The 2020 Lexus RX350 F Sport is Amazing

2020 Lexus RX 350. F-Sport Series 3 with 295 horsepower, 268 pound-feet of torque from a 3.5 liter naturally aspirated V6. I'm Yuri. I'm Jacob. And we're going for a drive. This starts at $56,000. This one is optioned out for $69,850 with the F-Sport Series 3 package. That's some good initial bite. That is definitely not bad. A lot of cars you've floored and nothing happens, this one went right away. There's actual response. Horsepower, torque. 295 horsepower, 268 pound-feet of torque from a 3.5 liter naturally aspirated V6. And this engine has technically been around since 2006-ish in North America, but it's been refreshed in 2018, so you know you're getting something reliable. And we previously reviewed a Lexus NX, which looks a lot like this. Yeah, but it's smaller than this. And this is the updated version of the RX 350, which I didn't realize what it was because the new front end change made everything in Lexus look different. Yeah, so the 2020 has been mildly refreshed. So you get new bumpers, you get a new grille, you get new taillights, you get new headlights, and slightly new wheels. But I'm thinking back from the days when, like, I guess it was like the 2000s, when they had those cool chrome windows. Oh, God, yeah. That's what I, that's right. The RX 300s and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay, so there's a lot of cool stuff on this car, but I want to start with the interior. Okay. So first off, it's all red and it looks really cool. And it's red because we have the F Sport package and we also have the optional red color. But what I really want to start with is the infotainment because now we have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Yeah, finally, Lexus Toyota. So even though it's a crappy touchpad, we can now also touch the screen. They kind of solve everything we had issues with before. They did in letting other people solve their problems for them by just enabling the touchscreen and having Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. And it's good. And my Apple CarPlay goes all the way across the screen. And when I'm playing music or something, everything is so big. Everything is so visually easy to tell. It's not cluttered with a lot of text. I think every manufacturer needs to take a note from how Apple CarPlay looks. And your Android Auto, is it widescreen? Well, it's Android Auto widescreen, which means it's not actually widescreen. Oh, the bad widescreen. Yeah, so it's got the clock on the side. And so it's cool. You can touch the screen and everything. You can get around, but you still have this trackpad, which it does suck. It sucks. Yeah, and I think someone was showing that on lower NX models, you can get hard buttons or something. Well, we still do have the hard buttons up here. But it's like non-touchpad. Oh, interesting. But maybe it's that weird joystick thing from older Lexuses. Anyways, this is basically like using a laptop, like the little trackpad thing. So we do have rewinding satellite radios, but it's such a pain to use still that I'm not going to use them. I actually used it. It's not that bad. No tune mix, but we've got the best volume knob and tuning knob that Toyota usually has. Yeah, they look and function extremely well. Like the function. To go through channels, look. Check this out. Rip up from 44 up to 300 with that, please. That's pretty quick. That's really fast compared to other cars. Yeah. And because of all the hard buttons, like we still have track, radio, media, pause, all that stuff, you can still use a lot of it without having to use the touchscreen. Yeah, having the hard buttons up in the center area near the climate is so critical. And if they deleted that, this would be a nightmare to use, but they didn't, so it's all there. So this is actually very functional. And the climate buttons are very good too. But you know what I noticed is that compared to the GS. Yeah, we don't have the scrolling numbers. This kind of looks like budget, but not budget. Okay, then we also have wireless charging, which is nice. We've got power right here for USB 2 amp. Then we've got USB in the armrest. And we've got a little spot to put your phone. Yeah, and then we have heated and cooled seats. And then we also have an analog clock because this is a luxury vehicle. But back to this putting your phone thing here. How many cars in 2020 do not have that? A lot. Like so many cars have nowhere to put your phone, then they're on the seat or whatever. Yeah, you end up putting it in the cup holder, which these have amazing cup holders, by the way. Okay, cup holder of 2020. So let me explain. The small cup fits perfectly into the one closest to me. But if I put it in the one farther from me, it's really deep and it doesn't fit. But there is a push button that raises the cup holder up. It's perfect. Well, it's almost perfect because there are these little sliders that go up and down. So if you do spill coffee down there, it's going to be impossible to clean that. Still totally fine. How much do I love gimmicks? You love gimmicks. 2020 cup holder of the year. Well, since we're on that. Lexus Canada, you can tweet about that. I fully approve. Let's test the visors. You think it's going to pass? I don't know. 3, 2, 1. Yes. Oh, yeah. Of course it will. I knew it. And the box test. 4, 5, 6, and 7. 8, 9, and our newest box member, Andy the Lab, makes it 10. Check her out on YouTube. She does car reviews with her dog. So how about our shifter? Do you like it? Yeah, it's normal. I feel like I kind of get stuck in neutral a couple times because you have to move it around a lot. It's not a stupid dinky, like, circle thing. It's a normal shifter. I like it. And then our steering wheel, everything is very easy to use. All our buttons are laid out well. And we've got, like, really nice feeling paddles. Yeah, it does feel really good, even for plasticky ones. And the steering wheel feel, like, the materials of it, for some reason, I find this more comfortable, nicer than pretty much everything else. It's the texture and the overall feeling of the quality of it. I know what you're saying. And I'm really glad that all the accents in here are a satin accent and not just straight-up chrome, besides the door handles. Yeah, and that's the only thing that stands out, which I wish they would have changed as well. But everything looks really nice. Everything feels really nice. Obviously, this is a very premium interior. And back to hard buttons and stuff, we have a whole bunch on the left here, including our heating steering wheel, our camera view. Like, when I had to use the 360 camera, I'm like, think, Yuri, where's the button? I look, look, boom. Okay, so that 360 camera is pretty good. But the backup camera is the worst thing I've ever seen in 2019 and probably I will see in 2020. It's pretty horrible for luxury technology. Like, we're also in the Volvo right now. And that is the most perfect 360 camera in the world. And this is the least perfect 360 camera in the world. And it has to do with the resolution and the distortion. Like, cars just don't look like the way they do in this camera. And then moving on to the gauges, we've got two really cool bezels in the middle that stick out and then digital in the middle with cool transitions between all your gauges. And when you're in certain modes, when you floor it, everything turns red. I really love the look of this, just like I really love the look of the RC350F. And the gauges look so simple and they're so effective. Everything looks crystal clear. And the only thing that kind of sucks, though, is the IS and the RC. The gauge cluster moves. The little ring moves. This one doesn't. But this is like a sports car, so I'm okay with that. Yeah, well, it's called F Sport, which is another confusing thing. Yeah, F Sport isn't really sport. No, we'll get to that in a bit. And then we also have a head-up display, which is super easy to use. We can click the button to just turn it off, which is also nice. And then when you turn it on, you can adjust on that little screen on the left. There's a lot of intuitiveness now that it's a touchscreen and I don't have to use this trackpad. I know, I totally agree. Like, my stress levels went down, like, three times. Yeah, this is a very relaxing car to drive. Is it relaxing and comfortable in these seats? Super comfortable. Except the butt bolsters are a little bit extreme. Like, I find the side of my thighs being a little bit uncomfortable because of how tight the bolsters are for my side butt area. For me, I fit just fine. But now if I stretch my legs out, I do notice that. Yeah, so that's the only thing. But otherwise, the seats are pretty comfortable. Yeah, and it's, like, soft touchdown by your knees and everything. And I just love the red color everywhere in here. Yeah, and then even this line pattern is really cool. It's not like a fake carbon fiber. And shout out to Lexus because there's no gloss black in here. Like, nothing. How could you make a luxury car without gloss black? And they did it. There you go. And then as for driving position, this hand thing that you use to put your palm on before using your touchpad, I can move my hands up and my elbow will be on an armrest while touching the steering wheel while driving. And we have all the soft touch everywhere, so your knees are against, like, soft leather. I overall love sitting in the front and even the back because there's actually tons of room back there. Then we've also got a pretty good sunroof. We've got a massive one. This is an upgrade. Pretty good trunk room when the seats are up. And the seats in the back will automatically fold down with the button from the trunk. And fold up, which is really nice as well. And one of my favorite things, we've got garage door opener buttons on the mirror. There you go. Which nobody in the history of cars talks about, but I really like them. And then overall driving position, I feel like I'm at the right height. I really love how there's pretty much no blind spots. These little windows are nice. We've got blind spot monitoring. What do you think of the lane keep? The lane keep is pretty good. It's not the best in terms of lane centering systems. It does kind of move a little bit, but it does lane center. And we don't talk about this in many cars, but we probably should. The Mark Levinson sound system is actually really nice in here. All right, so I'm done with my deep dive into the interior because I was very comfortable. I was very happy with the infotainment. Now you can drive and talk about whatever other stuff you want to talk about. I've got a lot to say. The horsepower and torque. So I want to try a new test in 2020, the intuitive test, where we see how long it takes you to turn on the car, connect the Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, reset the trip odometer, get into eco mode, drive the car, put the radio to channel 300, put the climate to 21, and turn on cruise control. All right. I feel like that's a pretty good, well-rounded thing that most people probably will get stuck in certain cars. Let's do it. Go. Start the car, then reset the trip odometer. Oh, trip. It's still booting up. No, no, no, there's no starting. This is the test. We can just fast-forward it. Maybe try the infotainment. All right, so we're going to pass on the trip odometer. Okay, now you got to hook up Apple CarPlay. Okay. And then after that, it'll be eco mode, drive. Android Auto. Android Auto, yeah. Okay, we're good. So now we need to put it into eco mode. Okay. Let's go into eco mode right here. Eco mode. Now we drive the car. Now while driving, we need to get to channel 300 on the radio. Okay, so I'm going to hit radio. And I'm going to go over on station list. Why, bro? You've got a tuning knob. I forgot. All right. Well, I know I have to use this. So I'm on replay. So get to 300, get to 300. And then we need to pull. Once we get to 300, we got to put our temperature to 21. Okay, I passed 300. Okay, temperature 21. Temperature is now 21. And then turn on lane keep and cruise control. Lane keep. I might have to be a certain speed, but let's try this. Radar cruise is active and lane keep is active. Ah, only two minutes and 37 seconds. Yeah, well. New record. And there's no trip odometer. Oh my God, that felt reliable. Okay, so we don't really talk about reliability, but this engine basically, in its most basic form, has been around since 2006. So we kind of can. And I want to address the reliability issue because I was speaking to a female friend who was watching our show for one of the first times and she was looking for a car and she's like, I wish you guys talked more about that. But the thing is, we just can't. We have these cars for one week and that's it. So we can give you our impressions, tell you what it's like, but you pretty much need to go somewhere else to see who has long-term testers. It's just out of what we can handle. Yeah, and if a car is brand new, we can't talk about the reliability because it's brand new. It might have a new engine, it might have new suspension components, whatever. But this engine, like I said, in its most basic form, has been around since 2006. So I feel comfortable talking about the reliability of this engine. And on that, another thing that we don't talk about because we can't, is our fuel economy numbers. Because the way we drive for filming, everything gets skewed. Yeah, we're idling all the time because these cars have to get filmed. So it's just not realistic. We can reset it, but then it's going to be reset for a short amount of time. So again, it's not realistic. So just look up the fuel economy numbers. Back to the review. Cliché corner. I'm going to downshift with this 8-speed auto. It is obviously not a dual-clutch. And let's see what this does. That's not bad. It's actually all-wheel drive, so it does torque vector, but it definitely understeers, especially in the winter. Yeah, I don't know if that was oversteer correction or just like body roll correction. It's kind of both. It does body roll a little bit, but not as much as you'd expect it to, but it's really comfortable. Like that's the biggest thing that you wanted of a SUV like this is comfort and this 100% delivers. Yeah, comfort and no stress. After getting out of that M8 Cabriolet, I was so much less stressed in this. Yeah, exactly. So this suspension is perfectly damp, like going over potholes and imperfections in the road and everything, like it's super comfortable to drive every day and you're just so relaxed because it's also really quiet in here. So this is an F Sport. Yes, it is. Which means it's really fast. No, it does not. Okay, only F means it's fast. Yes. So if it's RC F or RX F, which doesn't exist, then it's fast. So there's no SUV F's. No, so this gets the same engine as the base RX 350 because this is an RX 350. And F Sport just adds like fun little touches of excitement. Yeah, it's mostly body stuff and interior stuff. It's not actual performance stuff. So this engine is exactly what you would get in the base model and it's actually pretty quick like to downshift and everything and it's obviously naturally aspirated. So you're not waiting for any turbo lag and it's just it feels like a normal engine and it's really nice in 2020. Yeah, like no pumped in audio or anything like a lot of good stuff. Yeah. So people say like, oh, yeah, it's old school and like you knock them for it. But old school is good in certain ways and Toyota and Lexus know how to do old school properly. Because they never really went new school yet. Well, yeah, and when they try it's this infotainment that sometimes doesn't work. When they try to go new school, they build a Supra. Yeah, thanks. I mean Toyota and Lexus. I'm really excited for them to announce that they have their first Toyota with wireless Android auto next year. Oh, yeah, because it'll be a Supra. And so like I said, this does have an 8-speed auto, but the problem with this 8-speed auto is that if you're in drive and you're using the paddle, so watch this. I'm going to floor it. I'm going to try and upshift. It doesn't do anything. Nothing. Not a single upshift. That is so weird. So how that works is you put it into manual mode and then it'll upshift. That's like that's not something car companies do. Yeah, I know. But the funny thing is it will let you downshift and see this is why you need two car reviewers who do different things in cars so you can learn about the things that normal people wouldn't if they're only doing solar views. There you go teamwork. Yes. All right. So let's talk about these drive modes. So we do have normal slash custom. We have eco and we have sport and sport s plus I really don't notice a difference between any of the modes but the best part is changing the gauge cluster into s plus just the way it looks is cool. Yeah, just white. I just okay. I wonder that thing where you Florida turns red go. Yeah, that's cool. You hit 5,000 rpm. But you know what? I hate about this car. What's that say? You're in eco mode right now, right? Yep, Florida bit and let off and floor it and let off. You see what's happening. Yeah, the eco and the top right that little green light keeps flashing every time like you get on and off the gas. That is a Lexus RX thing. That's like when your grandma just like colored the thing out on the gauges with a permanent marker on her old Ford Escort. Yeah, by the way, my grandma handed me down a Ford Escort and it had a check engine light and the way that she fixed that was by using a permanent marker over those gags, which they ever the only way that I found it was looking at the gauge cluster from the side and seeing a weird orange light and then I figured out what it was and then I fix the actual problem. Perfect marker. So with handling performance and everything out of the way, let's get to the looks. I really like big Lexus grills. Yeah, so do I the spindle grill just works everyone hated it at first but everyone got used to it and everyone I think likes it a little bit more now. Yeah, I think it looks great. The grill pattern looks good the grill patterns on the side are fake grills, but but they have a gap behind it. So like they put in the extra effort. They didn't just put like plastic right against the back which is what like the Civic or something like that would do there's actual effort in the fakeness of this. Yeah, which I mean is good and the headlights are good normal Lexus headlights. They've been updated to LED. So they do look a lot nicer now and they function better and the side profile is really nice like super crisp. I really like it and I really like the floating roof design. Yeah, it's just not boring from the side, which is really nice to see and how about the wheels? I think these wheels really work for this car. I'd like to see them one size up but you're going to lose comfort. So I get it and this one is on Continental winter tires right now. So the Continental recommended tire for this would be the cross contact LX 25 or the new Viking contact 7 and if you happen to have Continentals on your car because of us feel free to send us an Instagram message with a picture of Yuri Tershin at the straight pipes or just leave a comment as well. And if you guys really want to help us out in 2020 watch the video all the way through that's pretty much the best way you can help us out at the straight pipes. Thank you guys. So how about the taillights? I love them. They look so cool. So sharp very good lines with no bleeding. So like the lights don't continue off once you pass the light section kind of like Tesla does. Yeah, and it's kind of like a budget version of the LC 500 because this is a Lexus. I really like taillights a lot. Yeah, they look so sharp. How about the exhaust tips? Exhaust tips are 2019 real. So you can see that 2020 real that pretty much 2020 real. Yeah. Okay, 2020 real and we got a pretty good looking diffuser in the middle. Oh, it's very F sport of this. It is overall really like the looks let's compare the looks to the competition. This or the RDX. I think I like the RDX more especially in a spectrum. I like this more because of the big grill and the headlights. What about the BMW X3? I think this looks better. I think this looks better but X4M I like more because it's uglier. Yeah, it's definitely uglier. This or the GLC slash GLE looks. I don't really know. I'm still with this because the headlights the grill. I think this it's just a little bit more exciting looking is different. So now it's time to get into the price. This starts at $56,050 Canadian and this one is optioned out to $69,850 with the F Sport Series 3 package. It doesn't seem that steep but it kind of does. Well, it's in line with all of its competition, but it doesn't have like all the cool gadgets that the BMW would have. Right, but nothing will probably break in here. That's the thing. It's the reliance. It's like this is like you said it was it probably because we can't say definitely because this is a technically all new like but like you said in the GSF the Lexus is probably the car to buy those other ones might be the car to lease pretty much because we can't talk about reliability the theme of this video. Yeah, so let us know what you guys think of the new RX 350 and check out this other playlist of luxury SUVs. Are we just going to wait until people click? Just a little bit ready and done. And by the way, I just found the trip odometer. It's blocked by every single stock in wow. Yeah, not very intuitive that eh?