Honda To Finally Separate Acura Into It's Own Division

Honda again fails to see the forest for the trees. The problem with Acura's are their exterior designs. Change your entire design team and you might have a hit on your hands.

What you've identified is the symptom. The root cause of these design shortcomings was the failure to separate Acura from Honda. Without autonomy to design its own models, Acura was the forgotten step child within Honda. Rather than being a destination where great designers can truly blossom, Honda designers would have seen Acura as a distraction to their role as a "Honda" engineer, and treated Acura as an afterthought. The corporate mentality would have been Honda 1st, Acura 2nd - and this was clearly the case when you reflect on how much BETTER the Honda Accord coupe is compared to ANY Acura.

Actually the need to for now to spark some life into the brand.

This is the right move, finally. Hopefully this will mean aggressive development of truly competitive sedans in the luxury segment.

If marketing has input into future products, like many companies, then this should help get to unique and better products.

Exactly. If Sales and Marketing aren't getting the products to sell and market appropriately, then it's all for naught. So the synergy that an autonomous sales/marketing operation can create in order to provide the right products can be huge especially if their revenues are dependent on only Acura sales, and not reliant on Honda sales to keep a certain profit margin.

I find it interesting that the guy that will lead Acura's now-separate S/M division was working under American Honda prior. And the guy heading Honda's now-separate S/M division was working under Acura prior.

They will still be Japanese Mercurys as long as Acuras are just differently styled Hondas. The RL is insulting. It literally is an Accord with a slightly lengthened wheelbase, slightly different styling and a $30K price bump. It's utter garbage like that which keeps Acura out of being a premium brand. Acura needs to look at the Hyundai Genesis and the compelling Cadillac line to get a clue as to the types of products they need and how to market them.