We've Had Our Fill

Time’s up, and the verdict is in on Lexus’s Hybrid SUV flagship

- Ash Westerman

LEXUS RX450hL SPORTS LUXURY

Price as tested: $111,070

This month: 704km @ 10.1/100km

Overall: 6286km @ 10.5L/100km

WITHIN THE Lexus R&D centre in Japan resides a team of software engineers that all have brains much larger than my almond-sized CPU. But that’s not going to stop me from respectfully suggesting there’s room for them to try a little harder.

That’s the core take-out from my four months with the RX450hL. It’s an endearing, mostly pretty polished large SUV that makes the best of unremarkable underpinnings, and is an incredibly easy car to live with.

But … I couldn’t shake the feeling that the hybrid powertrain could deliver both better economy and greater refinement if only the software would allow it to run longer in EV mode. It was a constant minor irk to see two bars (out of five) of battery charge, yet to have the car’s brain calculate that this was insufficient to allow EV operation. Surely there’s predictive software that can use data gathered from recent driving conditions – no extreme hills, no wide-open throttle – to confidently forecast that regenerative, battery-replenishing driving is likely to be imminent? And therefore at least some of that remaining charge could be allocated to the motors?