Acura's confidence in its electric-only future shines bright from within the company, and now it wants the rest of us to see what's waiting in the distance. Normally, hearing the words "advertising campaign" would sooner provoke an eye-roll of boredom rather than a genuine sense interest, but because of how Acura wrapped the entire presentation in a sleek and very stylish manner, it at least warrants a look, if not even praise for thinking outside the boring box.
While the motto New World. Same Energy. chosen for the campaign is cheesy as can be and basically carries nothing of substance, the video itself is in the opposite spectrum. By using different styles of animation, much like Love, Death, & Robots, it achieves quite a rare effect on the viewer, because as far as car commercials are concerned, they're usually quite boring, to be honest. Obviously, I'm not referring to the ones from the Super Bowl, because those are from a different league.
The various visual styles I was talking about earlier are part of the fictional Acura multiverse. And no, not the Metaverse, that's an entirely different thing. This is more like Marvel's multiverse with the three Peter Parkers. The ad lasts just 60 seconds, but each style is roughly 10 seconds long, and I counted six different variations.
The first one is your usual hyper-realistic CGI car speeding through an industrial environment and nowadays that's not impressive. This is where the 2023 TLX Type S nameplate makes its digitally recreated appearance in the "Future-verse," as they called it. In the real world, the basic TLX 2.0T variant starts at $39,850 MSRP, while the highly specced out TLX 3.0T Type S PMC Edition is priced at around $62,000.
The second scenario takes place in a retro-futuristic '80s neon Japan that looks insanely detailed and well thought out. The 2023 Integra A-Spec is the star of this Future-verse. It costs $36,300 and the specs show a 200 horsepower (203 ps) performance output from its 1.5-liter turbocharged inline-four engine.
Photo: Acura
The third "verse" made me chuckle because it's straight out of WandaVision, with that '40s, '50s suburban aesthetic. They called it the "Joneses-verse," and it features the 2023 Acura MDX Type S which is the performance variant. The "vanilla" MDX starts at $49,550, while the Type S begins at $73,200.
Then the car magically breaks an interdimensional border and ends up on a planet-like surface. This "Lunar-verse" is more than fine in terms of graphics, but again, nothing you haven't seen before. However, maybe you didn't get a chance to see the 2023 RDX SUV models explore such a world yet. On Earth, the price tags range from $41,550 to $53,550.
After that, in comes Acura's latest anime racing hero, Chiaki, driving the 2024 Integra Type S. Chiaki is a recurring character in Acura's advertising campaigns, and is part of a small series called Type S: Chiaki's Journey, from the... you guessed it, "Anime-verse."
The high-performance model Integra Type S is set to arrive this summer. Its 2.0-liter turbocharged engine is capable of outputting over 300 horsies (304 ps), manageable via a six-speed manual transmission. No pricing was available at the moment of writing.
After going through another visual threshold into a No Man's Sky-looking world called the "Racer-verse," it transforms into an Acura ARX-06 electrified race car. The real-life version will step into the limelight at the 24 Hours of Daytona event that will take place on on the weekend of January 28. This electric hybrid, with its 2.4-liter twin-turbocharged engine, is capable of delivering 500 kW of power.
Photo: Acura
Finally, the vehicle steps into a Marvel-like Bifrost Bridge world. This "EV-verse" presents the star of the show, the Acura Precision EV Concept. The model boasts an “expressive silhouette," and a “Particle Glitch” lighting effect on the front and rear fascias, along with a similar design theme in its 23" spokes.
The cockpit was envisioned to resemble an F1 race car, with inspiration taken from Italian luxury power boats. If everything will come out as initially planned, the steering wheel will be able to retract in the Spiritual Lounge mode that's basically meant to resemble something akin to Avatar 2's underwater scenes. It was dubbed by the company as their new "North Star."
The last-verse (see what I did there?) is supposed to represent the all-electric future, as the company prepares to enter this phase in 2024 with the Acura ZDX and ZDX Type S models. Another fun fact is that the ZDX will be the company's first zero-emissions SUV.
In a previous public statement, Emile Korkor, the assistant vice president of Acura National Sales said that "The Acura ZDX represents the start to what will be an accelerated path toward electrification by the end of the decade and the key role the Acura brand will play in our company’s global goal to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050."
Codrin just loves American classics, from the 1940s and ‘50s, all the way to the muscle cars of the '60s and '70s. In his perfect world, we'll still see Hudsons and Road Runners roaming the streets for years to come (even in EV form, if that's what it takes to keep the aesthetic alive). Full profile
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