Photo gallery: Lexus RX350 Sports Luxury (2009)For our in-depth photo gallery, click here.
Exterior design
In designing the new RX, it seems that Toyota's designers took the old RX, melted it for a while, added a few slashes, the odd splash of chrome and then headed off for an extra hearty serving of sashimi and sake. While there are still many of the elements of the original "sports shoe" styling, its all been wrought with a thicker, less elegant brush.
To our eyes at least, the new car looks significantly bigger, but that's not an impression borne out by the measuring tape, with at most 4cm difference. A powered tailgate — it's advisable to let it do its thing, as the door itself weighs as much as a small bank vault — allows easy access to plentiful quantities of boot space, which is extendable via the fold-down rear seats. Large loads are hampered by a floor hump required for our car's optional (AU$1000) full-size spare wheel. There's also a dearth of decent luggage hooks to hold shopping in place.
Interior design
The interior's not as pretty as before, but certainly more usable.
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(Credit: Derek Fung/CNET)
Far more dramatic changes have occurred on the inside. The waterfall dash that we were rather partial to has been binned, a victim of the new Remote Touch system detailed later in this review. Mounted vertically on the dashboard, the gear lever looks rather awkward but it falls nicely to hand, but we really do wish that Lexus would do away with its foot-operated parking brake.
While the black interior doesn't really reach out and grab the optic nerve, the leather seems to be the same pleasantly comfy stuff used in the IS250. Every sitting position, except maybe the central position in the rear pew, has ample room, even with the front seats pushed all the way back. One could conceivably fit a platoon of giants inside the RX without too many issues. The front seats are big and comfy, but you do need to be of a certain width to gain much cornering support. Both front seats offer electric adjustment with three memory settings, while the rear seats slide, recline and flip down via a handy set of levers located in both the seat base and also in the boot. Do be prepared to let out a Thomas Muster grunt when lifting them back up though — they're heavy buggers.
While the walnut trim is a ghastly sight to behold, the bright Optitron instruments — with OLED backlighting no less — is a visual delight. With the ever growing list of gadgets, knick knacks and bric-a-bracs, the RX offers three 12V outlets. One's in the boot, the other two hide underneath a false floor in the centre console bin. This is also where the 3.5mm auxiliary jack lives, so it's a great way to keep iPod, phone and other chargers out of sight. It can make car hopping and impromptu use a bit of a pain though, and there's still no USB slot to be found.
Features
Heads-up display puts speed and next turn info on the windscreen.
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(Credit: Derek Fung/CNET)
There aren't too many occasions when auto-folding wing mirrors actually saved themselves from being blemished, but they are a handy way of finding out whether the car's been locked. Although the auto-dipping feature when reverse is engaged doesn't quite dip enough to help the driver see the gutter, Lexus has installed a kerb camera that's nestled on the underside of the passenger side wing mirror; a very necessary reversing camera is also included.
Other standard equipment includes dual-zone climate control with vents for the rear seats, parking sensors front and rear, rain sensing wipers, keyless entry and keyless start. On this Sports Luxury model, the auto headlights use xenon bulbs that pierce the night with its blue-white scythe of light. They're adaptive too, swivelling with one's steering inputs to maintain a path of light in the direction of travel and self-levelling to minimise blinding of on-coming cars. A moon roof is also included, although it's controlled by the usual smattering of switches, rather than the more convenient dial system we saw in the IS250. We tried heating our butts with the heated and cooled seats, but no matter what we tried there was just a steady, gentle stream of cooled air emanating from below us.
Safety gear includes 10 airbags, ABS, traction control and stability control. The Sports Luxury's radar modulated cruise control keeps a safe distance between the RX and the car in front, and is also a handy way of ensuring that you don't get snapped by speed cameras. We loved the heads up display as it helped to keep our eyes on the road by displaying speed, audio and next turn info right on the windscreen. It becomes difficult to read, though, when wearing polarised sunglasses and at night when a lot of cars are about.
Remote Touch
Remote Touch controller: like a trackball, but not.
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(Credit: Derek Fung/CNET)
The new dash design brought about by the Remote Touch system may be less elegant, but it's certainly more functional. Remote Touch can control most of the car's features, including the sat nav, telephone, audio and entertainment, and climate control. The last two still retain physical buttons and, joy of joys, one no longer has to dive into the menu system to select where the air is coming from. Audio and telephone controls are also duplicated — triplicated, even — via buttons on the steering wheel spokes.
As with the systems offered in German luxury cars, Remote Touch consists of a large LCD screen placed high on the dash and is operated via a controller near the centre arm rest. The Germans have universally opted for a scroll wheel that can be pushed and pressed; Lexus, however, has opted for a trackball-like device that controls an on-screen cursor. There are just five physical buttons in the Remote Touch system, two enter keys located on either side of the controller's wrist rest, and shortcuts to the main menu, sat nav map screen and display settings. Although the cursor doesn't snap to buttons, whenever you mouse over one the controller will generate a moment of resistance and a slight clicking sensation. Because of this the cursor is drawn towards buttons on highly populated screens, such as the sat nav's destination keyboard.
Except for the control method, the guts of the Remote Touch system are carried over from previous touchscreen units. The menu structure has been reworked and is more sensible than before; however, moving more items, such as the telephone, to the main menu would be helpful. Some car settings, like the adaptive lighting and folding mirrors, reside in a separate system located in the instrument cluster and set via steering wheel controls. Oddly, Remote Touch prevents address entry whilst driving, but is perfectly fine with you tweaking the audio settings or finding the choice tune.
Entertainment
The 15-speaker Mark Levinson sound system fitted to our RX is an AU$3000 option on the Sports Luxury model. As with most wagons, the best seats in the house are in the rear. Here, in the nexus of all the speakers, the system delivers clear audio at all volumes and for all genres. Sitting in the driver's seat, classical music sounds best; more modern tracks sound a little thin as the boot-mounted subwoofer is a long way away.
We were able to pair a variety of phones to the car's Bluetooth hands-free without any fuss and, thanks largely to a car's cone of silence, having long, tangential conversations proved to be no problem at all. Voice recognition is almost a misnomer as it's still limited to calling people in your phone book and only works with pre-recorded five-second voice tags. At least now calls can be made from any screen.
With nary a USB port or hard disk in sight, music options are limited to AM/FM, an auxiliary jack and the six-CD/DVD stacker. The latter's capable of playing back MP3 discs, but struggled with about a third of our testing disc. For those who prefer their music uncompressed the Gracenote database is included, providing info for most discs. Surround sound processing, while not really our thing for music, works brilliantly with DVD video. Letter boxing and the screen's recessed position make it difficult for rear passengers to fully enjoy the experience.
Sat nav
The GPS sat nav system on the new RX is essentially the same system that graced the old model and, in some ways, it's gone backwards — turn instructions no longer come through the driver's speakers only. So, it's still DVD-based and utilises Whereis maps; the former means that the predictive keyboard exhibits an irritating delay when you're trying to quickly enter an address or point of interest at the lights. 3D view and text-to-speech spoken street names are still notable for their omission.
Performance
Goes well, drinks better.
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(Credit: Derek Fung/CNET)
As we've established already, the new RX isn't that much bigger than its predecessor, but on the road it feels like you're piloting QE2. The "so chumpy you can carve it" windscreen pillars play a significant part in this, as does the sloping bonnet. Despite the best efforts of the big wing mirrors, and kerb and reversing cameras, placing the car on tight streets and driveways relies on guesswork and, literally, blind faith.
Although the handling is less rolly polly than on previous RXes, it's still not going to make drivers dream of carving up Mount Panorama or the Nürburgring. The ride softly blots most minor road imperfections and doesn't unduly bounce over major road scars; it will even happily ride roughshod over those impertinent removable speed humps at 60km/h-plus without floating like Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Predictably, the electric steering is over assisted and artificial, and whatever the front wheels are feeling is learnt through implication rather than communication. The variable power steering can cause the car to lurch around a bit if one isn't being entirely vigilant.
Nestling under the hood is the same 3.5-litre V6 found in the Camry — sorry, Aurion — as well as the Lotus Evora. The 204kW and 346Nm it generates has to lug around nearly two tonnes (1975kg, to be precise) of metal, plastic and fluids. Given the odds, it actually performs a pretty decent job, with a sufficient poke around town; even emitting a nice growl when you sink the welly. Despite the token resistance thrown up by the green Eco light on the dash that lights up whenever you keep revs under around 2500rpm, we averaged 16.5L/100km in the city and 9.8L/100km on the freeway. The six-speed auto shifts between gears almost imperceptibly and the RX more than maintains the company's reputation for producing extremely hushed conveyances.
Conclusion
Quiet, plush and with enough gadgets on-board — Remote Touch is nice, but where's the hard disk nav and USB folks? — the RX should please most drivers, but in our experience there's more joy to be had for passengers. No doubt it will continue to be one of Lexus Australia's most popular models, although we can't help but be tempted by the AU$107,900 price tag for the equivalent hybrid model's better fuel economy and LED headlights.
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