Lexus RX (2015-2022) review

The RX starts at £50,905, with the seven-seat RX L commanding a slight premium of £1,290. Just as most people who buy BMWs go M Sport, and most people who buy Mercedes go AMG Line, most people who buy the RX go for the F Sport, with its sportier styling and longer kit list.

All RXs are well equipped - 20-inches across are as small as the wheels gets, the 12.3-inch touchscreen is standard and so too is the company’s suite of active safety tech (including collision avoidance, radar cruise control, lane-keeping/departure assist/warning, road sign assist and auto high-beam).

The F Sport starts at £55,205 (you can’t get it as an L) and adds, among other things, fancy suspension and new ‘Bladescan’ headlamps, where LEDs are projected onto a rotating blade-shaped mirror spinning at 6,000rpm. The benefit is finer control and thus better visibility. And the fact you can tell people you’ve got spinning blades in your headlights. The most expensive RX is the £61,705 Takumi, which gets everything.

Lexus offers a three-year or 60,000-mile warranty, with certain components in the hybrid drivetrain getting five-year cover.  Service plans are available, too, with the maintenance due once a year, or every 10,000 miles. But Lexus routinely does pretty well in reliability studies, so the odds of you needing to cash-in that warranty are pretty low. Should you need to visit one, its dealers are supposed to be pretty good too.

As for the cost of keeping the RX in fuel, it ought to be pretty cheap for a big SUV. And of course the benefit of not being able to plug the RX in means there’s not going to be any implication for your electricity bill. Lexus claims WLTP figures of up to 35.7mpg for the RX and 34.4 for the heavier RX L. A 45-mile mixed route driven conservatively yielded 34mpg from a five-seat RX F Sport, indicating that those numbers aren’t totally unrealistic. Drive a bit harder and you’ll dip into the high-twenties.

Use it properly (i.e. plug it in) and you’ll get better numbers from a PHEV. It’s up to you to decide whether plugging your car in when you get home at night is something you want/are able to do. If you don’t plan on plugging in your PHEV, a Lexus/Toyota-like hybrid is probably a more efficient option.

CO2 is 134/138g/km for the RX/L, giving BIK rates of 30/31 percent. Company car drivers are better of getting a PHEV because of the tax implications, regardless of whether you plan on plugging it in or not.