Lexus goes fully electric with bold changes
Goodbye to the glovebox and hello radiant heating. Lexus RZ 450e creates new standards of excellence in electric-vehicle driving that every owner can warm up to.
We have lost much from our cars over the years, from cigarette lighters (which always seemed thrillingly dangerous when I was a child) to tape decks, CD players (and, for the bourgeois among us, CD stackers) and that stick between the seats we used to use to change the gears for ourselves.
We are all invited to believe that the steering wheel will go the way of cars without cupholders, eventually, but I hope that’s wrong. Lexus, it seems, is looking to do half the job by launching its new fully electric vehicle with some kind of a yoke instead of a traditional tiller (it’s optional, thank goodness).
What they have deleted entirely from the new RZ 450e is the glovebox (which means you will find the car’s instruction manuals in the boot, eventually), which, considering that it could reasonably be argued that Lexus buyers are among the demographic who might actually own driving gloves and use said box thusly, seems a brave decision.
The pay-off is something infinitely more modern than a lid that always drops open on the point of your knees, a virtual blanket over your legs. Radiant heating is a world first for Lexus and uses two infra-red pads to send waves of heat through whatever meat is parked on the seat. Presumably you could very slowly heat a meat pie on the passenger side on your way home.
It’s not just a heated seat, it’s cleverer than that, as it radiates heat through your legs, which, I must say, makes it a glowing jolly to review this car in the colder months (indeed, if I’d driven it in Canberra I might have actually wept with joy).
Furthermore, the little heating pad where a glovebox should be and the other one under the steering wheel get so hot you can cook your hands on them, which negates the wearing of gloves anyway.
The RZ 450e is an EV SUV, apparently, and it certainly feels hugely spacious (the flat floor you get in an EV makes rear legroom particularly impressive), but I wouldn’t say that it looks like an SUV, and I would say it looks very different when parked next to one of the many traditional SUVs Lexus does offer.
Deleting the need for radiators and airflow through the front of the car meant that Lexus could delete its always visually arresting spindle grille, and this instantly makes it one of the car’s more alluring designs. Catching it at twilight loitering in my driveway one evening I was also struck by the way light played on its slashing sidelines – it really does look modern and lacking in the usual ugly bulk of most SUVs.
The interior of my $135,000 Sports Luxury model (there’s an entry-level Luxury variant of the RZ 450e that starts at $123,000) was also nicely fitted out; one shocked passenger even declared “this is LUSH”, before noticing the floor mats. I’m going to hope that these are an optional feature because they look like they were stolen from the household of a very, very old person while they were napping.
My range topper also gets a heated steering wheel, a 13-speaker Mark Levinson sound system and double-glazed windows, which really add to the feeling of silent solemnity inside. The quiet way in which the RZ’s two electric motors – 150kW and 266Nm for the one on the front axle and 80kW and 169Nm at the rear – make driving it a peacefully premium experience.
As does the very clever double sunroof, which can go from clear to opaque at the press of a button, a system that I can only guess uses witchcraft.
It does seem strange that Lexus put more of the grunt at the front, although both power and torque can be constantly shifted to the wheel or axle where required for truly gripping all-wheel drive – if only for the fact that car companies love talking about how their vehicles are “rear-wheel biased”.
A rear-drive set-up is the gold standard for being sporty, but this car is focused instead on delivering the “Lexus driving signature”. What this means exactly is hard to say, but it definitely doesn’t mean “German-car like”. The ride quality is excellent and the RZ can flick its way through bends with some aplomb and virtually no understeer, but the inoffensive, not particularly talkative tuning of the steering means you’ve never heavily involved in the driving experience.
In a single word, I would describe the Lexus driving signature as “easy”, or “effortless”, but personally I like a bit of effort in my driving. What I did love about driving the RZ 450e was just how punchy it was around town.
I should be used to the way EVs accelerate, particularly from 20km/h to 80km/h, but the Lexus, with its combined output of 230kW and 435Nm, really was fun to carve up traffic in. See a gap, be the gap. The zero to 100km/h claim is 5.3 seconds, but it feels quicker.
Lexus says the RZ will get around 400km from a single charge, but my week of testing suggests the real-world figure might be closer to 350km, although the amount I was tempted by its throttle bursts might not have helped.
Buyers are gifted three years of free charging on the national Chargefox network, which is a hell of a deal when you compare it to the equivalent three-year free fuel card that no one offered, ever. That might help to justify some of what seems like quite a steep asking price, as would the fact that owners have access to the Lexus on Demand service, which means they can borrow vehicles from a fleet of Lexus models at airports across the country when travelling interstate.
That kind of bonus ownership experience is at least one thing our cars have gained over the years.
