27 Jan 05
Here is a list of things that it is no longer acceptable to do in public: smoking, spitting chewing gum to the pavement and driving a 4x4. A slight exaggeration, to be sure, but not that much of a stretch. It has long been fashionable to be sniffy about school-run Mums and their Chelsea tractors gumming up our roads and pavements, but the greenies have become even more hysterical of late. Take the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, a campaigning group that's taken to sticking spoof parking tickets on the windscreens of off-roaders, with phrases such as 'axles of evil' and 'poor vehicle choice'. So if you fancy running a 4x4 how do you respond to such attacks, apart from telling these folk to mind their own sodding business?
Lexus just might have the answer. In the warm afterglow of Toyota's Prius, winner of Car of The Year gong and vehicle of choice amongst enviro-poseur celebs, Lexus has given the RX 300 the same hybrid treatment. The result is the RX 400h, which will go on sale here next May. The 'h' is for hybrid and the '400' is meant to represent the 4.0-litre V8 output that the hybrid Lexus aspires to. In fact, the RX 400 is powered by a 3.3-litre V6 that receives a helping hand from two powerful electric motors.
The result is a powertrain that develops 272bhp. As with the Prius, at low speeds around town the RX is powered exclusively by battery, but once speeds rise or more acceleration is called for, the petrol engine comes on line. When serious performance is demanded, both electric motors and the engine step up to the plate. And the driver gets performance potential that translates to 0-62mph in just 7.6secs and a top speed of 125mph.
And the payoff for Mother Earth is fuel consumption of 34.8mpg combined, a very good figure for a big petrol-powered off-roader, and remarkably low CO2 emissions of 192g/km. To put that in perspective, that's almost exactly the same polluting output as a Vauxhall Vectra 1.8 16v estate, which has far less than half the power of the Lexus. In fact, Lexus reckons that an owner doing 22,000km a year in an RX 400h will produce 2.6 tons less CO2 than somebody driving a similarly powered non-hybrid 4x4. We did the math for ourselves and found, if anything, Lexus is being conservative.
