Until quite recently, virtually all cars were billed as exciting because that’s what people wanted: speed and handling and lashings of rip-snorting exhaust noises. We needed to know that our car was faster than our neighbour’s car and sometimes, on the way back from the pub, in a cacophony of single camshaft, four-cylinder awfulness, we’d attempt to prove it.
Yet now, it seems, we’re not bothered how quickly our cars go. Sure, there are still Ferraris and Aston Martins and McLarens, but by and large you never hear people arguing about their family cars in a pub, and apart from a halfwit in a Tesla recently, I can’t remember the last time I was invited to a race at the lights. Our love affair with speed lingers on in our limbic system, but on the surface it’s gone. Today I have absolutely no idea how quickly my car goes from 0 to 100 or what its top speed might be. I’ve never even tried to find out, which is something I routinely did with all cars back in my youth.
What interests us in 2022 is the simplicity of the sat-nav system and the internet connectivity and whether the voice-activation system will put a call through to “Bob” and not “Mum”, which is what usually happens. In the not too distant past BMW boasted constantly that it made the ultimate driving machine. And we all liked the idea of that. The perfect weight distribution, the clever suspension geometry, the way the engine became more eager when it “got on the cam”. And now? Well, BMW recently announced a new car that, at the flick of a switch, can change colour. And no one said, “Yes, but how fast does it go?”
We are told that driverless cars are coming. This ought to fill me with dread, but actually, it’s not so bad. Because who wants to drive a car when they could be looking at cows falling over on TikTok?
That’s what we want our cars to be. Private trains. Mobile offices. A safe and comfortable space where we can do our business and stay connected while we move around.
All of which brings me to the subject of this morning’s missive. The Lexus ES Something or Other. A few years ago, I’d have dismissed it as dreary and as boring as a weatherman’s trousers. But that was then, and this is now. It’s not a fast car. It’s not even on nodding terms with the concept of speed, mainly because it uses an internal combustion engine that was designed by a man called James Atkinson, in England, in 1882. It’s an engine designed to be efficient, not powerful – and that, 140 years after old James, thought of it, is seemingly what the world wants. Especially if it’s allied to an electric motor to create a “hybrid”.
You put your foot down and there’s nothing more than a faint buzz as the car starts to pick up speed. And sometime later you’ll notice, if you’re paying attention, that the speedometer readout has changed. You were doing 50 and now you’re doing 51. If you really put your back into it all day, you can, I’m told, get it up to 57.
It’s annoying when you reach a village and have to sacrifice your hard-won speed, but slow down you must because the Something or Other yells at you if you break the limit, or if you veer too close to the white lines. It wants you to behave. Another peculiarity is that there are no gear changes because it has just one sort of infinite gear. There are paddles on the steering wheel that make it feel like you’re swapping cogs. But you aren’t. You’re just slowing things down even more.
So, what about handling? Well, it’s a front-wheel drive saloon car, so even though the car I drove was the F Sport model, it plainly wasn’t designed to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. What happens at the limits of adhesion? No idea. I never even got close.
To drive the Something or Other, then, is very boring indeed. But crikey it’s comfortable. There’s a button that makes it less so, but no one will ever push that. It’s also quiet and well-priced and because it’s a Lexus, very well made. Panel gaps and shut lines are so tight, it beggars’ belief. If ever I need a pacemaker, I want Lexus to make it.
Would the pacemaker be boring? Yes, probably, but I don’t think that would matter. And it doesn’t really matter with this car. Because there’s no getting round the fact that in a world full of ecomentalists and speed cameras and righteous cyclists waging war on cars, its quiet, grey anonymity does make a deal of sense.
Lexus ES 300h F Sport
ENGINE: 2.5-litre petrol-electric hybrid (160kW combined). Average fuel 4.8 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: Continuously variable front-wheel drive
PRICE: From $72,930
STARS: 3 out of 5
