Cashing in on that sweet, sweet nostalgia, Acura’s gunning for our car-enthusiast hearts with a revival of the Integra. The car’s first teaser, which was dropped on social media shortly after a flyover the Concours d’Elegance, where Acura’s kind of cryptic announced blindsided slightly tipsy journalists, leading them to wonder if what they saw was true, or maybe they had too much of that Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. I kid. Kind of.
Acura only released a small headlight and profile teaser, and let us wonder about what form the Integra will take for its latest iteration. Would it be a two-door coupe? Were they going to Mitsubishi it, and bastardize a sacred name by affixing it to a generic crossover? Will we get a manual? We still don’t know the answers to all of those questions, but today Acura threw us a bone and showed us more sheet metal of the forthcoming Integra.
There’s not a heck of a lot of information here to do a full-on design analysis, but here are some impressions based upon what we know.
What we know is, the Integra will have four doors, as evidenced by the rear door shut line in the teaser. Now, the internet is already up in arms on the “coupe versus not a coupe” thing, but I’m not going to wade in that dumpster fire of a discourse. Acura could have a coupe in the works, but we won’t know until we get there. I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high though, Honda axed the Civic coupe due to slow sales. The latest Civic generation features an updated platform and no coupe body style. Anything’s possible, though.
From what we can see, the Integra’s styling is a logical progression of what we’ve seen on the new TLX. A trapezoidal faux pillarless greenhouse is paired with big chunky brightwork that emphasizes a sloping roofline. The rear fenders look chunky and wide for what they are, similar to the TLX’s wide stance.
Less convincing is the rear fascia, which although definitely is consistent with Acura’s aesthetic, somehow ends up looking like a Hyundai Genesis coupe with a Brazilian Butt Lift. It’s nice and perky, but maybe a bit generic. Whatever, you drive the inside of the car, not the outside.
This next part is mostly speculation, I could be totally wrong but bear with me here. Speaking of “driving” the car, the Integra is likely to use a variant of the Civic’s chassis. Even in the stylized profile sketch, the Integra shares some proportional similarities with the Civic. The windshield is fairly upright, the dash-to-axle ratio is less obviously front-wheel drive, leading to a shallower dashboard top. To many, the latest Civic is proportionally superior to the one before it.
Arguably, Acura’s proportions have been the bane of their stylistic duds in the 2010s. Most of their cars were Accord and Civic-based, and they had a hard time hiding those chassis hardpoints. Most Acuras had short stumpy noses, nonathletic and milquetoast proportions paired with a styling language that was both bland and ugly. The RLX and final generation TL just looked like ugly accords, because well, they kind of were ugly Accords, mechanically.
Now, Acura’s put some distance between itself and Honda, with platforms that share a lot less with their pedestrian Honda counterparts. It shows — the latest TLX and MDX look great, in part due to their better dash-to-axle ratio, and more sophisticated and athletic proportions. Will Acura craft a bespoke platform for the Integra? We don’t know yet. Still, I like what I see thus far, and it appears to be more interesting than a Honda Civic with an Acura badge.
