2.) The treatment from the Service Department has left a little to be desired from. I keep thinking about how everyone I know with a BMW talk about how they get treated like royalty every time they go in. I have a friend who has an out of warranty 3 series and he'll get an X5 to drive for a week while his car is being serviced.

3.) Long trips are awesome. The rattles subside at higher speeds and the XM / Navigation make it more enjoyable. I can get lost in a paper bag so having the Nav as a reference point and being able to find resturaunts and gas statons make long drives a whole new expereince.

I'm 30 years old and I have had 4 Acura's and after this one I'll bet I'll never buy another Acura again. I will probably just step it up to Merc or BMW where the dealers are used to accomidating a more affluent lifestyled customer base.

Your thoughts?

Which points to one key problem with the Acura label -- it has never really stood for luxury or performance worth paying top dollar for.

And there are two chief reasons: not enough power and a front-drive-only drivetrain. See, while rivals from Japan, such as Nissan's Infiniti, are switching to rear-wheel drive to showcase superior handling (Lexus long ago added rear-wheel drive in order to gain on its German competition), Acura has stood pat. Officials there have always insisted that inline four and V-6 engines with power sent to the front wheels made the most sense from a production and space-efficiency perspective. And they are right about the latter -- if you don't have a driveline stretching from the engine bay to the rear wheels, a flat cabin floor is much easier to create. And you can more readily make a spacious cabin without having to make a long car.

However, there are a few big negatives as well. One is weight distribution. With no driveline reaching backward and an engine pushed forward to make a small car roomier, you wind up with a nose-heavy machine that won't corner as neutrally as a vehicle with 50-50 weight distribution. Another problem is torque steer (the tendency of the front wheels to fight steering inputs under hard acceleration). Acuras have never suffered from severe torque steer, but that's unfortunately changing. The reason is there's a horsepower war going on in luxury-performance cars that sell for $30,000 and up, and everybody is coming with rear-wheel drive or all-wheel drive.

So whether that's General Motors' Cadillac or Infiniti, or Ford Motor's Jaguar or Lexus, Acura has to keep up. But more power sent to the front wheels eventually results in torque steer -- there's just no way to get around it.

Still, the choice to go with less power doesn't look very good in ads, either. So that's why the $32,650 Acura TL gets 270 horsepower, way up from the old TL's 225-hp output. After all, this car is meant to contend with Infiniti's 260-hp G35, Cadillac's 220-hp CTS (you can also get the CTS with 400 horsepower as well, but it costs $49,300 versus $30,490 for the base model), not to mention BMW's 225-hp 330i. And, yes, a few Lexus options, as well as the Audi A4 with all-wheel drive and the Mercedes-Benz C320.