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Acura ILX: Lower expectations, better results

Dan Neil for The Wall Street JournalAcura ILX.

An online outfit named TheCheeky sells an anticheating wedding band; the inside of the titanium ring is engraved with the words "I'm Married," in reverse, so that after a few months the words are indelibly imprinted on your finger.

Or you could drive this car.

The Acura ILX strikes me as a second-marriage car. This, the brand's new bottom rung ($26,795), is a roundly sensible, tolerably attractive little luxer with very decent build quality, diverting performance and a score or more of easy-to-use digital amenities. It also has a substantial pedigree for safety and reliability in the Acura name, which is spelled Honda (HMC) in most of the world.

Note how very levelheaded and moderate those qualifiers are, how very selfless. The hottest engine you can get is a 2.4-liter, 201-horsepower four-cylinder. This is the sort of ostentatiously rational choice made after long kitchen-table deliberations with your wife--your second wife--and it represents a compromise along multiple axes. Not too spendy, not too flashy, safe and fun, but not too fun. There's nothing extreme about this car, all well and truly between the margins. We've learned our lessons. The meds are working.

Your first marriage? That's the one where you blew all your savings on a lifted and camouflaged Ford F-250 Super Duty with a folding deer stand in the bed. Money was an issue in your first marriage.

But there's something else there, too. There's a spark, a flicker of renewed optimism. As troubled a brand as Acura is, it still has some lingering aspirational heat. And it's clear the kids in Torrance are trying to turn things around. One move the company is making, long overdue, is the effort to emotionalize the brand: Exhibit A, the NSX, reborn as a supercar hybrid and coming in 2014; Exhibit B, a product-placement deal with Marvel Studios' "Avengers" film series, which is brazenly awesome and vice versa.

The other move is to reset the entry vehicle, and that's where the ILX comes in. The ILX's base price comes in $4,110 below that of the possibly departing TSX--a pretty big interval, and one that represents an obvious retrenching on Acura's part, reflecting more sober expectations. In other words, Acura is kind of just starting out again, having been schooled in disappointment. I think it will appeal to people likewise situated.

Sure do miss that pickup, though.

You ordered nuts and bolts? The ILX is based on the Civic's front strut/rear-multilink platform and built in the ancient Japanese enclave of Greensburg, Ind. The powertrain choices are three: a 1.5-liter, 150-hp four with a five-speed automatic; a 111-hp hybrid with 39/38 mpg city/highway fuel economy; and, like our test car, a 2.4-liter, 201-hp, 170-lb.-ft. in-line four with six-speed manual transmission, the very same powertrain as in the sporty and ornery Civic Si and the TSX.

There's a relative shortage of fun, tossable entry-luxury cars with manual transmissions available, so the ILX with the stick wins happiness points on that score alone. The ILX's program engineers also gave the car a more well-seated and refined feel in its ride and handling than the donor Civic. Among the upgrades are new, fancy dampers with two-stage valving, providing limited damping in the first few centimeters of compression, then firming up for long-stroke events. The effect is subtle, but it's there. The ILX also enjoys a higher-rate steering ratio for a crisper steering feel.

Also noticeable is the uptick in ride isolation, which is to say the ILX has less of the tactile and audible thrum of asphalt under-wheel than does the Civic. When the engine isn't vocalizing, the ILX's interior delivers a handsome amount of calm and quiet.

The front-drive ILX carries about 60% of its weight on the front wheels, so the grippier 17-inch, 45-series tires that are available with the 2.4-liter engine package are welcome. With the additional grip at the nose, the ILX bites harder and holds a cornering line longer before it starts to push off in mild and manageable understeer.

The 2.4-liter--beloved in the Si--is just about impossible to dislike. The revs and widespread torque come eagerly when you call them, the engine spooling furiously to its shouty, 7,100-rpm redline. A hard upshift into second gear will coax a naughty little bark from the front tires. You won't win many drag races in this car--0-60 mph is around 7 seconds--but the car has such a fervid, hustling personality, so much the dragonfly on a leash, you'll hate to park it. I did.

The interior design is a multiorgan transplant from other Acuras. Here again the blithely futuristic switchgear and console, the same rotary controller in the center stack, the same twin-scalloped, ski-boat cockpit. Our ILX's cabin was very nicely turned out with dense rubberized dashtop, stitched-leather seats and doors, alloy-like flourishes dividing the upper and lower dash and, in our test car, a lovely center-console fascia that I know can't be metal but looks exactly like brushed anodized aluminum. Excellent.

Acura's exterior design also resets with the ILX. These cars' styling has been a strangely sterile exercise in modernism in the last few years, with a hard-to-watch identity crisis playing out in the nose-and-grille area. I believe I am the only human on Earth to like the Acura ZDX, including those who built it.

The ILX body shell puts a lot of visual distance between itself and the coupe-roofed Civic. The front overhang is more pronounced in order to visually lengthen the hood; and millimeters have been carved out to create a sedan-like trunk with a (very) short deck lid. The shape is more sculptural--there's a pronounced lightline at the rocker panel and the beltline vigorously hitches itself up over the rear wheel arches--and yet more conservative. The ILX doesn't require quite the explanation that other Acuras do.

So, we're starting over, are we, Acura? Well, let's avoid the mistakes of the past, stay positive, try harder. Love lifts us up where we belong.

Dan Neil writes the Rumble Seat for The Wall Street Journal.