2020 Lexus RX Review and Buyer's Guide
RX, and in particular the RX 350 I spent a week in, is the vehicle I'll always think of as 'the other Kluger'. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing…
What’s the Lexus RX really like? If you’re in the market for a prestige SUV, should you buy one?
Don’t get the impression that being genetically connected to the Toyota Kluger is strictly a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
I’m seeing upmarket mum and dad and two big, strapping teenagers travelling anywhere (but let’s face it: mostly stuck in city traffic, because reality is real) in comparative opulence, with legroom to burn.
This is a big five-seater, and nobody in row two needs to pay the price for ergonomic concessions built in to facilitate row three - because there’s no row 3 to facilitate.
This vehicle is unlikely to give you any trouble. Typically Toyota in the DNA, it’s dependable, comfortable, quiet, refined. Goes where you point it. Keeps up. But, just so you know I’m not about to kneel down and unzip Lexus in the manner of some aspiring fluffer, RX is just not that exciting. Not that dynamic.
The 350 has heaps of poke in a straight line - a modern 3.5 V6 will do that - and it’s smooth, thanks to an eight-speed conventional epicyclic auto. You’ve got to rev it, but when you do, it rewards. Highway-speed overtaking - no problem - big trucks, uphill - whatever - big tick. Consider it done.
And at least Toyota/Lexus has the good grace to use a proper 60-degree V6 and not one of those Frankenstein-inspired truncated 90-degree V8s. You know, the ‘we took the angle grinder to the 5.0 V8 and look what fell out’ kinda thing. I hate those truncated V8s. Looking at you, General Motors.
Anywho, at its core, this is not the vehicle you buy for inherent driving excitement and engagement. And that’s fine - it just depends on you and your driving expectations. Most drivers are like that, I think - they wouldn’t understand the passion of tipping a car into a bend hard if it jumped up and bit them on the arse. In fact, doing that kind of thing secretly terrifies them. Especially in the wet.
Well appointed
Looking at the top-spec 450hL, you do get a long list of features. There’s the Luxury or the Sports Luxury, with about $18,000 separating the two.
Standard is Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, DAB+ digital radio, satnav with SUNA live traffic updates, voice control and 12.3-inch infotainment screen (because apparently size matters), wireless phone charging, climate control with concierge function and Nanoe ‘moisturising air conditioning’.
There’s also 12 Speaker DVD system including sub woofer, USB ports all over the place, seats wrapped in leather from top to bottom, as well as being heated and ventilated (cooled), powered, and with memory functions including an auto-entry/exit position.
The Kluger’s ample boot space translates into the RX, offering 652 and 1656 litres of cargo volume, and about 210 litres behind the third-row when deployed in the ‘L’ Luxury models. Row three gets curtain airbags, the driver gets a knee airbag, and the front passenger airbag is Toyota’s clever twin-chamber airbags, which disperses the load of the occupant over a greater area in the event of a crash. In case it matters, ANCAP rated the RX for five stars in 2015.
You also get the full gambit of safety assist features standard, like adaptive/radar cruise (which you can set to the prescribed speed sign recognition function), auto emergency braking in forward and reverse at any speed, road sign recognition, lane keeping and departure warning, blind-spot and rear cross-traffic alert, and active cornering assistance - which I presume actively assists you to corner. There’s also tyre pressure monitoring, should you need to notify the man at Lexus.
The Sport Luxury pack gives you the alternative 20-inch Sports Luxury alloys, moonroof with front tilt and slide, triple-stack LED headlights with LED cornering lights, headlight washers, sequential LED Indicators, and a smart-entry key card (which, being a Lexus, probably won’t fail on you). Plus a four-camera panoramic 360-degree camera, adaptive high-beams which scan the road and deactivate in sections where it detects oncoming vehicles. Sport Luxury also gets a 15-speaker premium audio system from some brand called Mark Levinson, plus a colour heads-up display, rear-window shades, heated steering wheel, even nicer leather, heated rear outboard seats with power adjustment.
If you’re not absolutely welded to the idea of having a fine Lexus parked on the stately driveway, you might want to consider the high level of equipment, luxury and safety offered by a Kia Sorento >>, Mazda CX-9 >> or Hyundai Santa Fe >> because you’ll save another 30 grand and get a shitload of equipment. Unless of course you couldn’t live with yourself being seen in the peasant mainstream brands, in which case, continue reading.
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POWERTRAIN
There’s an entry-level RX 300 with a 2.0-litre turbo petrol four and six-speed auto - it’s the only front-drive RX you can buy. There’s also a hybrid version of the 3.5 V6 - it’s got slightly less grunt and a six-speed CVT instead of the internal combustion-only eight-speed auto.
Ultimate Transmission Guide: CVT, dual-clutch, auto & manual >>
Frankly I don’t know why you’d buy either the 300 or the 450h - you could get a Kluger Grande for much less than an RX300. And it’s going to be smoother and have more grip, thanks to AWD and better auto.
The Hybrid is difficult to justify because it’s $10,000 more than the 350. Therefore, the payback period is, like, 170,000km. And, anyway, nobody in their right mind spends $100,000 on a car to save money on fuel. If you’ve got $100k for a car, fuel is cheap. You don’t care what it costs. It’s a budgetary triviality.
If you want to be truly green you cannot drive a two-tonne vehicle without having breathtaking disrespect and/or ignorance of basic thermodynamics. If you want to be green, catch the friggin’ train to work. (So unpalatable for the rich.) So, by that measure, you’re probably going to be able to stump up for the hybrid anyway because, hey, it’s only money.
Sidelining the 300 and 450h variants, I absolutely can make a strong case for the RX 350.
Back to the differences: over in Klugerville, you can get front-drive versions of the atmo V6 as well as AWD - but with RX 350, they’re all AWD.
Biggest difference - apart from the more hatch-like converging roof on the RX and the outrageous snout and grille (which you will either embrace or not - it’s purely subjective) is that Australian Kluger is manufactured in the United States, whereas Australian RX emanates from the land of the rising sun itself. Home grown, in a sense.
Kluger is thus tuned to run on 91 RON unleaded. (That’s roughly equivalent to 87 in the US. They use a different rating system called ‘anti-knock index’). But Australian-spec RX demands 95 RON premium unleaded.
As a result RX has slightly higher peak power and torque figures than Kluger. But only slightly. You’re not going to feel it. You just need to know not to run it on 91 or (most) blends of e10. Like, don’t make that mistake at the service station because you’ll regret it, eventually.
BUYING PRESTIGE? MORE USEFUL LINKS
2019 Lexus LC500 Review & Road Test >>
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Lexus RX F Sport -Vs- Ze Germans
Aesthetically, Lexus has chosen a different path to the brawny, hulking German SUVs (which are built in the US and Slovakia (Audi)). They’ve gone for sharp lines and pointy intersections. You have eyes and can judge for yourself how effective this has been, but I’d suggest that it does work in making you 1. stand out, and; 2. get noticed.
The Germans certainly have the Lexus licked on outright performance, however. The BMW X5 M’s 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 is good for 460kW of peak power from 6000rpm, while the Mercedes-Benz GLE (450kW @ 6500rpm) and Audi SQ7 (320kW @ 4750rpm). The RX450h F Sport (the top-spec version) will make 193kW from 6000rpm, with a power-to-weight ratio of just 106kW/t - substantially less than the other three. So it’s not going be a fast, but you could argue how that matters when we’re all restricted by the same speed limits and constabulary lying in wait around the corner.
The 2020 RX350 Sports Luxury (that name, just for disambiguation) on the other hand has a much more competitive performance with 216kW @ 6300rpm and 358Nm @ 4600-4700rpm - which is much closer to the Germans, albeit still not enough to invoke a fear response in any AMG, M or S owner. Although, they will have emptied more numbers out of their black AMEX account than you.
The GLE is $120,000 more than the F Sport, the X5 M wants $100k more, and the SQ7 owner shovelled an extra $60,000 into the dealer’s account than the respective Lexus buyer. But who cares, right? It’s only money, I hear you say.
Customer service is important to luxury car buyers, at least the self-respecting ones who have more important things to do with their time than deal with the service department.
While the Lexus RX owner will need to frequent the dealership every 15,000km or 12 months, the Merc, BMW and Audi custodian gets 25,000km service intervals. And granted, BMW is pretty good at looking after its customers in my knowledge of the industry.
But there’s a reason I don’t recommend Mercedes-Benz, and this is (one example) >>
And don’t even get me started on Audi’s customer service.
Luxury Car Tax, which continues to hoover money from the consumer to protect a car manufacturing industry that doesn’t exist anymore, will be substantial on all four of these vehicles. But you’ll pay significantly less buying the Lexus.
An RX 350L ($97,000 driveaway) will demand $6,524. The 450h Luxury, ($108,000 driveaway) includes over $9,000 in Luxury Car Tax. Seems fairly innocuous, right? You’re buying a luxury SUV, so a few grand in tax is inconsequential. But let’s look at the Germans.
Mercedes GLE63 AMG: ($246,000 driveaway) $36,000 LCT. Pov-pack GLE 300d: $117,500 driveaway, (LCT: $9000)
Audi SQ7: ($184,000 driveaway) $23,000 LCT. Pov-pack Q7: $117,700 driveaway, (LCT: $7000)
BMW X5 M50i: ($175,000 driveaway) $21,000 LCT. Pov-pack X5: $136,500 driveaway, (LCT: $13,600)
So it’s like this: You can have a top-shelf Lexus RX Sport Luxury for less than the starting price of a shitbox poverty pack GLE or Q7, and not hand over fists full of cash to ScoMo (and even more if you buy in Victoria because: politicians). And the money you save can be spent on jetskis, hottubs full of Ming Molls, Louis Vuitton shoes, Cuban cigars, caviar - whatever.
You could even set fire to some of the leftover money and use those flaming 50s to light your Cubans.
Conclusion
A Kluger Grande AWD - the pimp’s Cadillac of Klugers - is going to knock you back about $75,000 in the traffic, notionally. And it’ll have seven seats.
RX 350 F Sport: About $100,000 on the road. Five seats. Five hundred kilos less tow capacity. More standard equipment, however. And character.
One’s a prestige car, the other is the Camry of soft (large) SUVs. And the obvious question is: Is it really worth paying 30 per cent more for the Lexus? Objectively, the Lexus is more polished. You’ve stepped up, but the law of diminishing returns is also in play. It’s certainly not 30 per cent better. But I acknowledge that you don’t simply buy a prestige vehicle because it is objectively better - I mean, what kind of world would we live in if such a thing were the first rule of buying a new car? Hell would freeze over.
The RX isn’t the last word in luxury, it’s worth noting. Obviously it’s not a Maybach, nor a Rolls-Royce, but it’s always going to elevate you above the Toyota plebs. If you can ignore the early-2000s faux-wood steering wheel and the slightly boring interior, you’ll enjoy a quiet, calm and very comfy place to put your arse. It’s real-world luxury that doesn’t try quite so hard to stroke your ego as the other brands. You might even call it subtle.
And Lexus has an excellent reputation for customer support, so there’s that.
If you’ve never fantasised about starting from pole position, and if you’re in the market for a robust, reliable and extremely polished taxi for comfortable family conveyance - with more than enough fruit to remind you you’re not in a Toyota. And hey, if you’ve got the cash, and if you can see the value in elevating yourself above the mainstream, despite the law of diminishing returns, then RX 350 is a great option around the $100 grand mark.
If that’s you, you should put RX 350 on your shortlist.
The Hyundai Palisade is a big, bold and comfortable holiday machine for growing families. Palisade offers excellent value, generous 8-seat SUV space, and practicality on par with LandCruiser, but at a much more affordable price.