When we saw the 2009 Acura RL and it's less than spectacular "Dynamic Power Plenum" grille at this past Chicago Auto Show, not only did we think it was a photoshopping joke (we swear we saw pixels), we wondered where the hell it had come from. It's been a while since Acura dropped a styling stinker in our laps — although Wert says he likes the look of it on something a bit smaller — this mid-cycle refresh can generally be called befitting of that description. Since nutty styling elements usually come from somewhere, we dug into the archives and came up with a pretty good candidate.

Released at the 2006 LA Auto Show, the Acura Advanced Sedan Concept seems like it's telegraphing the pending power shield pretty well. We panned it pretty well when the Postfather ran the concept, and as would be expected we panned it again when it showed up this year. Hopefully it feels more at home when Acura drops the styling element on the new CLS.

Send an email to Ben, the author of this post, at ben@jalopnik.com.