2024 Acura TLX Preview: Subtle style tweaks, fewer trim options

The 2024 Acura TLX sees a number of updates to keep it competitive and address a few customer requests. It also looks a bit different, but you do need to take a closer side-by-side look.

The big visual change is the front end. It now looks more like the TLX Concept car – specifically the lower air dam area and crucially, there’s now a frameless grille. Acura needed to redesign the entire trim piece above the grille and across the fascia to accommodate it. The change is most obvious on the base TLX, which used to have chrome lipstick around the “Diamond Pentagon” grille. It’s gone now.

So are a whole heap of 2024 Acura TLX trim levels. There had been eight and now there are three: TLX with Technology Package, A-Spec and Type S. Front-wheel drive is now exclusively paired with the now-base TLX with Technology Package (that’s seriously what it’s called) and vice versa, while the other two are only paired with Super Handling All-Wheel Drive (SH-AWD). There was previously a Technology-less Base TLX, a front-wheel-drive A-Spec, a TLX with Advance Package, a Type S w/ Performance Tire and the special-edition Type S PMC Edition. The surviving three were apparently what people were overwhelmingly getting.

That said, parts of those zombie trims survive. The Advance package may be gone for the base TLX (customers were more interested in the sporty versions than the more luxurious take of Advance cars), but its head-up display and surround-view parking camera are added as standard to the Acura TLX Type S. It already had the Advance’s other extras. The PMC’s special lightweight wheels, fashioned in a Copper color are now dealer-installed options for the Type S along with the performance tires.

Speaking of wheels, Acura answered another customer request by enlarging the A-Spec wheels to 19 inches and through in a coat of Shark Gray paint. The Type S wheels are now Berlina Black to match the new gloss-black finish in its grille. More gloss black shows up on the A-Spec as well on its new, reshaped rear spoiler. Below it is a similarly gloss black diffuser encasing new round tailpipes in place of the old square covers.

Perhaps the most significant visual upgrade, however, is back up front where a new, smaller radar sensor for the adaptive cruise control and forward collision prevention system is now completely encased behind the Acura logo. The sensor was previously a square plastic plate awkwardly placed on the grille mesh with the logo plopped on top. It was lame. And now it’s gone. The blind-spot warning sensors were also upgraded for expanded field of vision.

Inside, if you were hoping a revised TLX would result in Acura binning its weird Precision Cockpit touchpad infotainment controller, well, sorry, it didn’t. The touchpad remains, but the screen is bigger –12.3 inches versus 10.3 – and the processor running it is faster. Wireless CarPlay and Android Auto are now included, while the ambient lighting control is now accessed directly from the main menu rather than being buried in submenus. This was another customer request. So too was the extra stitching atop the Type S dash (people love themselves some stitching it seems).

The TLX analog gauges are gone, which is a shame in the Type S since it had really cool, classic Acura white-trimmed dials. The new 12.3-inch all-digital display gauges features two designs: a just-OK “Crafted” design that looks like two standard dials, and a new-fangled “Advance” design that puts the tach and speedo on the periphery a la BMW and fills the center with a too-small speedo and various graphics for ADAS and infotainment. There’s apparently a third design, exclusive to the Type S Sport+ mode that features a big horizontal bar graph for the tach. It sounds similar to what’s in the Integra Type S, but Acura couldn’t put the car into Sport+ mode for complicated reasons associated with how the car was staged during our preview. Like the Integra Type S, the revised TLX Type S also allows you to fill the infotainment screen with extra gauges, in this case for turbo boost and a g-meter.

The only changes that could affect the driving experience are extra sound-deadening measures in all models, while the throttle response in the Type S Sport+ mode has been sharpened. There are no other powertrain or chassis enhancements.

The updated 2024 Acura TLX goes on sale in late November. Pricing was not available at the time of this writing, but Acura did say that they will be a little higher but inline with the previous TLX with Technology Package, A-Spec and Type S.