What's the difference?
The Lexus RX holds broad appeal. Families with a bit of money that don’t need a third seating row, older people who love the brand and want a bit of space, and people stepping up into the premium marque from a mainstream brand are all potential buyers.
The fifth-generation version that launched in early 2023 proved to be a significant step up over the previous RX.
Lexus made it more dynamically capable, and there’s been a sharpened focus on refinement, value-for-money and safety credentials.
We spent three weeks getting to know the most affordable RX - the entry-grade Lexus RX350h Luxury two-wheel drive - to see whether it’s worth putting it at the top of your premium family SUV shopping list.
Chery’s explosive growth in Australia has been thanks to its range of affordable SUVs in some of Australia’s most in-demand categories.
Lately the brand has been expanding into the most in-demand segment of them all - hybrids. To that end, the Tiggo 4 Hybrid seems to tick a lot of boxes.
It’s relatively affordable, looks modern and offers plenty of features. Plus, unlike other Chery hybrids, it’s not a plug-in.
However, to see why I found the Tiggo 4 Hybrid a little disappointing - read on.
It’s hard to look past the value equation of the RX350h Luxury 2WD when comparing it to almost all its competitors. The pricing is on point, but there are some features missing.
However, there are very few (if any) rivals with a true hybrid powertrain (sorry, mild hybrids do not count), so the RX will capture buyers looking for environmental credentials and efficiency without going full EV.
The drive experience is much better than before and it’s all wrapped up in a very stylish package. The Lexus RX should not be ignored.
If you’re just looking for an affordable hybrid which will save you money at the pump, the Tiggo 4 will do the trick, but there are so many little things which could be better here, it’s evident you’re getting what you’re paying for.
This makes the Tiggo 4 hybrid a bit of a let down, because the other Cherys I’ve driven recently have been pleasantly surprising given their price-points, not to mention the price-gap between the Tiggo 4 and many of its rivals is nowhere near as large.
Across its five generations, the RX has held significant visual appeal - especially the still-handsome second-gen version that was the first RX sold Down Under. The first-gen model skipped Australia.
The new model that launched in 2023 is a clear evolution of the car that came before, but it’s been softened and sharpened in the right areas, giving it one of the most appealing designs in its segment.
The proportions and design elements like the squat stance, unique C-pillar treatment, slimline headlights and nicely sloping roofline give it a sporty look.
In fact, I reckon it might be the best looking Lexus available today - not including the jaw-droppingly beautiful LC coupe and convertible, of course.
The interior is modern and feels like an evolution of Lexus’ previous cabin design - but elevated. The gloss black section of the dash helps here.
Levels built into the dash break up the bulk, but the interior is very grey. It could do with a dash of colour.
The synthetic leather seat trim doesn’t look premium. If you want a more expensive feeling RX, you need to pay more for a higher grade.
On the outside, I think the Tiggo 4 Hybrid is pretty generic and inoffensive. It shares its 'box-on-wheels' aesthetic with cars like the outgoing Mitsubishi ASX and Hyundai Venue, which, to be fair, have been strong sellers.
It might not be an eye catcher, then, but there’s something to be said for not trying anything controversial, and this is pretty consistent across Chery’s range. In fact, compared to some brands in the market, Chery is doing a solid job of design consistency for its mainline SUVs.
Highlights on the outside include the enormous grille and contemporary LED light strip across the rear.
On the inside things also look pretty swish for this compact SUV category. The seats immediately jump out as a highlight, big and lavishly trimmed in comparatively soft synthetic stuff. The glitzy steering wheel and dual-screen layout continues from other Chery products and the dash design is tidy, if a little generic.
The RX is a five-seat only proposition in this generation - the previous model had a seven-seat option - so if you need a third row you can look at the Lexus LM people mover or massive LX 4x4 SUV, or at any number of other three-row lux SUVs like the Volvo XC90 or new Mazda CX-90.
That doesn’t mean the cabin isn’t practical.
Up front the seats offer excellent comfort levels and ample upper body support, but not a lot of hip support.
Lexus has changed up the door handles for the new RX and it can be complicated - initially.
The interior handles bamboozled every new person that got in my press car over the three week loan. But once you realise it’s a simple push of the thumb on the handle’s thumbpad and a gentle push, it all makes sense.
Lexus calls the electrically activated door handles an ‘e-latch’. Is it tech for tech’s sake? Probably.
I recently reviewed the Lexus LM and commented on how much I like Lexus steering wheels and that’s true of the RX, too.
It has clearly identifiable controls and feels nice in your hands. Thankfully, the cruise control buttons are housed on the wheel too, so no annoying stalk on the wheel.
There’s plenty of space across the front row so you should avoid the awkward driver-passenger elbow bump on the centre armrest.
Under the armrest is a huge central bin that opens on the driver and passenger side. There’s also a big covered storage nook forward of the shifter and another ledge above that, as well as a sizeable glove box.
The doors have ample storage room for bottles, but the space is almost too wide. My bottle slid around when driving so I had to lay it down.
The centre console houses two big cupholders with adjustable depth in one of them. Clever touches like this and the central bin add to the appeal.
As with the Lexus LM, I am a fan of the new Lexus multimedia set-up. It has an easy-to-navigate menu along the side, easy wireless Apple CarPlay connection, and visually appealing graphics.
It’s a world away from Lexus’ previous system. That frustrating touchpad is, thankfully, in the bin.
I quite like the gear shifter with its unusual gate and even the indicator feels and sounds premium.
Small rear windows make for a rear three quarter blind spot, but visibility is otherwise good.
On a side note, the RX has very strong air conditioning - perfect for an Australian summer.
Jumping into the second row, there’s plenty of space all around and no shortage of head, leg, knee and shoulder room. Although foot room under the front seats is tight.
As with the front seats, the rear row offers comfortable seating. Kids should be happy back there.
There’s only a small transmission tunnel so middle-seat legroom is good. And in great news for passengers, the rear backrests recline.
Lowering the 40/20/40 split-fold rear seats for more cargo space is done via a lever on the side of the outboard seats, or by a button in the boot area. There are ISOFIX clips on the two outboard seats.
Other amenities in the second row include map pockets, two USB-C ports, knee-level air vents, climate control, and a pull-down armrest with pop-open cupholders.
Open the power tailgate and you’ll find cargo space of 612 litres with all seats in place, or 1678L with the second row stowed.
That’s a decent amount of space but not class leading. The Mercedes-Benz GLE has 630L and the VW Touareg can swallow 810L.
There’s no under-floor storage because that’s where some hybrid hardware is housed. You will find audio speakers, nice carpet, a cargo blind, two 4.0kg hooks and three top tethers. No spare, only a tyre repair kit.
I can see this car having a lot of wow factor on a dealer forecourt but up close things are less good. The software on the screens is pretty ordinary; hardly the sharpest, fastest or most logically laid-out. There’s a selection of clumsy-looking themes, and while the multimedia portion has a logical smartphone-style main menu, beneath lies an array of confusing and inconsistently-labelled sub-menus.
The digital dash could be smoother and better looking and it’s a bit confusing to use with the poorly labelled buttons on the steering wheel.
The centre console area is finished in a gloss finish, which is easy to scratch or smear with fingerprints. Up front underneath the main screen is an entirely separate dot-matrix style climate control panel with actual physical buttons. It looks a bit clunky compared to some other solutions on the market, but at least it’s clearly labelled and straightforward to use.
Somewhat infuriatingly, though, interacting with this climate panel brings up a menu on the touchscreen which you don’t need and it takes several seconds to go away. Why?
The cabin is reasonably practical from there, though. There are decent bottle holders in each front door and a further two atop the console. There’s a pass-through beneath, good for handbags and the like. There are some strange additions, like an upright holster with rubberised sides which seems to be for a phone, and behind the shifter there’s a key fob-sized cut-out, but it’s gloss finished, so it will scratch if you actually use it.
The wireless phone charger is tucked away underneath, which makes your phone hard to get at in a pinch, and easy to forget when you exit.
Ergonomically, this car is a bit strange. The seat base is very high, so for me (at 182cm tall) even with the driver’s seat set to its lowest position, my head feels close to the roof. Plus, I’m peering down on the instruments, rather than have them at a comfortable height.
However, there are soft-touch surfaces adorning the doors, which can’t be said for every car in this segment and the rear seat hasn’t been forgotten, either.
I fit pretty comfortably behind my own driving position in terms of knee and headroom and the plush seat trim continues.
There’s a nearly flat floor, so while it’s a reasonably narrow vehicle, at least someone in the centre position will have somewhere to put their feet.
On the amenity front for rear passengers, there’s a small bottle holder in each door, pockets on the backs of the front seats, a weird storage tray and USB port on the back of the centre console and a drop-down armrest with two shallow cupholders. There’s just a single adjustable air vent for rear passengers, so they’ll have to fight over who gets the airflow.
The boot surprised me. It looks tiny, but the brand claims it weighs in at 470 litres. On top of this, the floor is a strange shape because the 12-volt battery is under the floor and doesn’t quite fit level.
However, when I went to load the full three-piece CarsGuide test luggage set, I was surprised to find it fit snugly, with the tailgate able to shut without a problem. I was also impressed to find a space-saver spare wheel and not just a repair kit under the floor.
The range-opening RX350h Luxury 2WD petrol-electric hybrid starts at $86,904, before on-road costs, and for that amount, the standard specification list is healthy. But it doesn’t include everything.
As well as a long list of standard safety gear (see section below), the RX350h comes with three-zone climate control, heated and eight-way adjustable power front seats, electric steering wheel adjust, rain-sensing wipers, a 14-inch multimedia set-up with wired Android Auto and wireless Apple CarPlay, digital radio, sat nav, a 12-speaker audio system, five USB-C (and one USB-A) ports and more.
It is missing a few items, however, that should be standard, such as a head-up display and wireless device charging. Those features are available as part of an options pack - or 'Enhancement Pack' in Lexus speak.
For $5000 more you get those two things and a panoramic sunroof, ventilated seats, a more digital instrument cluster and other goodies.
You can opt for an all-wheel drive version of the 350h and that adds just over $3500 to the price. If you want the same powertrain but more gear then you’ll need to step up to the $110,575 Sports Luxury.
There’s also the petrol-only RX350 in F Sport and Sports Luxury guise, as well as the flagship RX500h F Sport Performance hybrid that tops out at $124,675.
Looking at the opening price of some of its rivals, Lexus has most of them beat.
The Mercedes-Benz GLE300d starts from $144,900, the BMW X5 xDrive30d is $134,900, Porsche Cayenne starts at $138,700 and the Volvo XC90 B5 Ultimate Bright kicks off from $100,990.
Only the Volkswagen Touareg 170TDI ($89,240) and Jaguar F-Pace P250 R-Dynamic ($83,700) are close on price.
The Tiggo 4 Hybrid we’ve been driving for this review is the top-spec Ultimate, which wears a price-tag of $34,990, drive-away.
The surprising thing about this is how close it is to rivals. Yes, the Tiggo 4 Hybrid is still more affordable than most of its contemporaries, but it’s not by the same massive margin as its larger models like the Tiggo 7 PHEV ($39,990), which undercut the outgoing Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV by almost $20,000.
Instead, the Tiggo 4 Hybrid only just slips under a Toyota Yaris Cross GX hybrid ($34,790) although the margin increases considering Chery’s offer is drive-away. It also continues to look impressive compared to popular hybrid alternatives from more traditional automakers, like the exxy Honda HR-V (from $39,900) and the sightly larger Hyundai Kona (from $36,950).
The Tiggo 4’s value proposition is also complicated by how much competition there is in this small SUV space. A Haval Jolion hybrid, for example, can be had at $32,990, drive-away and is a slightly larger vehicle with a similar warranty offering, while MG’s ZS Hybrid+ can be had from $33,990, also drive-away, giving you plenty of things to think twice about.
Still, compared to those base prices for rivals, Chery is offering a top-spec and the Tiggo 4 Hybrid is pretty well equipped in this Ultimate form.
On the outside there are some expected things like 17-inch alloys and LED lighting, while on the inside the Tiggo 4 punches above its weight with things like dual 10.25-inch scregens for the multimedia and digital dash, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, synthetic leather seat trim with power adjust for the driver and heatin in the front two positions, dual-zone climate, a sunroof, ambient interior lighting, a wireless phone charger and a six-speaker stereo system.
There’s also a pretty good 360-degree view parking camera, walk away locking and auto-folding wing mirrors.
At this price, and in this segment, you generally have to spend a lot more to get this level of kit.
Powering the RX350h is a series parallel hybrid system consisting of a naturally aspirated 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine, a front-mounted motor and a nickel-metal hydride battery.
Lexus doesn’t provide combined torque outputs for the hybrid, but total power for the system is pegged at 184kW.
This drives the front wheels only via a continuously variable transmission (CVT).
The Tiggo 4 hybrid variants pair a 1.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine with a relatively large electric motor housed in a transaxle-style unit driving the front wheels. In effect, it's continuously variable without being a much-derided CVT auto.
Weirdly, Chery doesn’t state combined power figures, just separate ones for each power source, with the engine producing 72kW/120Nm and the electric motor producing 150kW/310Nm.
You’ll note the electric motor is much more powerful than the engine, which has an effect on the way this car drives.
The official combined cycle fuel consumption figure for the RX350h 2WD is 5.0 litres per 100 kilometres, with CO2 emissions of 114g/km. You won’t get figures like that in a petrol or diesel competitor.
Over three weeks of mixed city, country, urban and freeway driving, I recorded 6.8L/100km which is not too bad given some of my spirited driving. The trip computer said 7.0L which is close to my figure.
The RX350h takes premium unleaded petrol and has a 65-litre fuel tank, so expect a range of around 950km based on our real-world consumption number.
The whole point of this plugless hybrid set-up is fuel efficiency and on paper it’s not as good as some rivals.
The official combined cycle (urban/extra-urban) economy number is 5.4L/100km, but we easily beat that claim on test with a figure of 4.5L/100km. Worth noting that average came primarily from urban and expressway driving. It seems the hybrid transmission might require significantly more combustion input in freeway scenarios, hence the higher official claim.
A 51-litre fuel tank translates to a 944km range using the official economy figure and around 1100km based on our on-test average.
The old RX was competent and even nice to drive but not a patch on the likes of the BMW X5. The new-gen RX improves on that in a big way.
It offers solid acceleration from a standing start. Lexus says 8.1sec from 0-100km/h - without giving you chills. The sportiest RX is the 500h Performance hybrid and that covers the same distance in 6.2sec.
The transition from electric power to petrol propulsion is more evident in this model than it was in the LM350h people mover I tested recently - the RX is a little noisier. The CVT doesn’t help this, offering up an uninspiring engine note.
It is, however, a much more fun car to push into tight bends than the previous RX. It remains reasonably flat in corners, and pulls out of tem with ease, but can’t compare to the dynamics of the dearly departed IS sedan.
The 19-inch tyres have large sidewalls and as a result soak up harsh bumps on the road. The non-adaptive suspension is tuned for better dynamism, meaning the ride quality is on the firm side.
The front-wheel drive RX lost traction for a second on a sweeping uphill section of my drive route, but the electronic traction systems otherwise kept the big SUV in check.
But around town in urban areas, there is very little to complain about behind the wheel of the RX350h.
The Tiggo 4 is a strange one. This hybrid one in particular has me in two minds.
My initial impression was not a good one. The high seating position makes you feel as though you’re sitting on the car rather than in it, and the overly electrically-assisted steering removes you from feeling what’s going on at the front wheels.
Even the pedal feel is wooden, with the car having to modulate the electric and combustion drive components and blended regenerative braking at arms length, leaving the driver with little in the way of feedback.
The ride isn’t one of the worst I’ve had in recent years, with an overall soft enough edge to it, but it also doesn’t feel very sophisticated, and harsher over the rear than it is in the front, giving it an unbalanced character. On top of this, our test car had a couple of intermittent rattling noises in the B-pillar (around where the belt retainer is) as well as somewhere in the rear.
Acceleration is pretty impressive at speeds under 80km/h, however, with plenty of power instantly available from the electric motor, although this has the side-effect of being able to easily overwhelm the Sailun tyres this top-spec Tiggo 4 ships on.
One thing I quite like about the Tiggo 4, however, is how smooth it is. The seemingly primarily electric drive is excellent, particularly at lower speeds where this car is at its best, surging forward largely in silence with no annoyances from a fiddly transmission.
Even the way it blends the combustion power in is seamless, even compared to a Toyota, for example, with the engine distantly buzzing away only when required.
It's impressive that unlike the MG3 and MG ZS which have similarly powerful electric motors but run out of juice and lose a bit of punch when the hybrid battery is low, the Tiggo 4 does a better job of managing its battery reserve level, making sure the strong electric power is always available. This might mean the engine idles higher and longer, but with decent sound deadening, it’s not something you notice much.
Overall the Tiggo 4 is okay to drive. The hybrid components impressed me enough, but these are tarnished by sub-par driver feedback and inputs, handling, tyres and some ergonomic issues.
The RX comes packed with standard safety gear and the SUV was awarded a maximum five-star crash safety rating from ANCAP in 2022.
Just some of the inclusions are auto emergency braking with pedestrian (day/night), cyclist (day/night) and motorcyclist (day) detection, intersection assist, emergency steering assist, driver monitoring, lane keeping aid and lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, front and rear parking sensors, blind spot monitor (including stationary) with rear cross-traffic alert and safe exit assist to avoid 'dooring' incidents.
I must say, Lexus’ (and parent company Toyota’s) driver assistance tech has come a long way.
In the early days of the pandemic during a rare non-lockdown period in Melbourne, I drove from Melbourne to Sydney in the previous-generation Lexus RX200 Sports Luxury.
The lane keeping system and adaptive cruise control were shockingly underdone. The cruise control would simply stop working when you encountered even a slight downhill section.
Not anymore. The new, smoother lane keeping set-up uses subtle wheel adjustments, unlike the ping pong effect of the previous RX, and the cruise system is now very much in control of the speed.
The Lexus safety suite now operates without too much intervention and is hard to beat among its key rivals.
The Tiggo 4 has a lot of safety kit for this segment and for such an affordable price, so much so that combustion versions have a maximum five-star ANCAP safety rating (although this hybrid variant didn’t exist when it was tested).
Active equipment includes all the key stuff like auto emergency braking, lane departure warning, blind-spot monitoring with rear cross-traffic alert, adaptive cruise and auto high beams.
The 360-degree parking camera is a nice touch and there are seven airbags (dual front, side, curtain and centre).
Is the active stuff annoying? Yes, but you can most of it off and the car remembers your choice next time you start it, so you can turn the most egregious offenders, like lane departure warning, and speed limit assist off.
Even when they’re on they are okay, but I found the driver monitoring to be the most annoying of the usual crop, pinging at you constantly, sometimes for reasons beyond my comprehension.
The one you can’t seem to permanently turn off is driver attention alert, which is annoying because it is this car’s most egregious offender, chiming at me for even daring to peer down at the digital dash to see how fast I’m going.
The RX350h is covered by a five-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty, and the servicing schedule is every 12 months or 15,000km.
There’s a capped-price servicing plan lasting five years and it will cost $695 per service. That's significantly less than some rivals like the Mercedes GLE.
The RX is covered by the 'Lexus Encore' loyalty program and includes complimentary service loan cars, fuel offers as well as discounts and other offers with Lexus partners.
The Tiggo 4 Hybrid is offered with a seven-year/unlimited km warranty, seven years of roadside assist and seven years of capped price servicing with an eight year and unlimited kilometre warranty for the high-voltage battery.
The servicing is required once a year or 15,000km, with each service costing $299 for the first five years. It jumps from there, with a particularly expensive service at $736.62, dragging the yearly average for the warranty period up to $360 a year.
It’s a little pricier than Toyota, for example, but very reasonably priced compared to most.