After seventeen years and two model generations, the RL officially comes to a quiet end in 2012. Reborn as the RLX for the 2014 model year, it’s a small name change for Acura’s new flagship sedan, but it signals the beginning of some exciting new technologies that should eventually trickle down into the rest of the Acura’s future models.

In essence, Acura’s flagship sedan has always been a progressive evolution since the 1986 Acura Legend, but for nostalgic purposes, let’s take a visual look back at the last seventeen years starting with the first generation Acura 3.5RL in 1996.