Lexus enters fast-filling premium electric SUV club with jazzed-up Toyota bZ4X
ILLYA VERPRAET
TESTED 1.3.23, PROVENCE, FRANCE ON SALE MAY
With so many cars spuriously purporting to be sporty or have racing genes, it’s refreshing when the presentation for a new one hardly even mentions sportiness. The RZ is Lexus’s flagship EV, and instead it ought to offer “confidence, control and comfort”. Mind you, it still has 309bhp and will out-accelerate quite a few hot hatches.
The RZ is Lexus getting serious about EVs. It’s had the UX 300e for a while, but that has never been a heavy-hitter. This new car shares its e-TNGA platform – which is bespoke to EVs – with the Toyota bZ4X and Subaru Solterra (road test, p34), as well as its fairly small battery.
Lexus has now confirmed that the quoted 71.4kWh figure is the total capacity, of which 64kWh is usable. 71.4kWh is already smaller than rivals, and a 7.4kWh safety buffer is much more than the industry average. Lexus says that this ensures the battery should retain 90% of its capacity after 10 years. It’s a noble goal which we applaud – although whether people running cars on a four-year PCP deal will care is another question entirely.
The small battery is compensated by the low energy consumption of the two motors, claims Lexus. What’s more, under normal driving, the RZ mainly uses the smaller, less power-hungry 108bhp rear item. When you ask for full power, that naturally combines forces with the 201bhp front one, but the software sends power back and forth as it sees fit for the prevailing situation.
Indeed, the official consumption figure of 3.4-3.7mpkWh is Tesla-like, but the end result is still a pretty disappointing range of 272 miles, which drops to 252 miles on the 20in wheels that the vast majority of UK-bound RZs will have.
Its rapid-charging rates are also unimpressive, 150kW being the bare minimum we would expect from a new premium EV. At least it goes through a standard CCS port, rather than a Chademo one, as on the UX.
We will need to drive the RZ for a few days in the UK to say anything conclusive about the real-world range, because during the one-day event in France, its own predictions were all over the place. With the temperature at around 10deg C, efficiency seemed to stabilise at around 3.0mpkWh, which suggests a range of 190 miles – similar to the bZ4X but short of the rival Genesis GV60 or BMW iX3.
So the RZ joins a very busy and competitive market segment on the back foot.
It redeems itself somewhat on the road, because that promise of confidence, control and comfort rings true. Despite not being offered with
