
For the last few decades, Honda’s influence on the auto industry — and its corresponding sales volumes — has been nothing short of revolutionary. Consider that the latest Accord just made Car and Driver’s 10 Best list for a record 32nd time; meanwhile, the Civic recently became the top-selling car in America. This makes the underperformance of Acura, Honda’s luxury division, somewhat puzzling.
Acura was the first premium Japanese marque to launch in the US, with sixty dealerships by 1986, and its early years were heralded by world-class machines like the Legend and the NSX. But since then a mix of uneven investment, marketing, and styling choices has positioned Acura well behind its rival, Lexus, as a credible challenger to long-established luxury marques like Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
Though the Acura brand as a whole underwhelms, looking across its history one can find a handful of machines beyond just the original Legend and NSX that deserve respect and admiration. Judged on cost-to-quality ratio, perhaps none is more deserving than the third-generation Acura TL (UA6 / UA7 chassis), which debuted for the 2004 model year and ran through 2008. Continue reading

The noble R129 Mercedes-Benz SL-Class specimen pictured above, a 1998 SL500 (5.0-liter V8, 315 hp), sold for $8300 in early 2016 with 91,000 miles, a thick stack of maintenance receipts going back four years and a clean California history.
As the number of well-kept R129s dwindles, and savvy car-shoppers realize how much craftsmanship went into these cars, there’s nowhere for the prices to go but up. Here’s the Klipnik Practical Buying Guide for this thus-far overlooked generation of Benz’s iconic luxury roadster.