Lexus NX350h - An Actual Owner's Review

well hello everyone and welcome to my very first video on this brand new channel my name is Josh and some of you will recognize me from my main YouTube channel Josh James where I talk all about luxury watches luxury accessories luxury Furnishings all that kind of thing um but I started this side channel here to do this video because this is really unlike anything I do over on that main channel in that we're going to be talking about this car because I bought this brand new Lexus and when I was doing my research you know as a customer looking to purchase this vehicle there really weren't too many videos from actual owners like people who put their own money down bought the vehicle was living with it day to day and had formed opinions and thoughts about what they loved what they didn't love that kind of thing so that's what we're going to be doing here in this video today I have got my amazing Lexus Yeti tumbler it is black fully engraved matches the interior how amazing is that and then I've got notes Here on my phone of all the things that I want to talk to you guys about in this video so the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to introduce you to this car tell you exactly what it is the specs and options it's got all that kind of thing and I'll be inserting like b-roll footage throughout the video to kind of show you the things in detail then I'm going to tell you why it is the perfect vehicle for me and for us why we bought the car why we absolutely love it then I'm going to go through five very specific likes and five very specific dislikes no deal breakers but the things that I've gotten on my nerves for sure so with that let's Dive Right into what this car is this is a 2023 Lexus NX 350h which is the full self-charging hybrid it is not the 450h plug-in hybrid and as you may know Lexus doesn't do any kind of Mile hybrid systems so it is a full hybrid you don't have to plug it in and you get amazing fuel economy just letting it sit in your driveway and driving it around on your daily commute this vehicle is in cloudburst Gray over Rio her red new Lux and that color combination is key for me because this is going to be a commuter car it was bought with the express purpose of getting me to and from the office doing errands running around it is not going to be a garage trophy we've already got one of those and the cloudburst gray exterior hides dirt like you would not believe red nulux interior here new Lux is as you may know the synthetic leather rat kind of material inside that was also very intentional we did not get the luxury package because the luxury package here in the United States comes with with leather semian leather and if any of you have had a car with semi aniline leather we have it is an immense pain to keep that thing that stuff looking nice new Lux will look just as good at year five as it does on day one and I love the Rioja red color in here as well this car has the premium package which includes things like the single pane moon roof you can tell we don't have the panoramic moon roof in here but I need a moon roof of some kind so we got the standard one I am perfectly happy with that on top of that we have some really nice factory options as well which we're also key to this car this is exactly the way we wanted it so it includes things like the 14 inch Lexus interface display a must in my opinion for the NX we have the 10 inch color heads up display we have a digital rear view mirror which again another must for me I love this feature here we also have the bright finish 20 inch wheels on all four corners those Wheels to me are also a must on the NX I tend to think that the NX with the 18 inch wheels looks a little bit frumpy and even though these are larger and they have lower profile tires I actually don't find the ride to be any worse than one with the 18 inch wheels it is maybe a little bit firmer but you don't get as much road noise and Road feel in the vehicle as some other reviewers have suggested maybe we have better roads here than elsewhere in the country and world but I don't find these to be a problem at all and then in addition to the factory options we also have a few key accessories so the all-weather floor mats plus the carpeted floor mats for vehicle protection we have the accessory hitch in the back which came on the vehicle I don't ever really plan to use it but it's there if we want it and then most importantly for us is the Lexus OEM dash cam we don't have it installed just yet that is the part was back ordered so the car is actually going back to our dealer on Friday to get that installed and the Lexus OEM One I chose to go that way even though it's expensive it is about five six hundred bucks with installation we'll see if it ends up being worth the money I will maybe report back if it ends up not working out for us so with that let's talk about why this is the perfect car for me and for our household now our household is just my husband and myself we don't have any kids we have a few animals but no one who's really going to be sitting in the back seat and needing that space the NX is relatively small so if you have kids I'd probably go with the RX or something bigger but if this is just going to be the car for you and your spouse or just you yourself um this is a great great size the NX for us also joins two existing other cars that we have in our household behind me sitting in the garage is a 2020 Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro that thing is our garage trophy it is my baby I bought that back in 2019 it is a 2020 model year car throughout the pandemic and really up until this year I have been working from home so it has sat in the garage for most of its life it is in it is three and a half years old but is in brand new Factory showroom condition because it doesn't get driven all that much it's only got 13 000 miles on it and if you know anything about about forerunners forerunners hold their value like nobody's business especially higher trim rarer models like the TRD Pro and especially if you keep them in exactly that kind of condition so this car really came about because when we got recalled back to the office I was like I'm I don't want to drive that thing on a daily basis leave it in the parking garage leave it out in the sun whatever the case may be so that's why we bought this car to have a car that we can do that with and not really worry all that much about in addition to the Forerunner we also have a RAV4 Prime that is my husband's daily commuter he does drive to work five days a week and that is the perfect car for him to do it in we love the RAV4 prime it is an amazing car and I was actually looking at whether we could get a second one or not but the RAV4 Prime is nearly impossible to get so getting a second one was kind of out of the question this is the perfect third car for us because we've got the dinosaur that'll go anywhere run a million miles be worth its weight in gold even 10 years from now we've got the engineering Marvel with the RAV4 Prime that car also by the way is still worth way more than we paid for even two years on and now we have the really comfortable really luxurious really premium technologically advanced kind of daily driver commuter throw around car with this NX so with all that said let's dive into likes and dislikes again I've got five legs I've got five dislikes so stick with me or you can fast forward to the dislikes if that's all you want to see but let's dive in um the first thing that I really really like about this car is that it's a hybrid um you know in my opinion there is really no other reason to buy the NX other than it being a hybrid what I mean by that is I don't really think that the NX does anything well beyond that um which is to say that I don't really see the point of the 250 which is literally the RAV4 engine in an NX and I the base RAV4 gas engine is it has no place in a luxury car um and the 350 Turbo you know it is more engaging it is sportier it is it is more performance oriented but if you're really after performance in this segment just go get an X3 or a Q5 they're both going to feel a little bit better out on the road um none of the other options though in this segment from the Europeans the Americans whatever have a hybrid like a full self-charging hybrid like this is you know I always think that you should buy a car because it offers something that there that no one else does and for the NX that is the hybrid powertrain in this vehicle not only is it super efficient and just easy to live with it's so reliable because it's basically what's been in the Prius for the last 20 some odd years so Toyota has refined it to death and at this point in time it is just the perfect powertrain for the NX okay so building on the powertrain my second like about this car is that it is so refined it is so pleasant and so comfortable to drive um at this point in time again Toyota's hybrid system has been refined to the nth degree and then you bring in the Lexus level of you know refinement and build quality and nvh and how comfortable the seats are and how just nice everything is to touch it is such a pleasant car to drive and we've had some really amazing cars in our in our history we've had you know we've had Mustangs we've had Volvos we've had big you know powerful trucks we've got you know even the Forerunner to some extent is is fun to drive in its own way but fun and pleasant don't always come together you can have a really fun car to drive but it can be a real chore to drive that thing as a daily driver just running to Target or whatever where the NX shrines specifically the hybrid shines is that it is so pleasant it is so easy to live with it is so comfortable that is why you buy this car because like us maybe you are looking for a commuter the kind of car that you can just get in and you know float on along to your next destination um just incredibly Pleasant I mean I could spend hours driving this car and it's never going to make me feel frustrated or fatigued in any way it's just just Pleasant and I love that about it okay next up with my third leg I love the way that this new NX looks on the outside and on the inside it's interesting because this NX actually to my eye looks like the spiritual successor to the RX from two generations ago I will put a picture in the video of what I'm talking about and it's interesting because this NX is actually a little bit out of character in my opinion for lexus's current design language when you look at what they're doing with the new RX the 2023 RX for example there are a lot of details and kind of extra design flares on that new RX that don't need to be there and in my opinion make that car look a little bit awkward especially the front with that serrated like knife edge Grille or whatever it is they're doing there they call it the frameless spindle Grill not my thing I think it looks weird I think it's going to date the car kind of badly if they move away from that just not my thing I love personally when automakers take a reductionist approach to the sculptural design of the car and that is exactly what they did with this NX there are no design details no creases no flares no whatever else that doesn't need to be there on the outside or inside for that matter of this car and I absolutely love that okay fourth leg staying with design I love the color palette of this vehicle I touched on it when I told you about the car and what it is in the introduction um but this color palette is like the perfect color palette for Lexus in my opinion because sometimes lexus's Lexi can look a little bit geriatric when they're in the wrong color and I'm not trying to throw shade again but when I see Alexis that's like that pearly white on the outside with like beige on the inside it's really nice it's absolutely beautiful but for me as somebody you know on the maybe younger side youngish side um I think that the perfect combination for Lexus is cloudburst gray over Rioja red is where it is at it prints younger it prints a little bit more modern as well so I think that the the exterior and interior of this car again talking about you know long-term freshness feeling fresh over many many years of ownership and all that kind of thing when we go to sell it as well I think that the Rioja red people just gravitate toward this color a little bit more than they do maybe toward Palomino or beige perfect color combination highly recommend it um if you can find one because these are cloudburst gray is a premium paint color so costs a little bit more and I don't know just from my armchair research while shopping for the car seems to be a little bit more rare than some of the other color options all right and Fifth and final like about the new NX is that all the technology in here feels incredibly solid which probably shouldn't come as a surprise because this is a Toyota after all but we've had a lot of cars we've owned a lot of cars and driven a lot of cars in our past that have had a lot of technology in there and from many automakers and a lot of the technology doesn't always feel solid even two to three years into a model run for example we had that Volvo XC90 with the original census infotainment system and I can tell you that system was glitchy you had all kinds of weird uh UI issues you would have all kinds of just kind of weird quirks about how it was designed and how it operated it never really felt well thought through the way that this system from Lexus does we recently also had or drove a Jeep Wagoneer technology in that car amazing as well but the uh driver display the main like your your gauge your digital gauge cluster that thing froze up at least once a day every couple of days it would do something funky there was a point when I was driving it was a rental car that we had and the navigation just froze up and we had this really funny like it was trying to show me Lanes on the bottom it was putting a map on the top but the map was not where I was so yeah um the technology in here on the other hand really really solid I have not had any freezes I have not had any glitches it's easy to figure out um there's just everything in here even the digital review mirror all the technology in here digital door handles Head Up Display Everything feels really really solid and I really that is a must-have like that is a necessity for me with a car with this much technology I need to feel like I can count on it when I am driving the vehicle and with the NX I can um so yeah those are my legs those are the five things I really like about the NX now because this video is running long and I I really apologize um those of you who know me know I like to talk let's dive into my dislikes and there are five things that I dislike about the new NX now I listed technology last in my likes because I'm going to pick right back up on that in my dislikes and the first thing I dislike about this technology while it is solid and it does feel really solid there are just some things that feel like they need a little bit of ux and UI love and that's to be expected because again this is still a gen 1 infotainment system so I'm giving it a pass for now but I would really like to see Lexus just think about the overall usability of this system for example getting in and out of apple carplay now in the Lexus UI this left hand rail is how we get to all the different key infotainment functions so carplay navigation media phone vehicle information and settings within the Lexus UI we use this bar to get to all the different things and it's persistent so if we want to go to vehicle information and then back to music we can do that the problem is when we go to Apple carplay the bar disappears so there's no way to access that without going back to the UI so let's say that I'm going to go to music and I'm going to be browsing around here finding something to listen to and I'm in one of the Apple carplay apps what if I want to go back to the Lexus UI well first I have to go back to the Apple home screen and only from the home screen can we get back to the Lexus UI by tapping the Lexus icon the problem is when I go back to carplay now I'm not back in music where we started I'm actually back on the home screen because that was the last thing I did before leaving carplay so you can't just jump right from one of your media screens back to the Lexus UI you always have to go back home that's really annoying and I wish that they would streamline that leave this bar here while carplay is active I don't think that would be a problem at all okay second dislike about this new NX staying on the infotainment screen I would really really really like a home button and a home screen I want a home screen that shows me all my information all at once and Heaven Knows we've got the real estate here like the you know the size of the screen you could make a really nice home screen on this display and I would like a home button so that when I am lost in all the many millions of screens and menus in this system I would really like to have a home run you know get me out of this mess just take me back to square one kind of button um and there isn't one this is a really interesting infotainment system in that it works really well but you can only really use one of these key infotainment features at a time so along the left hand side you've got your kind of key vehicle functions things like navigation phone media uh vehicle information and settings but you can only be in one of those tabs or those features at one time and this is weird because in the last generation Entune system which directly proceeded uh this new infotainment and I'm going to put some footage in here from the Forerunner to show you exactly what I mean that old system had a home screen and a home button and I can tell you as a Toyota owner that I actually that is really the only screen I ever left the Forerunner on because it was perfect it had navigation on the left hand side so I could see kind of what the streets around me were at any given point it had my audio in the upper right hand corner and then I also I think I have weather down at the lower right or something like that that is what I want to see when I'm driving down the road now the reason that that for me is not a deal breaker in this vehicle is because it's software so if Toyota wanted to you know I'm sure they could update the software to give it a home screen and put a home button somewhere on the screen so I'm hoping that that does come in a later iteration of this infotainment system so I'm going to complain about it now but if this gets fixed I will be really happy and just disregard everything I just said all right third dislike still talking about the infotainment system the last thing that really drives me up the wall about this new interface from Lexus and Toyota is that the system defaults to voice for data and text entry all the time now I knew that going into this purchase I knew that that was how the system worked because I'd watched all the videos and all that kind of thing what I didn't realize was that they meant literally all the time even when you are stopped so right now we're sitting in my driveway the car is not moving it can be in park too no less the system will default to voice so if you hit the search button to call up something like a destination in navigation or search for you know media and apple music or whatever it might be the first thing that comes up is that stupid blue screen with the microphone how can I help you I don't understand why it does that when the vehicle is in the park now I should say before I go on here I have looked through the vehicle the many many menus and settings that control this whole system and I do not see a toggle like a user addressable toggle to change the default uh data entry to be keyboard based when the car is stopped um if I'm wrong about that please let me know down in the comments but I don't think I am and it's really annoying because when I'm stopped the logic I want to happen here is actually again going back to my Forerunner with its Antiquated infotainment system the default logic in there is a lot better than what's in this Lexus because when I am stopped in the Forerunner car is not moving it can even be in drive for that matter but you know at zero miles an hour the default entry is a keyboard so I would love to see Toyota change or add a setting for that maybe some people like that I don't I want a setting to change that the other annoying thing here about that defaulting to voice is I have found that if I haven't driven the car you know in a while like overnight or in a day or so the voice system takes a beat to initialize so I might get in the car right turn on the engine get myself all settled I'm gonna hit that voice or that the search button to put a destination in that I want to start going to I'll hit that search button and it'll say it'll put up a little kind of error message oh voice system is initializing but the problem is I can't get to the keyboard until that thing has initialized it's really annoying if it just defaulted to the keyboard I wouldn't have to wait for that thing to initialize then enter my thing then get to the keyboard whatever like just give me a keyboard you can probably tell how irritated I am with this but this is probably my biggest sticking point with this system right now is I can't just pull up a keyboard and get going um especially when that system takes quite a bit to initialize but enough bitching about that let's move on to my fourth dislike we're staying thing on the screen but not talking about the infotainment itself the fourth thing that I don't like about this car is that the climate controls are mostly on screen now I'm giving Lexus a pass here because this is just the way that luxury automakers are moving you see this with basically everyone from Audi to Range Rover they do those kind of weird double screen things you see it in the Volvo census system even Subaru is doing this with the Giant 11 inch screen that they're putting in all their cars with the climate control at the bottom like this is just where the industry is going and I can accept that I actually think that Lexus does this a little bit better than some others because the knobs are the digital knobs that we have to control the actual temperature on either side that's the only thing that they do if you've been in a modern Range Rover for example those knobs are changing functions depending on what is contextually on the screen that drives me up the wall because I can't I have to look to see what that knob is doing anytime I want to change the you know just use it for anything sometimes it's temperature sometimes it's your drive mode sometimes it's your um off-road setting or whatever it might be it's just like I don't care for that so I do like in here that these knobs do one thing and one thing only my problem here though the one thing I'd really really like to see um I don't know if Lexus will ever go backward but if they do the two things that I really really want to have as hard buttons are my fan speed and the off button I want to be able to just literally reach down feel the you know feel like a rocker switch or something and be able to increase or decrease my fan speed without having to look actually you know take my eyes off the road and figure out where my finger is in relation to the screen and the UI I really really wish they had done that and it's weird because we've got like these defrost buttons down here at the bottom and we've got like there's some these two hard buttons on either side are for things that I never ever use one of these could have easily been a fan speed and one of them could have been an off button it's kind of Beyond me um all right and finally we have reached my last dislike I know this has been so long guys I really apologize my last dislike is a really really really teeny tiny one but it's one that because my husband and I both will sometimes drive this car I have noticed and it does bother me every single time I it happens um this car has a lot of different driver specific uh customization meaning that it ties a lot of the vehicle settings to either the key fob or the key card or the digital key if you use that but it can tailor and adjust almost everything in the car to who is driving it at that given moment so my husband and I have both drive the car I am assigned to the key he is assigned to the key card and when we get into the vehicle Everything Changes mirrors seats steering column even the profiles and the media sources and the EQ and the sound system in here change depending on who's driving the car at that moment the one thing that doesn't change and this is a really really odd emission in my opinion to leave out of that whole Suite of adjustability is the position of the head up display so if he's been in the car and has adjusted the HUD for his you know low down here driving position I'll get in the car everything else has changed you know we're back up to my seating position the HUD is still in the wrong place I don't understand why that is not tied to the driver profile it seems like a really automation because literally everything else that's powered that thing is powered everything else changes and adjusts to that individual driver except for that it's one of those things that's jarring too it's not something that's subtle that you don't notice if you have two people of different Heights or different seating positions I guarantee you dry driving the vehicle I guarantee you that you will notice it the way that we did so not the biggest deal you know it's a first world problem I get in the car I'm just gonna have to adjust that and you know move it back up to where I want it but it is one of those things that again you will notice and it's on this list because it is one of the things that I it's one of the few things I can complain about in this car that I wish they would fix and maybe they will fix it with software later on um so yeah that was my fifth and final dislike I know this video has been so long I really apologize for that but um these are all the kind of things in this level of detail that I would have wanted to know before I bought this car I hope if you are looking at buying this car as well that this video has helped you out I hope this was enjoyable I hope it was helpful um consider giving it a thumbs up and a like or you know whatever you do on YouTube and um thank you guys for watching I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you soon

Channel: Josh’s Cars of Japan

Views: 123,275

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Id: sZ8R3hl4vic

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023