2022 Acura MDX Review and Test Drive

Join Nik Miles as he goes over the ins and outs of the new 2022 Acura MDX. Nik takes us on a test drive and tells us about all the newest upgrades, how the car feels while driving, and gives us an honest review of the vehicle. I’m Nik Miles and welcome to Dick Hannah Acura of Portland. We’re here today to show you this. It’s the 2022 Acura MDX. Now, the MDX has a long and rich history. It has been the best-selling premium luxury SUV with the third row in America for many years. And, with this new 2022, it will absolutely continue to do that. This vehicle has been redesigned from the top to the bottom. It has so many new and exciting features including the Alexa app which can tell you all about the car itself, plus, the super-handling all-wheel drive which will make your everyday commute or your family road trip extra special. I have off-roaded with the Acura MDX in the past and the thing that always blows me away is how well designed and engineered the super handling all-wheel drive is. Acura nailed it the first time out and every single iteration of this vehicle I’ve driven after the first time has just got better and better. Definitely, in inclement weather or in some mild off-roading this vehicle is absolutely outstanding. The handling makes it so much more than just an off-road vehicle because Acura is a performance brand. You know the Acura logo itself is the calipers and that shows you how the precision in engineering is super important to the brand. Everything they do is done carefully and accurately and you can feel that just behind the wheel of the new MDX. There is a reason that this vehicle is the best-selling premium luxury SUV in America. It’s because it is so well-designed and so well-engineered and so well put-together that when people get into it, and they have a third row they find it’s a family SUV sort of covering a real sports car underneath. The power, the acceleration, the braking, the steering, the overall driving dynamics of this vehicle, make it outstanding. This vehicle is the perfect SUV for the family where the driver of the SUV wants a little bit more than a truck. They want something that’s a performance SUV. And you get it in this for not the sort of price that you expect to pay. Even the sounds and the feel of things like the indicator stalk put it on; that just sounds like quality engineering. Everything you touch, the tactile stuff on the inside of this car is absolutely perfectly well put together. Information is very easily available. The infotainment screen is just below the windshield. So, I take my eyes off of the road just for a very little amount of time to be able to glance at the information that I need to read while I’m driving. Also, all of the switches are within my reach especially in the door panel here; the mirrors, the lock, the unlock, the windows. Everything is so neat and so easy for me to get to. I can see all the buttons from the driver’s position. They’re nicely designed as well. This copper-colored trim on the inside, soft-touch dash, stitching around it really looks like it’s quality. Then you have your piano black below that. Everything is displayed in switches. I’m not searching through menus and getting lost for the stuff that I need to activate. It’s all easy for me to find, easy for me to operate; it’s just well put together from start to finish. And then of course, there’s the dynamic drive mode. This comes out of the NSX. The DNA spills out of the NSX into this vehicle. You can feel it as you drive it. The dynamic drive modes allow you to operate in four different modes including sport, normal, and comfort, and there’s also a snow mode. The gear shifter is push-button. This is the way things are going and going to a push-button gear shifter actually allows you to do several things that you weren’t able to do when you had a traditional gear shifter. First of all, it’s electronic so it takes up less space. That allows you to have more equipment and more stuff in your center console. Second of all, everything you need is on each side of that. There is a very cool pop-up USB-C and USB-A port. There is your automatic engine stop/start button so you can turn it off. You also have a brake hold as well which means you can take your foot off the brake and the car won’t roll forward or backward. Then you have your touchpad which allows you to easily get around your infotainment screen. The infotainment screen is split into two, a smaller side and a larger side. It has wireless Android and wireless Apple CarPlay, which is great because you get in the car with your phone and your phone basically pops up on the screen once you’ve done the initial pairing. You’ll also find your volume knob and all of your other infotainment and information stuff right here in the center console, a nice armrest right above a wireless charging pad. They’ve thought of everything. Everything is well done, well put together, well-designed, and easy to use. This cockpit is definitely designed about my needs and what I want to do and see when I’m driving. You know, I think of panoramic roofs or large glass roofs not in the way that most people think about them. I think about night and taking road trips with them. At night it’s really nice to put this shade back and be able to see all the stars through these two roofs: this panoramic style roof. Also, at the same time, if you’re on a road trip and you’re driving through the mountains it’s beautiful to be able to look out of the roof and see the trees and the mountains; for everybody in any seat of the vehicle to be able to get an experience of where you’re driving. It allows a light; a beautiful light to come into the vehicle. It’s obvious that Acura thought about this. You know, Acura is the luxury version of the Honda car company and Honda and Acura do some things that are very different than a lot of people. When they design a vehicle, they fly it to different cities around the world to see how it looks in the real light of that city and you get that feeling on the inside. They’ve thought about this very carefully. They’ve designed it around everybody getting every aspect of the outside coming into the vehicle. It’s just a breath of fresh air. Plus, when you have infotainment, when you have information, it’s also great in this vehicle too. Even things like speakers in the A-pillars; the sound inside the vehicle, it’s absolutely outstanding. Elliot Scheiner is the guy that designs many of the sound systems in this vehicle. He produced the Smashing Pumpkins. He produced Steely Dan. When you listen to the music, he knows how that music sounded in the studio when he actually engineered it so when he sits inside these vehicles and does the sound systems, he actually knows how the sound systems sound inside of these vehicles. It’s a genius move by Acura to have him put the sound systems in their vehicles. Acura is known for its safety systems. It does great in the construction of the vehicle. They also have a lot of passive and active safety systems in the vehicle. And safety support allows you to activate or deactivate several of the features in the vehicle including you can have your road departure mitigation, you can also have your blind spot information system, your low-speed braking control, and your collision mitigation braking system. It’s all controllable from the small spooling wheels up here at the front. And on the left-hand side, you can also activate many other things like the phone, the Alexa, the Android Auto, the Apple CarPlay, the BlueTooth, the Sirius XM, the social playlist. You can get your AM radio, your FM radio, your USB device, or customize your applications all from those wheels. You can toggle them up and down, push them side to side, or there are several buttons on the steering wheel that allow you to access those pieces of information and those features in the vehicle including your adaptive cruise control as well. So fully operatable right from the steering wheel; plus, there’s something else on the steering wheel that makes this vehicle extremely exciting to drive and that is if you put it into the manual mode, you can actually use the paddle shifters to drive like a real sports SUV enthusiast. The MDX for 2022 became much more muscular and much more rugged than it had been in the past. You can see that by the angles of this vehicle. It got wider and it got slightly bigger. This vehicle now has a better presence on the road than the last generation. Just take a look at things like the headlights. Acura, famous for their jewel-eyed headlights, well now the latest version of those headlights is much slimmer with a daytime running light underneath them and the four different jeweled eye headlights on top of that daytime running light. The grille got so much bigger, and this year has so many nice angular design portions of it. It really looks like a full-on luxury-designed vehicle that you might see coming out of the German houses of design. Great big Acura symbol up front. Don’t forget this is the calipers for accuracy and engineering. And then at the bottom, very nice angular air intake, a very nice angular bumper all the way along, and then some chrome finishes in certain angles of the vehicle. It looks nice coming down the side still continuing with a high beltline, very cool pieces of cladding above the wheel and what these do is if you get it in a lighter color, they actually make the wheel arches look bigger, so it looks more rugged and more floaty than it does in the darker colors. Coming down the sides still a high beltline, monochromatic mirrors with a piece of chrome which travels from the front fender all around the mirror, embedded LED signals here, piece of chrome at the bottom. It has monochromatic door handles as well with a single touch to get in. This vehicle all-around has just very finite pieces of trim. Makes the roof look like it’s floating with black A, B, and C pillars here and then at the very end very angular sporty look to the vehicle with this aero spoiler on top and of course great angular back pieces of glass which make this vehicle look very coop and SUV like. When we get round to the back the lights as well and the tail finally designed this vehicle still looks great all the way around the back and then getting inside, you’ll find space that is really usable. This third row is not cramped; there’s plenty of room in it and even behind it there’s 16 cubic feet of space. You put that third row down and then you get 39 plus cubic feet of space. Put all the rows down and it goes up to 71 behind the driver and passenger seat. So, lots of usable space here as well and it’s a fairly decent load floor height if you want to take a look under here you have extra space underneath to be able to store things like computers and valuables when you leave the vehicle. And, if we take out this rubber mat at the back which protects from damage you actually have a reversible floor mat here, so it has plastic on one side and carpet on the other. You can put that in and it’s the perfect place for muddy boots to live if you’ve been out; wet suits, dirty equipment, right on top of this piece of plastic if you don’t want to get the carpet dirty. Acura have thought about space usage and storage usage in this vehicle. Flip down little holder there to hang stuff on, you also have a really nice 12-volt power outlet here which is the old cigarette style lighter so you can power things from the back of the vehicle if you’re tailgating plus, it’s the one push button as you walk away to close the trunk. Multiple storage inside the second-row doors and you can put a big bottle of water inside this door as well. And I’m a big supporter of allowing your kids to be able to get into the third row on their own. And this is what Acura have done. Press it, the seat tilts and slides forward. A five-year-old could do that and climb into the third row. Map pockets in the back of both front seats and then when you get to the legroom in the back here in the second row, I’ve got plenty of legroom sitting behind myself where I would be if I was sitting in the passenger seat. And I’ve got at least another eight inches of legroom that I can have at five foot four it gives me the option of being somewhere around 5 foot 12 if I wanted to grow that much more if I could. In the back there’s heating and cooling controls, directable air vents, 2 USB ports, plus a 12-volt cigarette style lighter port here so everybody in the second row gets the power that they need. Well, there it is the 2022 Acura MDX. Now you’ll agree with me one of the best SUVs on the road today. They are in short supply because they are such a hot commodity but the one place you can test drive them is Dick Hannah Acura of Portland. Give them a call. Come down and test drive the 2022 Acura MDX.