Gadgetory

there's not much in the Lexus line you can't get with a hybrid power plant including this the kind of hot looking es let's drive this ES 300h hybrid check the tech now the es used to always get kind of some snide remarks for being sort of dowdy a tarted-up camry you've heard all the lines this is a pretty hot looking car in this sedan class you've got that trapezoidal mouth what does the new Lexus look you come to so much swoopy your lines down the roofline into the rear and the cars got a little bit of the Lexus LS bearing without being so overbearing let's get inside now first off when you get into this ES this is a really nice car really nice materials nice and soft I'm always amazed at how smooth they polished this wood part of the wheel in the Lexus but then it starts to jar me a little bit there's every single aspect of a French curve used somewhere on this - you've got trapezoids and you've got the Lexus grille echoed here then you've got tapers and it's kind of chaotic my other problem is this color of the interior I'm sorry but chamois colored hard plastic doesn't do any carmaker any favors and Lexus is no exception now notice here we have a screen on this car but we don't have navigation but this is what they call a display audio system I think it's optional but I doubt you'll ever see an es hybrid that doesn't have it you've got a knob controller here but it's different than what you'd get with nav which would be that Lexus palm controller so everything changes but you still have nav and controller for a bunch of basic settings the most interesting of which are your medium now of course you've got AM and FM radio we have HD radio on this car as well that's part of an optional package though that is not strictly bass if you go to the media setting we have our CD slot right here you see we get nice readout of the text from the tracks there Gracenote database and here's our bluetooth streaming player now this is my Android phone I'm not getting metadata it doesn't mean that you won't on yours but on at least mine ain't happening and that's always annoying to me the good news is we have very reliable AV RCP the remote control protocol so this track adjustment pause and play worked really well for me every time I have a great feel about the radio screens where they do the actual meta tags coming in from the RDS system they don't use all the real estate that they could that second law in there where the tagline is it always seems to be cutting something off and sometimes it's kind of funny and of course you see here we don't have Toyota Lexus generally excellent app support they call that into non Toyota inform on the Lexus it's one of the best in the business but you've got an option into that now the other knob on the console after you get rid of all this head unit stuff is this one over here for your drive select it's very interesting we've seen it before on the CT you've pushed it to go to normal mode you rotate once to go to sport which also turns your left gage from an eco gauge to attack and lights everything up in red you go to the left counterclockwise for eco mode below that's a button for evey mode to force it to an electric more often than not and then on your transmission you've got a sport mode this is starting to become madness it's not just Lexus this transmission by the way is a CVT it's got a traditional shifting gate but it's just a continuously variable gearbox no real gears in there and you do have a rear camera on this car but that is optional although again I bet every es hybrids probably going to ship with this you get a wide-angle camera if you go to a higher trim with now last thing I want to point out in this car is well the seats are very comfy they're also very hot the seat heaters go from position 1 which is ok that's too hot up to position 3 which is good grief call the Consumer Product Safety Commission they kind of give me like a half point in here somewhere these things are serious now the EES has always gotten lots of ribbing for being some kind of fancy camry here is one place where it does share the guts with a camry it's hybrid motor this is not the Prius powertrain it's the camry hybrid powertrain 2.5 litre lean-burn inline 4 in spite of the fact this car is called a 300 it's not a 3 liter couple that with electric motor of course front wheel drive only in that one choice CVT gearbox 200 horsepower doesn't sound like much but of course hybrids are full of torque unfortunately Alexis doesn't quote a torque number for this car so we'll have to go on the road and see if it has enough they do quote mpg of course 40 city 39 highway for a car that weighs nearly 3,700 pounds compare that to the v6 on this car the standard gas engine you'd be getting a much lower 20 1:31 MPG there is a real difference okay it's a hybrid with a strong electric mode so you put it the gear you start it nothing happens the car just runs to move a little odd to begin with this car can go a few miles I think it's about 2 miles or so in Puri V mode and depending on the conditions that can do that at relatively high speeds up to about freeway speed I think now there's a big difference between sports where it really pours on the torque electric motors are good for that and here's eco or it's really kind of reticent to move well normal is actually a great plan the ride quality dialed together like a Swiss watch as you might imagine nothing rattles at all on the other hand the ride was a little bit unrefined I told that they were trying to get a sport ride which sometimes is just how to place this car to me is a luxurious kind of an affordable premium sedan and I got too much road input and the real-world mpg we were seeing was somewhere in the mid 30s a combination of driving on freeway city up and down hills in some trenches storms we had the last few days that's a really nice real world number one more thing about driving this car there kind of anoint me there's a very slight high-pitched whine on deceleration or acceleration coming from somewhere over here on the left side of the dash the hybrid might be a power inverter thing I'm guessing but I can hear it my ears are pretty damn good I guess that sounds like it's up around 15k or more but it annoys me after a while I want it to stop Arlis price this 2013 ES 300h about thirty nine seven is your base with destination won't have a lot of tech at that point you can add about twenty six hundred bucks to get navigation premium audio and a few other niceties that would be kind of your main entry point to go see that style to go hog-wild though you spend ten thousand six on top of the bass and that gets you every tech toy in the book and these guys do all their technology pretty well so very little if any of it is going to be waste you