I think of this as the land cruiser for those who cruise the land of country clubs.
This is the Lexus L570 big luxurious but don't let it's gilded exterior and cabin fool you it's a real body on frame off roader let's drive it.
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Now in a sense the LX is really the Lexus LS of SUV's.
It's a full size SUV.
It's a body neon frame construction which makes it technically a truck, that also means the thing can pull 7000 pounds on a trailering load.
You've got all wheel drive as your only configuration, and as we're gonna find out, it's a fairly complex system.
Three rows of seating inside are standard.
Lexus says it'll hold eight people, although I'd hate to be number six, seven, or eight.
Now inside this big boy you've got a lot of traditional Lexus cues.
One thing I noticed right away is a lot of traditional gauges here.
Again, kind of.
In truck style.
You've got things like oil pressure and temperature gauges and amp meters, things that most other cars have given up years ago.
But it makes for a nice, substantial feel.
Now let's get to the head unit, where most of the tech is going to play out.
We've seen this navigation system before and the media choices, and, of course, the optional Mark 11 upgraded 19 speaker surround sound.
So all of this is quite familiar still.
What I want to take you to, is go into this area called" Apps" in the upper left.
This is what they call Lexus Enform.
It's the cousin of Toyota Entune.
Fact, they're kissing cousins, very similar, and you've seen this before as well.
The nice thing about this system is you install the Enform app on your phone and it Cloud loads all of these apps.
One time.
Under the Bing app, again no Google search here, you do have the ability to kind of do a free-form search for just about anything.
And you can use voice if you use this voice icon.
The voice button on the wheel does not tie into this system which is a little inelegant.
San Francisco Giants.
And there you go.
Hit that and it's going to take you to information about the Giants and I bet it's going to show me how to get to the ballpark.
Yep, there it is so it's very sort of tuned toward automotive, it didn't bring me up, you know, box scores or the history of the Giants or who's on the mound today, it just went to what I needed to know for a vehicle application.
Very smart.
iHeartRadio which I've always had contempt for because why would you have an app that just brings you the stations of one ownership group?
I won't even use it.
Movietickets.com, I prefer Fandango myself, here's Opentable.
Again you can use voice search which is the key way to operate this.
Find a table at seven for a party of four at Trattoria Fresco.
Not bad.
That's pretty good for our relatively unstructured search.
Finally you've got Pandora which again uses the app on your phone then puts it into car mode and brings all the control up here.
And finally, your Facebook Implementation here is strictly Facebook places.
Basically checking in as you drive around.
Nothing more than that.
You can't look at your wall and make long posts or anything like that fortunately.
Now the downsides of this system.
First of all, as you may have noticed, it's kinda dog slow and I don't attribute that all to the fact that it's using my phone's 3/4G connection.
I think there's some processing delay going on here that needs to be sped up.
Secondly, if you're out on the road with this, a whole slew of these.
These functions get locked out.
But, not all of them.
It's a weird hodgepodge which doesn't let you operate with a single clear set of behaviors.
It drives me nuts.
And finally, under Yelp, notice there isn't a voice search button here, as there is for almost every other app in this application sweep.
Now, of course, this cabin abounds in creature comforts.
You've got heated and cooled seats,.
You've got four zone climate control.
And right here in the console under the arm rest, we've got the optional cool box.
Which looks like it's set up for about two bottles, which is a controversial space allocation in and of itself.
It uses the air conditioning to pump out the coldest air it can wing.
And it does a pretty good job in there.
In there.
Plenty of camera tech in this bad boy, luckily.
Go into reverse and you've got a couple of options here.
First of all you can change up what they call your park assist.
This gives you a variety of indications of where you should go to park, but it's not a self parking vehicle.
That technology's not available on this LX.
And I think that might be useful.
But it does give you a zone to aim for.
I'm not sure it's gonna help a lot of folks who can't park, it'll just be difficult in a different way.
But that's my opinion.
And then when you're creeping forward, at like a mile or two per hour, you get this front camera.
But the other.
Another one that's really valuable is one that looks over on the right side because in a vehicle this big and this tall, you have no idea what's down over there and this let's you keep a peak on it.
That's quite useful.
Now so often as the case in life, what's going on in your hind quarters is important to pay attention to.
Split tailgate, the upper part going that way the lower third of course comes down to make a nice little bench, and also to make a lower lift over.
These seats in the third row are fairly substantial, and the room isn't bad.
It's basically for kids or adults you hate, but here's how you clear the area, although it's only sort of clear.
Drop the head rests first.
And then you've got these buttons here that will lower each of the seat backs.
Now to get the remaining seat assembly out of the way, you go to these buttons over here that lift, by power, each of those seat clusters up to the sides of the vehicle.
You may think it's a huge waste of space to have these, sort of, sitting like that, except notice that Lexus has them flush with where the wheel wells are anyway.
So you don't lose a lot of actual floor width.
Go under the hood of this big boy, it's a big motor, 5.7 litre V8, but nothing tricky about it, not even direct injection.
383 horsepower, 403 pound feet of torque.
All wheel drive only.
Six speed automatic through a standard [UNKNOWN] center limited slip differential.
Pretty serious gear.
Zero to 60 is 7.5 seconds, which may sound unremarkable.
Until you realize this vehicle weighs 6,000 pounds.
Its MPG rating is commensurate, at 12/17.
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Now things get really interesting when you get down to all
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All these buttons around the shifter.
Then over here you've got your high and low four wheel drive controller.
Next to that you've got your crawl button.
This will take you crawling up or down, at super careful modulated speed.
There's also a turn assist technology button next to that, and then here are some degrees of crawl on a rocker switch.
And next to that you've got a height adjustment rocker.
This lets you go anywhere from three inches up from normal all the way to two inches below normal.
A five inch range of taking this guy up and down thanks to an air suspension.
Finally, your suspension control.
Sport,.
Normal and comfort.
And as you can see we've got a lot of ways to fiddle with this vehicle.
I hope you're into off roading.
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Ok, driving the LX570 is, as I mentioned, it's got a lot of LS DNA in it.
It's smooth.
All the responses you get back from the road are refined and almost muted depending on your.
Position here on the suspension in particular, because this is a responsive engine- and obviously a big and powerful one.
When you tip into the throttle, you get to measure the power right now.
Because we're not dealing with turbos, and we got the computers and such to stay alert, it's actually very enjoyable to drive around in even though its hinged.
I like the normal setting on the suspension.
And it just seems to get a little jittery and a little nervous.
Coax the gear shift over here into the sports side of the gate, even if you don't shift, and now you're in a sport mode that just revs a little higher.
Hangs onto those gears in a little gutsier way.
All and all, I think you'd be surprised how much this does not feel like you're piloting a ship.
By the way, if you need help driving something this big you should shop elsewhere.
The LX 570 is mostly lacking in driver assist technology.
It does offer adaptive cruise control but no lane departure tech, no blind spot tech and no automatic full braking to prevent a collision.
Okay, let's price our big crimson friend, these don't come cheap they're high end vehicles and.
From their big capable vehicle.
So 835 base, nicely equipped but to get it fully CNet style you've got to add about $8400 more to the package.
So that gets you Evenson sound, fully cool and heated seats, that cool box in the console, a card key instead of a wireless fob, adaptive cruise control.
The DVD rear seat entertainment rig I could easily live without.
And the parking assist visualizations on the main screen.
So all in, about 92 grand.
If you're looking for that cosseting kind of luxury you find in a Lexus LS, but you also want serious off roading and towing ability, this might be your guy.
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