My SUV has 240,000 miles so I'm in the market, but it's running fine so it's not urgent. I really like the looks of the RDX and how it drove, and had an RL in the 90's and loved it. Here's my problems with the RDX after visiting a dealer and I understand a refresh/redesign is probable for the 2016 model. What are the chances of these improvements?

1. My wife is 5'2". When she sat in the passenger seat she appeared to be sitting on the floor. We must have a height adjustment like you get with most vehicles in this class or below this class. This was a surprise;

2. Gas mileage - AWD the MDX is 18/27 and the RDX virtually identical at 19/27. Is this due to the MDX having direct fuel injection and/or variable cylinder management? I would like better gas mileage on a smallish SUV;

3. No rear air conditioner. The slot is there but it's empty. I frequently have rear seat passengers and would like a vent;

4. My son thinks LED lighting is very important.

Any info/guesses on next year? Item one is a deal breaker for sure, and item two is important; the others can be overlooked.

 

I would wait for the refresh, however, I dont think the passenger seat will have an up and down adjustment.

 

I felt the same about the passenger seat and got a dining chair cushion and tied it around the back of the seat and it helps to some degree. Really dumb of them not to have an adjustable seat but it's probably one of those "if you want that you have to get the MDX" upgrade issues.

 

Its really not that hard to pull the four seat bolts out and install newer longer bolts and some spacer washers to raise the height about and inch. Some forum members have done just that and are as happy as clams...


The rest of the missing items, I can not help you with. You'll just have to wait and see like the rest of us. In the end you might have to buy a lumbersome four inches fatter & longer... and slower Lexus RX for about 10K more $$$$ to get those items. We all hope not. But the jury is still out....

 

I had considered all those four issues the OP raised ( and my wife's 5'2" as well ) . We were graduating from a sedan so the seat height doesn't bother us ( I was skeptical at first) we simply like the higher view from SUV. I would love our RDX more if it had all the other three features. But as time goes on I don't think about it too much. The RDX is a very nice and satisfactory car to own.

 

Right. And then the airbag deploys and the seat isn't where the system expects it to be and people die or are injured.

The system is designed for a fixed height seat at a certain height (as opposed to other systems that are designed for adjustable seats) and unless you crash test the car with the seat at the new height there is no way to know how the system will react.

People who have done this may be quite happy until the unthinkable happens.

 

We're talking an inch not a foot.

 

Thank you... You have such a subtle way with words.

 

Raising the seat is not an issue for airbag deployment, if it was there would be a warning stating that tall people can't seat in the passenger seat.

 

Clearly you don't want to understand that modern safety systems are more than just a bunch of airbags that punch you in the face when they deploy.

Modern systems have sensors that determine occupant weight, seat location and recline and many, many other data points. In an accident, the car makes literally millions of calculations in a split second to determine if and how the airbag system should deploy.

Making any modifications to the system may impact the operation of the whole system. Unfortunately you won't know it impacts the system until it is crash tested - either in real life or in a lab.

Manufacturers are required to crash test vehicles with different options (seats for example) to determine how the different options impact the systems. Mercedes even crash tested cloth seats separately from MB-Tex and leather to determine those impacts.

These are some of the unintended consequences that I frequently speak of. That "just an inch" may seem immaterial until the chili gets greasy.

 

There are 2 sensors in the seat - linear positioning and weight. The positioning sensor tells the air bag system exactlywhere the passenger seat is relative to the air bag itself. This determines which bags go off or how they go off if say the passenger is way up forward close tothe glove box. The weight sensor lets the system know that someone weighing 40pounds or more is seated in the passenger seat. Raising the seat height 1”willhave an insignificant impact on any of this.

The greater concern would be the physical properties of the bolts used and the yield/shear loads applied to those bolts because of the additional leveragethe spacers would be applying to those bolts in the event of a frontal collision.

To everyone else, my apologies for straying from the original topic.