Lexus: Hybrid Vigour

You may be looking at the shape of cars to come, as Lexus sets out to prove a point: that you can have luxury and performance without ravaging the planet.

Make no mistake: this is a serious luxury car, full of all the pampering toys and costing refinements you’d expect from a £55,000 price tag. Transport fit for the most serious captains of industry. But not the captains of just any industry – certainly not old fashioned big, fat, heavy, dirty industrial industry. Think more of the captains of sleek, modern clever technological industry. Just as powerful, just as rich, but cleaner, smarter and more efficient.

The LS600h is a product of its age, the collision of two apparently contradictory forces: customers’ demands for ever more opulent, safe and potent transport, hurtling straight for the huge lumbering mass of scientific evidence and public concern over finite world resource and climate change. Their meeting doesn’t produce an almighty crash, but the gentle hum of an electric motor. Lexus claims fuel consumption figures of up to 35 miles per gallon on the open road for the LS600h – not bad for a car weighing in at over 2.2 tonnes, especially one with thirsty permanent four-wheel drive. Even more impressive when you compare claimed carbon emission figures with diesel-propelled rivals in the executive category – this petrol car produces less. The LS600h borders the miraculous when an environmentally reckless stab of the throttle away from the lights propels you to 62 miles per hour in a positively hurried 6.3 seconds.

The secret is the very new and very clever petrol / electric hybrid drive system. Weeeell, very clever, but perhaps not so very new. Lexus (part of the Toyota group) have some past experience of hybrid drive, having proven the principle in the rather fashionable Prius, the top selling hybrid car in America. What makes the system in the LS600h so impressive is that instead of combining a feeble petrol engine with lots of heavy electric motors and batteries and making you suffer painfully slow performance as the price for your environmental conscience, it has lusty five-litre V8 capable of producing 389 horsepower. And the key word there is capable of producing. When you want it, the hooliganism is there at your disposal, the V8 ganging up with the 221 horsepower electric motor to do horrible things to the road, but when you don’t want it the electric motor takes over, saving lots of precious fuel. Fun though the acceleration bit is, the system gets really clever when you take your foot off the gas; the electric motor stops consuming power and starts providing it – acting as both a brake and an electrical generator at same time, recycling all that kinetic energy that that would have been wasted just heating up the brakes and tucking it away in the battery for the next time you need to accelerate. Smart. The result is a car that feels potent when you put your foot down, yet calm and serene when you don’t. Yes it’s big and heavy, but so is every other model in the executive class – that’s what makes them executive cars. What makes the LS600h different from the others is it’s ability to do all the things the other execs can do – the comfort, the speed, the road presence etc – but without having to spend quite so much time at the petrol pump.

Lexus LS600h

From £55,000
4,969cc petrol V8
389bhp @ 6,400rpm
520Nm @ 4,000rpm
650 volt electric motor
Max power 221 bhp
Max torque 300Nm
Max combined power 439bhp
0-62mph 6.3 seconds
50-75mph 4.3 seconds
Maximum speed 155
Urban (mpg) 25.0
Extra urban (mpg) 35.3
Combined (mpg) 30.4
CO2 emissions (g/km) 219
Nitrogen oxides (NOx, g/km) 0.02
Hydrocarbons (HC, g/km) 0.02
Carbon monoxide (CO, g/km) 0.41