have not been disclosed. A $4.4 billion facility will be built in the United States by Honda and LG of South Korea to produce solid-state batteries for Honda’s next electric vehicles.
Acura’s vice president and brand officer, Jon Ikeda, predicts an exciting era as internal combustion engines gradually fade from use. We may be able to push our engineers to their limits with this vehicle by deviating from conventional practice. However, a business is also at stake. Growth is a process that can’t be rushed.
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