Automotive Engineering - April 2020 - 10

WHAT WE'RE

DRIVING

2020 Lincoln Aviator
Reserve
For the Lincoln of my experience - and
I'm not particularly young - I haven't
been able to understand the "sell" of the
brand. Low sales numbers and decades
of declining prestige seemed to have long
indicated a "cut your losses" argument
for Ford to ditch its premium marque.

2020 Acura RDX
Acura's RDX midsize crossover has established itself as an industry benchmark
in body engineering, vehicle dynamics,
cabin design and related metrics. All this
basic goodness has helped this 2-row
SUV to be the brand's best-selling model. The 2020 edition mainly carries over
from last year's all-new product so
there's plenty to applaud - and a few
things left for engineers to amend.

2020 BMW X3 M
Competition
The concept of the high-performance
SUV (more appropriately, "crossover")
can be difficult to reconcile. The notion
of SUVs or crossovers that are "tuned"
for performance is perplexing; SUVs
and crossovers exist because of their
supposed utility and/or off-road capability. That usually implies long-travel
suspension and raised ground clearance
- chassis aspects generally at odds with
hot racetrack lap times.

But if the 2020 Aviator is the building
block of things to come, there's hope.
This all-new platform, sensibly shared
with the volume-play Ford Explorer,
returns Lincoln to the longitudinal engine/rear-drive layout that luxury vehicles are supposed to have. As a result,
the Aviator is as responsive and athletic
as you can expect a three-row,
16.5-foot-long crossover to be.
Never mind that for $76,000-plus one
might reasonably expect just that. But
whether it's the exhaustive list of tech
and luxury features (that price had our
Aviator fitted with just about everything)
or the no-messing-around thrust of 400
hp and 415 lb-ft from the 3.0-L twinturbo V6, there's no compromising here.
The Aviator deserves to be considered
with every other lux brand's big 'ute.
And thanks to that classic driveline
layout, the Aviator looks the part, too.
The hood, long and lovely, accentuates
the vaunted axle-to-dash ratio the sets
apart the longitudinal engine players
from the front-drive hoi polloi. There's a
real sweep, too, to the roof and hind
quarters that you just don't get with
Lincoln's prior crossover efforts. Luxury
credibility doesn't come easy, but maybe the Aviator is the inflection point
Lincoln's been after for so long.

For the 2020 North American Utility
of the Year judging, I spent time in an
all-wheel-drive RDX stickered at more
than $48,000. It was equipped with the
'Advance' package-pretty much what
customers wanting posh seating and
audio would order, plus head-up display
and foot-swoosh liftgate operation. The
RDX's powertrain continues to impress:
the 272-hp turbocharged 2.0-L four
mated with Honda's own 10-speed automatic transaxle and the company's
'super handling' SH-AWD driveline provide responsive thrust and reassuring
grip on a multitude of road surfaces,
particularly on slick pavement.
But I've yet to drive a Honda 10-speed
that was perfectly calibrated, and the
one in the RDX tester needed more cal
attention. Throttle tip-in felt lazy, as did
the CUV's willingness to deliver lower
gear ratios when needed on some freeway on-ramp accelerations.
The RDX's cockpit appears overly busy
at first, but the HMI is easy to learn and
acclimate to. Well, mostly. While Honda's
brief march away from any audio-control
knobs has been somewhat remedied,
driver frustration is now ensured by the
Acura's control touchpad. The device is
simply a poor-functioning novelty.

That performance-SUV dichotomy is
butt-blisteringly obvious with BMW's X3
M Competition. Its stupendous accelerative performance comes with the most
abysmal ride quality I can recall. Driving
on the "Comfort" setting of the fancy
Adaptive M Suspension electronically
controlled dampers, the ride is so relentlessly brittle I thought perhaps the adjustment was malfunctioning. It wasn't
- using the Sport and Sport + settings
somehow conjured additional harshness.
I don't know how much suspension
travel the adaptive dampers and the
M's revised suspension pieces deliver,
but it feels like zero. If you don't relish
constant head toss from your $80,000
compact crossover, the X3 M
Competition ain't the choice for you.
But if you want the maximum expression of the company's still-wondrous turbocharged inline six-cylinder, then this is
place. The most-powerful-ever iteration
of the turbocharged S58 3.0-L I-6 is magnificent: tuned to a 503-hp, 442 lb-ft farethee-well yet revving to 7300 rpm, it's V8
muscle and Mad Max-perfect exhaust
menace all slathered over with that renowned inline-six butter. Too bad some of
that butter wasn't left over for X3 M's
merciless suspension.

Bill Visnic

Lindsay Brooke

Bill Visnic

10 April 2020

AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING

Automotive Engineering - April 2020

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