Gadgetory

I think of this as the landcruiser for those who cruise the land of country clubs this is the Lexus lx570 big luxurious but don't let its gilded exterior and cabin booyah it's a real body-on-frame off-roader let's drive it check the tip now in a sense the LX is really the Lexus LS of SUVs it's a full-size SUV it's a body-on-frame construction which makes it technically a truck that also means the thing can pull 7,000 pounds on a trailering load you've got all-wheel drive as your only configuration and as we're going to find out it's a fairly complex system three rows of seating inside our standard Lexus says it'll hold eight people although I'd hate to be number six seven or eight now inside this big boy you've got a lot of traditional Lexus cues one thing I notice right away is a lot of traditional gauges here again kind of in truck style you've got things like oil pressure and temperature gauges and ammeter things that most of their cars have given up years ago but it makes for a nice substantial feel now let's get to the head unit where most of the tech is gonna play out we see this navigation system before and the media choices and of course the optional mark levinson upgraded nineteen speakers surround sound so all of this is quite familiar still what I want to take you to is going to this area called apps in the upper left this is what they call Lexus enform it's the cousin of Toyota Entune right they're kissing cousins very similar and you've seen this before as well the nice thing about this system is you install the inform app on your phone and it cloud loads all these apps one time under the Bing app again no Google search here you do have the ability to kind of do a free-form search for just about anything and you can use voice if you use this voice icon the voice button on the wheel does not tie into this system which is a little inelegant San Francisco Giants and there you go hit that it's going to take you to information about the Giants and I bet it's going to show me how to get to the ballpark yep there it is so it's very sort of tuned toward automotive it didn't bring me up you know box scores or the history of the Giants or who's on the mound today it just went to what I need to know for a vehicle application very smart I Heart Radio which have always had contempt for because why would you have an app that just brings you the stations of one ownership group I won't even use it movietickets.com I'd prefer Fandango myself here's OpenTable again you can use voice search which is the key way to operate this find a table at 7:00 for a party of four at trattoria fresco not bad that's pretty good for a relatively unstructured search finally you've got Pandora which again uses the app on your phone then puts it into car mode and brings all the control up here and finally your Facebook implementation here is strictly Facebook Places basically checking in as you drive around nothing more than that you can't look at your wall and make long post or anything like that fortunately now the downsides of this system first of all as you may have noticed it's kind of dog slow and I don't attribute that all to the fact that it's using my phone's 3/4 G connection I think there's some processing delay going on here that needs to be sped up secondly if you were out on the road with this a whole slew of these functions get locked out but not all of them it's a weird hodgepodge which doesn't let you operate with a single clear set of behaviors it drives me nuts and finally under Yelp notice there isn't a voice search button here as there is for almost every other app in this application suite and of course this cabin abounds and creature comforts you've got heated and cooled seats you've got four zone climate control and right here in the console under the armrest we've got the optional cool box which looks like it's set up for about two bottles which is a controversial space allocation and of itself uses the air conditioned to pump in the coldest air it can wing and there's a pretty good job in there plenty of camera tech on this big boy luckily go into reverse and you've got a couple of options here first of all you can change up what they call your Park Assist this gives you a variety of indications of where you should go to park but it's not a self parking vehicle that technology is not available on this LX and I think that might be useful but it does give you a zone to aim for I'm not sure it's gonna help a lot of folks who can't park it'll just be difficult in a different way but that's my opinion and then when you're creeping forward like a mile or two per hour you get this front camera but the other one that's really valuable the one that looks over on the right side because in a vehicle this big in this tall you have no idea what's down over there and this lets you keep a peak on that's quite useful now as so often is the case in life what's going on in your hindquarters is important to pay attention to split tailgate the upper part going that way the lower third of course comes down to make a nice little bench and also give you a lower lift over now these seats here in the third row are fairly substantial the room isn't bad I mean it's basically for kids or adults you hate but here's how you clear the area although it's only sort of clear drop the headrest first and then you've got these buttons here that will lower each of the seat backs now to get the remaining seat assembly out of the way you go to these buttons over here that lift by power each of those seat clusters up to the sides of the vehicle now you may think it's a huge waste of space to have these sort of sitting like that except notice that Lexus has them flush with where the wheel wells are anyway so you don't lose a lot of actual floor with now under the hood of this big boy is a big motor 5.7 liter v8 but nothing tricky about it not even direct injection 383 horsepower 403 pound-feet of torque all-wheel drive only six-speed Automatic through a standard Torsen center limited slip differential pretty serious gear zero to 60 is 7.5 seconds which may sound unremarkable until you realize this vehicle weighs 6,000 pounds its MPG rating is commiserate at 12:17 now things get really interesting when you get down to all these buttons around the shifter then over here you've got your high and low four-wheel drive controller next to that you've got your crawl button this will take you crawling up or down at supercareful modulated speeds there's also a turn assist technology button next to that and then here are some degrees of crawl on a rocker switch and next to that you've got a height adjustment rocker this lets you go anywhere from 3 inches up from normal all the way to 2 inches below normal a 5 inch range of taking this guy up and down thanks to its air suspension finally your suspension controls sport normal and comfort and as you can see we've got a lot of ways to fiddle with this vehicle I hope you're into off-roading okay driving the lx570 is as I mentioned got a lot of LS DNA and it's smooth all the responses you get back from the road or are refined and almost muted depending on your position here on the suspension in particular this is a very responsive engine and obviously a big and powerful one when you tip into the throttle you get to measure it amounts of power right now because we're not dealing with turbos and because they've got the computers and such program to stay alert it's a very responsive Drive and that makes it actually enjoyable to drive around and even though it's huge I like the normal setting on the suspension I've gone to sport and it just seems to get a little jittery and little nervous coax the gearshift over here into the sports side of the gate even if you don't shift and now you're in a sport mode that just revs a little higher hangs onto those gears and little gutsy your way all in all I think you'd be surprised how much this does not feel like you're piloting a ship by the way if you need help driving something this big you should shop elsewhere the lx570 is mostly lacking in driver assist technology it does offer adaptive cruise control but no lane departure tech no blind spot tech and no automatic full braking to prevent a collision okay let's price our big crimson friend these don't come cheap they're high-end vehicles and they're big capable vehicles so eighty three five base nicely equipped but to get it fully seen that style you've got to add about eighty four hundred dollars for the package that gets you Levinson sound fully cool and heated seats that cool box in the console a card key instead of a wireless fob adaptive cruise control the DVD rear sea entertainment rig I could easily live without and the parking assist visualizations on the main screen so all in about 92 grand if you're looking for that costly kind of luxury you find in Lexus LS but you also want serious offroading and towing ability this might be your guy