Wonders never cease
The UX is a small hatchback riding a little bit taller than Lexus’s ancient entry-level offering, the CT. It wears plastic wheelarch cladding to look all tough and outdoorsy, and as usual for Lexus, the rest of the bodywork is an earthquake aftermath of cracks, creases and wrinkles.
The USP is there in BLOCK CAPITALS on every digital billboard in the land. “NEW LEXUS UX. SELF-CHARGING HYBRID”. Clever branding, really, if irritatingly worded. Obviously, Lexus has not skewered the laws of thermodynamics and made a perpetual-motion car that never needs refuelling.
But if you’re a green-thinking urbanite caught up in the go-electric movement, that’ll really grab you. You live in a city. You’ve got nowhere to plug in overnight. That knocks the Mini Countryman Cooper S PHEV off the shopping list. A self-charging hybrid? Good for under 100g/km of CO2? You’d be beating down the Lexus salesman’s front door at 3am begging for a test drive.
The front wheels are driven along by a naturally aspirated, 2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol engine blended with an electric motor to deliver 181bhp altogether. In reality, you’re barely using half of that.
As usual, the handover between trafficcrawling EV power and e-boosted petrol drive is brokered by a CVT gearbox. And this is where, with your Lexus hybrid bingo cards at the ready, you’ll be expecting the usual moans about mooing, whining, droning protests from under the bonnet as the car bleeds away all but a morsel of power, leaving your heavy, underpowered hybrid stranded mid-lane change, doing about
twenty-thousand rpm. But for two reasons, this is a shockingly decent Lexus.
One: it’s unfathomably quiet. Even when you rouse the engine, there’s no longer the buzzing, resonant hive of bees vibrating through the bulkhead. You squeeze the throttle and let the hybrid’s computers politely sort out the power balance, rather than tiptoeing around desperately trying to stay in the parameters of battery power. Brake pedal feel is still mushy, but easier to modulate than in older Lexus efforts.
Two: when you do need to stop mooching about and really ask for some urgency, the UX actually delivers. It’s a portly car for its size, at around 1,600kg, but at last there’s some sense of torquey e-boost getting things moving on demand.
For no reason we can conjure, Lexus is keeping the utterly rubbish old CT200h hatchback on sale for a while, in parallel with the new, finned UX. We can only assume this is to show how much progress it’s made.
Apart from the usual Lexus interior own-goals. Stellar build quality marred by cheap ’n’ nasty switchgear. There’s oodles of incongruous LFA supercar inspiration too. Supercar trickle-down features might sound great in the marketing pitch, but none of it actually makes the UX easy to operate. This Eighties arcade game masquerading as a premium infotainment system was terrible when Lexus first brought it out, and it’s still a pulsating, pus-filled boil on the face of any Lexus fascia today. But the car, fundamentally, is a good one.
We’re as surprised as you are. Basically, it’s a more expensive, more cramped, butcher-looking Toyota Prius, wearing a Scream mask. But at least no one will mistake you for an Uber and vomit all over the seatbacks when you’re bumbling home of an evening.
“FOR TWO REASONS, THIS IS A SHOCKINGLY DECENT LEXUS”