Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury review: mass delusion

Is there a human on the planet who wants a car as enormous, bloated, overpowered, mystifying and expensive as the Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury?

Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury

Is there really a human being on the planet who wants a car as enormous, bloated, overpowered, mystifying to behold and expensive as the Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury? I can’t picture them, nor understand them, but I am reliably informed that there are many, many people, in Australia alone, keen to part with $210,800 for what is, essentially, a Toyota LandCruiser with delusions of grandeur (does the word Luxury really need an Ultra prefix?).

This Lexus isn’t merely large, it is Titanic, and it would probably smash right through any iceberg it encountered. At one point I pulled up behind it in my driveway in a normally proportioned Audi A3 sedan and it felt as if there was a multi-storey car parked in front of me. I could just see the Lexus’s roof from where I was sitting, but there were clouds around it.

The front end is even more imposing and wears a grille like Kylo Ren’s helmet, if that dark-side warrior were 3m tall and had a head the size of an asteroid. The LX 600’s capacious dimensions suggest you’ll get a lot of room inside, and yet it only has seating for four people, because that’s (Ultra) Luxury.

The rear seats are so large and luxe that my son, so seasoned with spoiling that he knows what he’s talking about, declared that it was “like a Rolls-Royce” back there with lushings of leather, a feast of screens, a dividing arm rest between the two seats with even more screens and buttons, and a Business Class aesthetic.

Inside the Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury.

And then we went for a drive, and my whole family started yowling about how jouncy it was, and expressing confusion at how anything so comfortable while sitting still could be so bouncy-castle-made-of-bricks on the road. I can’t tell you how bad the ride has to be in a car for my loved ones to notice. Normally, if I dare to raise the subject of a car’s handling, or even its performance, I am greeted by a chorus of over-the-top yawning sounds, or just shouted at to shut up. I tried to explain that, unlike a more conventionally sized Lexus, the LX 600 has a ladder frame chassis, because it’s a Toyota LandCruiser underneath (Toyota is Lexus, in the same way that VW is Audi). This really got the loud yawning going, so I pointed to the fridge between the front seats and a sense of calm awe was returned.

Now I’ll grant you, Lexus has done its best to hide what the LX600 is made of – a job akin to turning a church organ into the Sydney Opera House (the Mark Levinson sound system is appropriately wondrous) – and to make it ride better, with springs and dampers tuned for smoother sealed-road driving.

It weighs 2660kg.

So it could be worse, and what makes it better is a properly unnecessary 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 engine that makes 305kW, 650Nm and produces a zero to 100km/h boulder dash of seven seconds flat. Achieving that in a mass of metal that weighs 2660kg and is larger than a city bus is not just impressive, it’s a little bit mad. Drive it fast in a straight line and it’s a hoot and a holler, but try to go quickly around a corner and a physics professor will tap you on the shoulder to point out why that’s not going to work out. Underneath, of course, it’s still a proper and hugely capable SUV with all kinds of off-road drive modes and the ability to bash its way up, or straight through, rocky mountains in the middle of a snowstorm.

So what we have, then, is an extremely luxurious limousine-style vehicle that looks like a LandCruiser in an Academy Awards gown Lady Gaga might like, and which can get someone very rich and important to somewhere hugely inhospitable in ridiculous comfort.

One finger to rule them all.

Which leads me to believe that the Lexus LX 600 Ultra Luxury must have been designed for Sauron, as opposed to actual, real people. It could cope with Mount Doom easily, it’s huge and black and imposing and suitably plush inside for the kind of guy who can wreak carnage on Middle Earth merely by raising one ringed finger. I guess the ride wouldn’t bother him as it’s hard to say whether he possesses a physical form, as such, but that’s a discussion for my next Dungeons and Dragons meeting.

The only other thing I would say about the LX is that it has a very clever set of God-view parking cameras that can make the vehicle itself disappear and show you what’s beneath you – usually a few smaller cars. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to make the Sisyphean task of parking it any easier.

Incredibly, Lexus says humans do buy this car – it took more than 400 pre-launch orders for the new LX earlier this year, so its stock was pretty much sold before it arrived. Of those, a staggering 10 per cent of buyers opted for the Ultra Luxury version. Please, go figure. I can’t.

ENGINE: 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 petrol (157kW/650Nm). Average fuel 12.1 litres per 100km (at least)

TRANSMISSION: Ten-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $210,800

RATING: ★★½