Lexus RX 450h

There's a disturbing image that inexorably worms its malicious little way into your head when you think of the Lexus RX450h: a school-run mum with a weak chin and expensive highlights belting about a leafy London suburb in a 2,700kg SUV and braying about how it's ok because it's a hybrid, and therefore has the ecological impact of coughing. To talk to some people you'd be forgiven for thinking that hybrids actually bled pure oxygen into the atmosphere, such is the insistent but generally misinformed fervour for anything with an EV capability.

A sweeping and slightly tacky little generalisation there then, but we've all thought it. Truth is, people are buying SUVs because they like their height and general feeling of security, but are getting increasingly uncomfortable with the social implications of having what people often regard as the automotive equivalent of a giant facial wart.

So the new Hybrid Drive RX450h should go some way to salve those overheated consciences by being the undisputed king of the contradiction. Here is a car that offers all of those SUV advantages - four-wheel drive, bullish driving position, status-enhancing bulk - with the latest and cleanest hybrid tech known to man. Not quite that simple, I'm afraid.

The new RX450h heralds a new breed of hybrid-only Lexus RXs (you can still buy a petrol-only RX350, but only in Eastern Europe), and the new system is really very clever. As well as the usual 3.5-litre V6 petrol motor (I know, that's not a great start to a green conversation really is it?), the RX450h gets a pair of AC synchronous electric motors - one in the front and one in the back - which can punt the car along as a pure electric vehicle, or apply shove in tandem with the traditional fossil fuel burner.

With everything running at full whack and in series, the total system output equates to 295bhp, 124mph top end and 0-62mph in 7.9 seconds. Eminently respectable figures for what is quite a large car, or a relatively modest SUV. When running in pure EV mode, the car can silently potter around for a couple of miles before the V6 needs to kick in and start the process of replenishing the compact nickel-hydride batteries. All well and good.

It gets better when you realise that the system provides 44.8mpg on the combined cycle no matter how much you abuse the throttle and will return just 148g/km of CO2. That's not just good for an SUV, but respectable for a supermini. It's also C-Charge exempt. Work that kind of stuff through a whole load of really dull tax rules and algorithms and you'll find that the RX450h is remarkably cheap to run per month compared to the competition. Trouble is, it needs to be. The range starts at £41,600 and ramps up to the frankly frightening £55,505 SE-L Premium. They are very well-specced, but that's a lot of wedge to invest in your ecological principles.

There are other issues that might also sway your decision. Though the RX still manages to look like the least threatening and most demure of the SUV crop, and despite some decent updating via Lexus' ‘L-finesse' design philosophy, the RX is still a bit soulless to look at. It's neither butch nor cute, brawny nor lithe. It just is.

It also drives like it looks; nice enough, but not really fully engaged one way or the other. Start it up from a push-button on the dash and, as usual with a Lexus hybrid, not much happens apart from a nice little light that pops up to tell you the car is ‘ready'. Slink away on a tidy little silent wave of EV torque and you'll be impressed by the feeling of solidity and a tad disappointed by the weird asymmetric dash. The new ‘Remote Touch' multimedia interface is intuitive (it's a bit like a force-feedback computer mouse), the usual Mark Levinson sound system impressive. But though I searched high and low, I couldn't find a grin-generator anywhere.

Once you get out of town, or cover more than a couple of miles, you'll start using the V6 as your primary source of motivation, and it has to be said that it's a very nice little motor - quiet, effective, but slightly drone-prone when mated with the CVT gearbox. The RX is quite decently rapid, and once into a set of corners the new, double-wishbone rear suspension makes itself felt by isolating bumps that would have worried the old torsion-beam set-up. There's a new ‘active stabiliser' that claims to decrease body roll by 40 per cent and generally the RX can clip along at a decent pace without scaring the passengers. It's better than the old RX400h by a good margin. 

But there's nothing here that makes you go ‘ooh'. It's all very nice, but certainly not a car that you'd buy to drive, rather one that you'd buy to travel in. Which is kind of the issue. This is a car for people who don't like cars. It does everything it sets out to do; be remarkably clean for the sector it finds itself in, efficient in a clever, unobtrusive and sophisticated way, provide a clear-cut excuse for self-loathing urbanites to own a town-bound SUV. But if you love cars, you'll never want one. Harsh, but true.

Tom Ford