You looking at me?
|’m the only one here. By Ben Pulman
After a few months of pootling about purely on electric power, we stretched the Lexus’s legs this month with a trip over the water to the Isle of Wight. Not that the hybrid RX 450h+ fired up its engine until we were on the far side of the island, mind. Which shows just how far 40odd miles of potential electric power really can get you when you’re able to let the battery run empty; in a pure EV you’d be panicking about finding a plug.
But while the Lexus did all the stuff you’d hope for – it was quiet, comfy, and did well on the twisty stuff – the trip wasn’t all sweetness and light. It seems life with the Lexus means an incessant cacophony of bings, bong, pings, blips and beeps. Everything you do seems to elicit another digital warning, and among the most irksome are the beeps when you exceed what the car thinks the speed limit is, and the beeps that sometimes (and it is only sometimes, with no obvious consistency) occur when you lock the car.
Most annoying, though, is the Driver Monitor, which uses a camera mounted above the steering wheel to constantly check the condition of the driver. It can see through sunglasses, and if a tired or ill driver fails to respond to alerts, it’ll even bring the RX to a halt and flash the hazards.
But what it can’t do is account for me rolling up to a roundabout and looking out of the side window at a joining lane. Or looking up in the top right corner of the windscreen as I nudge out on a single carriageway, to see if a potential overtake of a van or truck is possible. At which point, right when you’re concentrating and focused the most, it goes bonkers and distracts you.
Nor does it realise I’m tall. If
I move in the seat during a long journey, sitting myself upright, the Driver Monitor can only see the underside of my eyelids, so flashes up a ‘Closed Eyes Detected’ warning.