Gadgetory

the 60 came up in no time this handful power here in all the years we've been doing car tech here at scene that I can't recall a car that's had more advanced email from viewers than this one it's the new Lexus GS the 2013 GS 350 let's take it for a ride find out what all the anticipations about and check the tech now this believe it or not is perhaps the biggest headline on the new GS its Lexus new face the so called spindle grille it kind of kind of gathers in the middle like a waistline here the rest of the car is not so remarkable ok here we are inside the new GS and it tells you this car is I think more luxurious than sporting how do I know that because look at the dash it's this big strong horizontal pronouncement here this is kind of more borrowed dare I say it from the el Dorados Imperials and Continentals of your nice clean gauges Lexus ours is a great job of that great typography very clear very crisp and then you've got this guy that is a huge screen BMW has some that are that wide but I'm not sure they're that tall that's a big boy twelve point three inch diagonal the map hasn't changed it's still 2d only flat view they don't have a bird's eye view or a 3d or a satellite rendered thing I can live without that to the right though you've now got a fixed second part of the screen it's always there and lets you get to your music menu put up a climate screen or an efficiency screen hit the radio button here and of course that brings that up over the map and you've got all your entertainment sources there on the top my iPods plugged in here my Bluetooth audio streaming is available I can put an optical disc in here you've got standard aux and then that brings us to the apps you've got Pandora and iHeartRadio here as media apps Pandora of course is Internet predictive music I Heart Radio is Clear Channel's stations but if you notice anything different while I'm touring all this with you look how I'm doing it this is a very different interface from Lexus in the past and a very different controller and it a disaster all you do with this thing is overshoot what you want now you can't see this in a video but it's got haptics that means as I move across each thing on the screen it kind of goes cheap chunk chunk and you feel that on the little controller here but it's just so badly calibrated I'm constantly missing what I want and I'm not the only person who found this the most glaring thing is there's no back button so I found myself going back to the home menu all the time which looks like this which is over stylized what does this one mean for example go to my iPad can't do that visit the Supreme Court I'm on the wrong coast call a telemarketer to get a pitch for land in Florida those don't tell me anything now here I've got satellite delivered stuff from Lexus enform sports scores fuel prices can be handy as is weather then you dive in another level and you get apps there's a weird hodgepodge of distraction prevention here for example I can go to Yelp which is nice to have for some reason they decided that you can look at two pages while driving but you can't look at three or more like there's a big difference in distraction there it's just frustrating also frustrating is the fact that some of these apps have voice command some of these don't I can't operate Yelp with voice but I can't operate Bing an open table with voice and the voice command in this car wallets pretty good is still nowhere near as good as my $200 phone I mean not even in the same universe this is your drivetrain mode knob push it to go into normal mode kick it counterclockwise once for eco mode it'll dial back the performance and push up the mpg now turn it clockwise once for sport mode that's going to aggressive eyes the throttle mapping as well as the shift profiles and then kick it one more time to Sport Plus and that's going to get the active suspension to be much more aggressive and also going to dial in a more aggressive profile on the electric power steering you'll only get Sport Plus if you have an F sport car because that's where you get the active suspension right above that of course is our shifter one choice only six-speed Automatic in all GS cars that's getting a little bit of criticism in the car world because it doesn't have seven or eight or nine cogs we'll be on the road in a minute and find out if that's worthy criticism on top of the steering wheel here check this out two little eight there little red in four red things behind this lens that's part of the fall asleep technology and it's supposedly can tell if your eyelids are down and you've fallen asleep I found no reasonable life-preserving way to test it so I'll take them at their work the lka button here on the wheel enables the lane keep assist which will gently tug you back into your lane if you drift with the signal off works most of the time and be som over here that turns on the blind spot monitor that's a passive system gives you an indicator in the mirror that someone's tucked away back there by the way navigation on this car is actually optional I doubt many of them ship without it but it's technically an option as part of a package and they got a confusing array of pricey packages for this car still a three and a half later longitudinally mounted v6 rear-wheel drive base all-wheel drive optional compared to the last GS 350 which was a model year 2011 the differences are slim 303 horsepower has grown to 306 the torque has grown from 274 foot-pounds to 277 and the mpg has crept up slightly as well 1926 to 1928 comparing rear-wheel drive cars pushing two tons or about four thousand pounds or more a curb weight on this car that's one of my first questions is would you load up a two-ton four-door sedan with an F Sport package I don't know those things pull different directions in my mind the ride quality of course is Lexus like but without being as floaty as Lexus has been in the past thank the F Sport package for that it's a v6 car without any kind of a turbo or supercharger on it but what I do like about this engine is it is so happy to rev as a result this motor is responsive more than its powerful that said we have that 6-speed manual in here that a lot of the the auto Rotty tend to sneer at the mpg on this vehicle is not great I'm not sure two more gears with fix that okay pricing this car makes me crazy it's about $48,000 for a base gs350 rear-wheel drive bottom level then there's that F Sport package which we have here for about another six grand I wouldn't do it it doesn't make sense to put a bunch of go-fast stuff on a car that's already a two ton four-door sedan then there's Lexus many chunky packages from eight to eleven thousand dollars this is where you roll in the stuff you want and the stuff you don't want like that ghastly interface you're basically stuck with it this car is going to run your summer between the high 50s to about 60 grand done up seen that style