At the big end of the premium SUV market here’s the heat. Three fresh-faced bar-raisers trade drivetrains, design schools and tech solutions in their heartland territory: the city...
Electric windows. Nothing new. But the ones on the latest Lexus RX450h are astonishingly quiet, zipping up and down with silk-like smoothness as if someone has put the audio on mute. It’s surprisingly impressive, to the point that it makes you stop to think: if the engineers put this much effort into something that some owners might never even notice, then how seriously must they have taken the rest of this car? It’s a thought that the typical ‘Lexus lowing’ propagated by the hybrid system’s Continuously Variable Transmission almost immediately undermines. But it’s also a thought that sticks in the back of your brain, like Spiderman in a glue factory.
Even so, the first thing to strike you about the new RX450h is that Toyota/Lexus doesn’t seem to have moved the mechanical game on since it first introduced the hybrid concept with the original Prius; the original protagonists are apparently stuck in the pre plug-in era, which in RX terms means a seemingly profligate 3.5-litre naturally aspirated V6 petrol combined with a tiny battery pack that delivers electric running at no more than a mile at a time. Although, actually, that’s a lie, because the first thing that really strikes you about the new RX is the way it looks.
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