Acura’s Precision EV Concept is ‘inspired by powerboats’. Right...

This is a lifejacket.

Speaking figuratively, of course. Literally it's an EV concept called the Precision, but it’s also a very real (if metaphorical) lifejacket, produced to help Acura take the plunge into electric vehicles.

And why does it help? Because SUVs sell, of course – the biggest market and growing – and EV uptake is generally limited by the availability of cars, not buyers. Case in point: the latest allocation of Hyundai Ioniq 5s to Australia sold out in 18 minutes.

So an EV SUV is the safe option, the easy win, the 100 per cent chance of good instead of a riskier shot at great. And that speaks to legacy manufacturers who don’t quite understand the world they’re entering – and are apprehensive as a result.

The Precision does the usual concept car feint of being “a design study that will shape the direction of future Acura products”, so any talk of spec, materials and so on is as pointless as a perfect circle. And design language? We’ll leave the full breakdown to the sort of people who say ‘colourway’, but will note that Acura says the Precision’s lines are inspired by ‘luxury Italian power boats’. Not sure how Riva feels about that, but that’s hardly here or there.

Apart from tenuous connections to titans of design, the Precision also delivers another easy game of EV concept bingo – ‘future vision of electric vehicles’, ‘full driving automation’, ‘move into an exciting electrified future’ and so on until you wonder if taking up cribbage might be a more interesting pastime.

This isn’t Honda’s fault, nor is it the fault of Honda’s all-American Acura sub-brand. And it’s not the fault of electric cars, either, which we all quite like. It’s just that we’ve had something of a realisation around here that carmakers the world over have felt the winds of change and have responded with the safest, low-risk plays in the history of motoring: electric SUVs.

And that’s what the Precision EV Concept is set to become in 2024: yet another EV SUV. Acura might have styled the Precision after a speedboat, but the car itself is like wearing a lifejacket. In the bath.