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car review

2017 Acura RDX on Bear Mountain, N.Y.MARK RICHARDSON/The Globe and Mail

The Acura's navigation system wanted us to leave New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. That's the quick way, straight west on the interstate through New Jersey before turning north toward Buffalo and Toronto. One stop for gas and we'd be home in just over seven hours, divided highway all the way.

It was the route we'd taken to get to the New York auto show and it was mindless to follow the screen map's directions. Most of the time, the active cruise control was set so my feet could stretch out off the pedals. The SUV would just drive at the set speed and if we came up behind another vehicle, it would slow to that vehicle's pace until I changed lanes to pass.

Even more mindlessly, the car would steer itself for 30-second stretches, using sonar and a camera to know where it should be in the lane and keep it there. I could rest my hands on my lap or, like everyone else, fiddle with my phone to change the music playing through the sound system.

This is nothing special any more. You can get this technology in the new Toyota C-HR for less than $25,000. The main cost was the research and development of the software and sensors and now every auto maker fits these features to their vehicles.

But it's not real driving, and it makes for seven hours of boredom. On the way down to New York, my son and I sat and listened to S-Town as the countryside slipped by, our heads in the podcast and not on the road.

So for the drive home, against Andrew's complaints of just wanting to get back quickly, I ignored the navigation system and the Lincoln Tunnel and swung the Acura RDX north onto Highway 9A, which runs along the New York State side of the Hudson River. It was a sunny spring day and once we passed the USS Intrepid aircraft-carrier museum, the traffic thinned and the six-lane road seemed to widen.

The beauty of this route is that much of the first 50 kilometres out of the city is on parkways, where commercial traffic is prohibited and mature, leafy trees flourish on both sides of the highway. Well, leafy in a month from now, anyway. These parkways were established in the early 1930s by future president Franklin Roosevelt – they were meant just to promote the pleasure of mobility through driving. Roosevelt had lost the use of his legs to polio and was a great advocate of the automobile.

He'd have loved the Acura RDX, with its comfortable leather seats and all-wheel drive, though its $46,790 price tag would have seemed impossible in the 1930s. These days, it's good value for a premium vehicle – less costly than much of its competition, such as the BMW X3 and Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class. We were driving the most expensive of the RDX's three trim levels, but even the basic $42,190 edition is better equipped than the basic trims of those German compact SUVs.

We cruised north between the trees, through the Bronx and then past storybook towns such as Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown. We avoided the George Washington Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge and stayed east of the Hudson, finding our way up to Bear Mountain and onto its tightly twisting hillside curves. I remembered the RDX paddle shifters and snicked through the lower gears like a racer before settling down again to cross the river toward Doodletown. Yes, that's its name.

It's about 70 kilometres from the Empire State Building to the Bear Mountain Bridge, but it's a route that's really only possible with your own vehicle. Buses and trains take the quicker route that shaves a half-hour from the total journey to Canada, and planes never see anything. Andrew, half asleep in the passenger seat after a late night in the city, barely even looked out the window. His loss.

Over the bridge and a little more parkway, and then we settled onto the curving multilane highway that leads to Binghamton, N.Y., and the true interstate. The RDX is not a car for attacking mountains, despite the paddle shifters, because it doesn't have the quick throttle pickup that would be welcome out of the corners, and for passing slowpokes.

It's a lovely car for settling back and enjoying the drive, though. I put the cruise control back on, turned up the next podcast and rested my hands in my lap for the final stretch home.

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