Acura builds a stiffer chassis and sharper creases into the brand new TLX

Each trade has its personal yardsticks—ways in which rivals can measure up towards one another to see who’s greatest. Within the automotive-manufacturing world, an effective way to do this is to let your physique panels do the speaking. Exact panel gaps are a method to do this, for instance. And now that everybody’s just about mastered the artwork of curves, the pattern du jour is for including sharp creases and folds. The most recent Acura TLX sedan, which simply went into manufacturing in Marysville, Ohio, is an effective instance of that.

“Our hood has a brand new expertise known as sharp edge,” defined Ken Sheridan, affiliate chief engineer at Honda of America’s Marysville manufacturing unit (Honda is Acura’s guardian firm). “The radius on these styling strains—normally they’re like a 5 millimeter radius. On this case, they’re actually sharp. They seem to be a 2.5 millimeter radius, they usually come all the way in which into the bumper on the highest of the automotive. It is a huge factor as a result of our entire idea is that this precision-crafted efficiency.

“It is at all times a problem after you have all this accuracy and you then put these aluminum comps—we’ve got aluminum fenders and aluminum hoods—into our oven at about 450 levels, after which stuff begins needs to begin shifting,” Sheridan advised me. “So we really developed particular fixturing for that to maintain it at a nominal place after it is mainly soaked in our oven.”

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