  2014 Lexus IS 350 AWD. Click image to enlarge |
Review and photos by Brendan McAleer
The road that winds across the spine of Vancouver Island from Port Alberni to Tofino, BC, is gorgeous, scenic and twisty – truly, no better/worse place in the world to be jammed up behind two rented RVs. As it is written in the Rental RV Handbook, these two wallow in the corners at sub-30 km/h speeds, and then make like Han and Chewie on the straights, hitting the hyperdrive, ignoring the indicated pullouts and making safe passing impossible.
If you’d like to know what our Lexus sport sedan makes of this sort of behaviour, just take a gander at the look on its face. Ye Gods. That is one angry machine.
After eight long years, Lexus has finally updated their compact sedan and, here in the F-Sport models, it’s not what you’d call subtle. The massive hourglass grille gurns like the Noh mask of a vengeful spirit, gawping with menace. It’s like a Cylon. It’s like Darth Vader. It’s like the Predator. It’s like an Audi grille wearing Mom Jeans.
Add in the fact that, like most press cars out West, this thing’s clad in Ontario plates, and little wonder that the two RV-ists ain’t pullin’ over. No problem then, we’ll just slow our roll and check out the interior appointments.
It’s tempting to call the inside of the IS “LFA-lite” and leave it at that. From centre-stack to air-vents, the guts of this fancy Toyota are an homage to the fanciest of Toyotas, and that’s mostly a good thing.
Mostly, because despite high-quality materials and excellent fit and finish, there are a few areas where non-Lexus-o-philes will look at a surface of undisguised plastic and wonder why it isn’t aloominum-look or carbon-fibre overlay. I like the honesty just fine, but it’s not going to woo everyone away from the Teutonic competition.
   2014 Lexus IS 350 AWD. Click image to enlarge |
The seats – here’s a minor detail that’s excellent in execution. At the Texas launch of the car, Lexus engineers blathered on at length about a sports car–low hip point and a new method of bonding the leather bolsters with an impressed curve in the foam. No surprise then that the IS can boast butt-cosseting chairs, and when you get out to look at them, there’s an air of quality.
Out back, the car’s previous cramp-tacular rear seats have expanded to now fit normal human beings with, y’know, legs and whatnot, and they swallow up our rear-facing child-seat with ease. The trunk impresses when I manage to stow both the running stroller and hiking backpack in there.
 2014 Lexus IS 350 AWD. Click image to enlarge |
While the central screen is better integrated than in a BMW 3 Series, Lexus’s control system is not. You know how everyone uses trackballs to control their desktop computers instead of mice? That’s right – we don’t. The odd controller is fiddly to use, often jumps two places when you only wanted to move one, is a bit slow and overloaded, and is generally distracting to use. Possibly you could get used to the shortcuts in more than a week’s worth of driving, but in the short-term it felt like it was different for difference’s sake. And, a sadly recurring cardinal sin among manufacturers of all types, the navigation system will not allow a passenger to input addresses while moving.
