Category: Executive 
Price Range: No data available
Remarkable road-holding and handling from Super Handling All-Wheel Drive system, clever safety technology, well finished and equipped, pleasingly compact for an executive car
Ride is too firm, auto transmission could be smoother, engine lacks the expected pulling power
An interesting and welcome alternative to the default-choice German offerings but spoilt by the drawbacks above. If you're going to be an individualist you'd make more of a statement with a Citroen C6.
Price range £36,250-£39,000. On sale in UK September 2006
With the Japan experience in 4Car's head, we approached the Euro-Legend with great interest.
The interior is almost identical, with a faultless, multi-adjustable driving position and a dashboard whose pleasing curved shapes are over-burdened with silvery detail akin to a three-year-old Sony compact hi-fi system. The instruments are good and clear, though, dominated by a large speedometer centre stage in the dial pack.
Beneath it is a small multifunction screen. One of its functions is to show a graphic plan of the four wheels with a bar-graph by each. This shows the proportion of possible torque that's actually being sent to each wheel - and it's fascinating to watch.
Briefly, this is how the SH-AWD system works. Between the propeller shaft and the rear axle is a 'speed mutiplier' able to make the rear wheels turn up to 1.05 times as fast as the fronts. This ensures the rear wheels are always 'loaded up' ready to take their torque and it also allows for the fact that when cornering quickly, the rear wheels tend to scribe a wider line than the fronts and therefore have further to travel.
The other major components are the electromagnetic multiplate clutches, one for each rear wheel. The more firmly they bite, the more torque heads to the rear wheels and away from the fronts - a minimum of 30%, a maximum of 70%. And by making one clutch bite harder than the other, each rear wheel's torque can be controlled individually to influence the Legend's handling. All these adjustments happen after the processing of information from the usual ESP-type sensors for wheel speed, steering angle, cornering force, drift build-up and so on. There's an ESP system too, of course, to act as a safety net, if even the sky-high limits of SH-AWD are breached.
A 3.5-litre V6 with 295bhp on tap should make for a quick car and, ultimately, the Legend is just that, with a 155mph top speed and a 7.3-second 0-62mph time.
But the engine's peak torque of 259lb-ft is a numerically lower figure than that for bhp, which is good guide to how an engine feels on the road. It suggests a revvy, peaky nature, confirmed by the fact the torque peak is at a high 5,000rpm despite the engine's VTEC variable valve timing.
You have to work the engine hard to make quick progress and that can be a problem. This problem is not with the engine, which is smooth and quiet enough, but with the automatic gearbox, which would be better with six gears rather than five, given the engine's characteristics. Its upshifts are quite smooth but the downshifts are not: the transmission hangs on to the higher gear for too long before letting go with a springy surge. The manual mode works well, though, via either the selector lever or the paddle shifters. It's a true manual mode, too, resolutely holding on to the selected gear instead of deciding to do its own thing as some rival systems do.
