Equipment levels are pretty generous, with all the toys you’d expect and almost the full suite of safety and advanced driver aids including emergency steering assist, radar-based adaptive cruise control and lane-centring steering. There is a safety pack option, including the E-latch door opening system which is linked to the rear camera and blind-spot system and warns of oncoming vehicles (including cyclists and motorcyclists) and then delays the door opening to prevent a collision. Lexus claims it has the potential to cut up to 95 per cent of those careless accidents.
Prices will start at £38,250 for the front-drive model, with 4x4s starting at £39,250. Our car was the almost fully loaded Takumi which cost £53,300 and came with a list of equipment which would take the rest of this review to list, but including leather upholstery, heated seats front and rear, heated steering wheel, an advanced automatic parking system (which works pretty well), a powered tailgate and a large sunroof. The only extra we could find was the £920 metallic paint.
Sumptuous inside
The interior is sumptuously trimmed with tightly disciplined leather, soft-touch plastic panels which kiss rather than overlap and a simply enormous touchscreen, which flows into the central digital instrument binnacle.
This consists of a central power meter filled with extraneous numbers flanked by coolant temperature and fuel gauges. The graphics are nice, but if you want simple and direct there’s a first-rate head-up display system. Feeling your way through the touchscreen isn’t that intuitive and some of the touch tiles require memorising, but it’s a damn sight better than the terrible track-pad control of the previous model.
The rest of it all works beautifully, with a well-defined click and clack to the switches and that feeling that someone has put in the time to make it easy and convenient. Well, until you come to the centre console, that is, which has a lid which is hinged on the driver’s side making it impossible to glance into the cubby hole while driving.
