Our Cars: Lexus LS600hL – week 6 & 7

The thrill of driving?

By Imthishan Giado

8th to 20th May

cake, lexus LS600hl

Why are you looking at a picture of cake batter, and how it does it relate to our long-term Lexus LS600hL?

Everyone knows that cake batter is the most delicious thing in the world, a sublime journey through a world of melted butter, icing sugar, and well, actual sugar. Eating cake batter is sometimes better than eating the end result. But to get to that wonderful gooey cake batter, you have to stir it up with a ladle, and that’s not so pleasant.

In a nutshell, that gloopy sensation is exactly what you feel when turning the tiller of the LS600HL. Weird does not begin to describe the feeling, lightness to the point of lifelessness and it hardly subsides when you go faster, needing only the briefest push from two finger tips to change lanes. You simply don’t feel like you’re driving a car

Yet quixotically, this is car that can dance through the corners. A few weeks, some pillock pulled out of a service lane in front of me. With just metres to go, I had to make an emergency lane change around him with only the briefest check to make sure there was no one in the neighbouring lane.

Did the Lexus make it? Absolutely, and frankly easily, without even firing the stability control. It just coolly and calmly swivelled around the offending car and returned to being a relaxed refined cruiser in one fluid motion. Which is quite disconcerting, if you think about it; in any other car your palms would have been sweating, the heart rate elevated to Def Con 2 but in the LS600hL? Nothing.

While I’m on the subject of driver disconnect, let’s talk about the brakes. Toyota has been doing regenerative braking systems for more than a decade now – so why does the Lexus system feel so awful? At any speed the brakes are abrupt and grabby, the mechanical and regen systems feeling about as well matched as Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries. For a brand that bills itself as the last word of refinement, it’s just not good enough. Other hybrids I’ve driven from the likes of Porsche have no such issues so it’s up to Lexus to sort it out for the next generation of LS.

That’s the big question, isn’t it? Will the next LS be as aneasthesised as this one or will it go down the ‘sporty’ route of the Lexus GS? Only time will tell.

Part 1 – week 1
Part 2 – week 2&3
Part 3 – week 4
Part 4 – week 5
Part 5 – week 6&7
Final Part 6 – week 8&9

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