Gadgetory

when I'm reviewing a car I have to consider what I want to take it on a road trip you know spending ten hours a day in the driver's seat traveling across vast expanses well with the 2014 Lexus gs450h the answer is definitely a yes the 2014 Lexus gs450h has two things that really recommend it for a roadtrip one it's got a very nice driving feel it's a luxury car and two it's very economical you wouldn't necessarily consider a luxury car to be economical to have a hybrid system like this one it's sort of like a a billionaire shopping for groceries at Trader Joe's but it all comes together nicely in this car there's a couple of design cues that distinguish the GS 450h from the GS 351 thus 450h has a slight bluish cast to the lexus emblem up front that's supposed to mean blue skies kind of green tech kind of thing and we also of course have hybrid badges down the side as well now let me give you a refresher course how a hybrid gasoline-electric system works in a car we've got a gasoline engine we've got an electric motor and we've got a battery pack now when you slow down or hit the brakes that that kinetic energy is actually captured and generated and turned into electricity and stored in the battery when you go forward when you hit the accelerator the energy from the battery is sent to the electric motor and that's used to help push the car forward gasoline engine also comes in to push the car forward and depending on the situation you could be driving under fully electric power under both the electric motor and the gasoline engine or just the gasoline engine and unless gs450h we've got a really robust hybrid system the gasoline engine it's a 3.5 liter v6 this engine does 286 horsepower 254 pounds of torque for valve time it uses an app consume cycle that's actually our uses the power a little bit but it's more efficient now with these systems Lexus is fairly honest about the total horsepower total output of the system they didn't just add the horsepower from the engine and the motor together they do a calculation that gets them to a total system output in this case 338 horsepower that's not bad for a car of this size and Lexus says it'll go from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds let's get in the cabin and check the tech I really like the cabin inside this GS 450h Lexus has done well the usual job of nice luxury appointments but one thing I particularly like is they've gotten using bamboo for this trim pieces here and they use a satin finish on this which gives it a really natural feel I like this so much better than the really high-gloss wood surfaces you find in some cards one really cool feature that I've not seen on other cars are these automatic seat heating and cooling controls and if you just hit the seat heating one once it puts it into automatic mode what that will do is it'll look at the temperature you've set in the climate controls and automatically adjust the seat heating or cooling depending on the outside temperature we have the shifter here this controls what Toyota Lexus has used in their hybrid vehicles for a long time is their transmission it's actually a planetary gearset it's sort of an electronically controlled variable transmission you can throw it over here to a sport mode you also have a manual shift mode which seems kind of weird because there's no actual gears here but they do include eight program shift point so it mimics what an 8-speed would do and I can select those gears by either pushing up for an upshift or down for a downshift let's have these paddles on the wheel and along with that we also have different drive modes so we've got this dial controller here on the console we have two sport settings we've got sport if I turn it once to the right and Sport Plus if I turn it once more now when I do that there's a little bit of magic that happens on the instrument cluster so if I'm in normal mode or eco mode I have a speedometer on the right on the left side I have this power gauge this shows when the car is charging through regenerative braking shows when it's moving in Eco mode or it shows that I'm really on the power but when I move it to sport mode this thing suddenly changes into a tachometer it's pretty cool it's a nifty little feature I like it for the infotainment system here we've seen this controller here before in Lexus vehicles this is what they call remote touch it's actually sort of a mouse like thing you you move this little pad around and it moves a cursor on this huge twelve point three inch screen it's not my favorite because when you move it around it's really easy to sort of skip what you're looking when you move the different moved to different options on the screen next to the menu button I also have a map button so I can go directly to my maps I like that feature and when this auxilary screen I give you some basic controls like on the audio screen I can change audio sources or I can skip tracks and you go to the climate control screen and actually choose temperature and stuff like that I don't know why I'd want to do it there when it's really easy to do it with the panel on the dashboard here you know the maps look pretty good one weird thing with Toyota Lexus is they don't do perspective view maps they only do plan view maps that's looking straight down on it you can get north up or the direction of the car but you can't get on any other kind of map on here if I want to choose a destination I actually have to hit the the menu button then go over here and choose the destination icon it's not my usual destination options like address entry point of interest destination assist is actually their telematics system so I can actually push a button and call an operator and they can send a destination to the car and here if I choose the little apps folder I get a series of apps that are actually connected to my phone for audio sources even though on this main menu screen they separate radio and media which is a little bit annoying when you go to the actual audio screen there it's all the same you can actually choose any of the audio sources from the screen all of this music is playing through a Marc Levenson audio system that's an upgrade in this car 17 speakers it's a good sounding system it's very well balanced and you can get good distinct highs you can get pretty deep bass it'll shake some of the panels depending on what tracks you're playing one way I've noticed I was driving down the freeway fairly flat freeway 70 miles an hour and I was seeing the prep computer give me an average rating of it was approaching 40 miles per gallon I was really impressed by that so I assumed that's what a lot of your driving is that you're your total average would probably be in the mid-30s or so and that's that's excellent for a car of this size this is electric power steering fairly easy to turn low speeds I mean there's not a lot of feel here at higher speeds it halves up a bit generally it's just a very comfortable easy uncomplicated car to drive the suspension gives it a nice ride quality it's very common it's especially not soft but it damps out the bumps really well it's it's a little bit springy and I really enjoyed the feel this car the accelerator wasn't always there didn't always have the power on tap because the hybrid system was a little fussy that way but ultimately you know what I feel like this car does the best is just cruises all right let's price out our 2014 Lexus gs450h base price comes in at sixty thousand four hundred thirty dollars now options may vary by region but in California you will only have three choices there's three luxury option packages now at the base level the lowest price one which is about ten thousand five hundred sixty-two dollars you get the mark leviston stereo you get navigation you get LED headlights you even get a head-up display now if you go up to the top level package $15,000 package you add some driver assistance features like adaptive cruise control and Lane Keeping Assist you want those extra $5,000 if not you're about ten thousand dollars over total price comes in about 72,000 so 72 thousand dollars is a hefty price for a car but I really like this GS 450h it's it's a good all-around car it's not a lot of fuss it has a lot of good technology its comfortable to drive to work everyday and it's definitely a car I wouldn't mind taking on road trip across the country you