2010 Lexus RX 350 SUV Review

2010 Lexus RX 350 Review You’d probably either love them or hate them, luxury crossovers. Lexus created the market for these things. Let’s see if they’re still out in front for the ride of the RX 350h while we check the tech. The RX is of all a bit styled pretty gradually over three generations. Ours is the gas engine 350, there’s also of a Hybrid 450h. Both are meant to be compact and stylist with a little bit of utility, you’re not bringing home a bed from IKEA in one of these. Now of course, our RX 350 is current Lexus product, so we’ve got the remote touch controller here to drive the onscreen interface. It’s way the hell up there, got a little glass thing in front, so you know right away it’s not a touch screen. You use this little finger paddle thing here to move the cursor around the screen and it has hectic feedback. So, you feel like a bump across those buttons there on the bottom. These helps you drive and use it without totally staring at the screen. I’ve always been a big fan of Lexus map and interfacing, just general graphics quality, no exception here; about as good as you’ll find in a car today. We have XM standard on this car. That’s not so exciting but it does bring with it, XM NavTraffic and XM NavWeather. And of course, the system will intelligently reroute if it can around traffic obstructions if you’re under guidance. Now, the system is hard drive based but unfortunately, none of that hard drive is made available for you to put music or other media on. So, enjoy the fact that it’s got good response and lots of good reach information which pop up pretty quickly all thanks to the hard drive but you can’t rip anything. So, we’ve got a six-disc changer right here in the dash but if you get a higher trim RX 350 with the Levinson sound, you’ll also have a DVD changer in there which can play movies on the screen when you’re parked as well as digest all kinds of audio disc. No HD radio yet on this Lexus, little disappointing. Satellite Radio like I can mention is standard. That will be your XM Satellite. The aux USB button brings you a lot of goodness. First of all, you can get to an aux jack but you can also turn on Bluetooth streaming audio A2DP which is a nice feature, a lot of cars still don’t have. And you can also get to the USB jack, which is located somewhere way the hell down there. One nice touch though is they’ve got a little port here with a little door. You can open this up to make room for a cable so you’re not going to be pinching, power or audio cables that come in and out of here. So, there’s some good thinking and some awkward thinking going on here at the same time. Nine speaker audio is the base rig, upgraded Lexus sound is 12 speakers and more watts, Levinson sound is 15 speakers, 7.1 surround and still more wattage. Now, as part of an option package that you’ll find in just about every RX, you get a reverse camera. So, you can kind of consider it’s standard and of course, as you can see, we got all the manic beeping of the distance sensors fore and aft on this car as well. Other visual technologies included available wide view video camera system, also not in our vehicle and a head-up display that will give you speed, navigation prompts and your audio status. I find the HVAC console a bit of a mess. There’s a temp up down button here for the driver but then you kind of got left and right for the passenger over there and there’s no button here to turn off the AC compressor. Now, I think that’s a trend that most drivers don’t really understand what that AC button means. They just put the thing in auto and say I want it hotter or cooler and the car will figure it out. I still miss the button. And finally there’s this. Did you hear about the recall of a whole bunch of Toyotas because the floor mats were causing the accelerator the stick? A little tag here that says you must secure those mats with a retention hook, so they were ahead of the game but not enough to cause a recall to go away. One of the things very Lexus about this Lexus, this is the quietest power window I have ever heard and watch this. It decelerates as it heads up toward the seal at the top. It’s a little thing but I love that. And the window fussing, don’t make that window fussy on glass sound. It’s almost silent, I love that. I can do this all day. I actually did yesterday. Okay, let’s price RX 350, about 38 for front wheel drive; add 1,400 more if you want all the wheels to be driven. Then to do it CNET style, it gets interesting. Lexus is very package oriented, so get ready to spend about 12,000 on a big old chunky package with a hard drive nav, XM traffic and weather, backup camera, wide-view monitor, head-up display, Levinson sound, pretty much everything, not a lot of a la carte here, so just bite the bullet.