2026 Lexus RX350h Sports Luxury review

The Lexus RX has a tough crowd to deal with. Once you weed out the Lexus rusted-ons – and there are a few of those, believe it or not – there’s a lot to consider. First, you have spectacularly good cars from BMW, Audi and Mercedes.

There is also the very good and underrated Genesis GV80, and if you were feeling generous, you could include the lovely, if ageing, Range Rover Velar.

And then a slew of much cheaper and well-equipped upmarket Chinese SUVs. Whichever way you look, there are compelling alternatives.

The RX range is quite substantial, with two- and all-wheel-drive models, four spec levels and four different versions of the driveline, with all but one featuring either series or plug-in hybrid power.

The RX350h Sports Luxury is closer to the top of the range than it is the bottom, landing at $117,000 before on-roads, $10,000 more than the non-hybrid Sports Luxury.

For your money you get 21-inch alloys, 14-inch media screen, three-zone climate control, auto LED headlights, auto wupers, heated mirrors, powered tailgate, acoustic windscreen and side window glass, heated and ventilated seats front and rear (excluding the middle seat), 21-speaker Mark Levinson audio, keyless entry and start (including a key card), heated steering wheel, 10-way adjustable front seats, power reclining rear seats, semi-aniline leather accented seat trim (whatever that is), some slightly dodgy woodgrain trim, head-up display, around-view cameras, adaptive high beam, panoramic sunroof, digital rear vision mirror and intelligent parking assist.

For a moment I thought it came with its own extra VAN, but that stands for Vehicle Approach Notice or, for the humans among us, a noise to tell you it’s coming when it’s on electric-only power. Yes, it’s a dad joke, no I will not delete it.

The differences between the Luxury and Sports Luxury are mostly in details but substantial in number. And it is quite a lot of stuff, although as you can probably tell, it could do without the woodgrain.

Naturally it’s a lot more than its Chinese rivals, but up against its more likely European rivals it’s pretty good value. It also doesn’t look too bad against the Genesis GV80 2.5-litre turbo.

The RX350h has been around for a while, so you can  find new and used Lexus RX models for sale at Drive Marketplace.

If you want to see the RX for yourself, the Lexus website’s dealer locator is here to help.

If you're looking for more pricing, specifications, and latest offers on the Lexus RX, click here.

Despite looking fairly large, the RX comes in well under five metres at 4.89 metres in length. I mean, that’s not small, but it bodes well for interior space.

Starting with the boot, things are encouraging. The swoop of the tailgate suggests limited cargo space, but you get an impressive 612 litres with the seats up and 1678L with the middle row out of the way. The floor is flat, the wheel arches only modestly intrusive and the cargo blind stays out of the way. You can also stow it when not in use. The floor is high, however, hiding a space-saver spare and no doubt some of the battery.

Moving to the rear seats, the seatbacks looks a little on the flat side, but the (ventilated and heated) outboard seats are well sculpted for your backside and offer a lot of under-thigh support. As you might expect in a car this size, leg room is excellent. If you’re a bit on the short side that won’t matter, but the rising window line might bother you as you need to be reasonably tall to see out. 

And being reasonably tall won’t be too helpful in this car with its panoramic sunroof. It chops out a pretty sizeable volume of head room here and in the front, although there is the bonus of an open cover flooding the cabin with light.

Up front you’re greeted with a very pleasant cabin. The shapely and attractive pair of sports seats are split by a narrowing console topped by a broad armrest covering a handily sized centre storage bin. Forward of that is the handbrake switch and the stubby shifter. To the left of that is the inline pair of cupholders.

The dash is a typical Lexus design with a small binnacle harking back to the IS200 days. The big screen looks slightly too large for the space but you’ll get used to it. The big start-stop button is placed somewhere you can actually see it, so that’s nice.

Two big dials control the climate with the rest of the configuration pinned at the base of the screen. While all the buttons aren’t physical, the important ones are and this is a good compromise.

Beneath these controls is a sprung lid for the wireless charging pad and you’ll also find two USB ports, one A one C, the former necessary for Android Auto.

The materials choices are muted and it’s a bit dark in here, almost Mazda dark. I do like the way the suede-like material at the top of the door cards is patterned and the stereo speakers aren’t spangly like some makers are keen on doing. There is enough piano black for you to notice but not enough to be irritated or smudged.

Lexus’s media system has come a long way in the last few years, but I think it still lags a behind the Euros for sophistication. It’s certainly very easy to use in that classic Toyota/Lexus way, and there is plenty to be said for that. And even more to be said for the physical climate controls that the system does not attempt replace, at least for the temperature setting.

The screen hardware is perhaps a little on the slow side, but it’s smoothly slow, so you don’t have to put up with unpredictable jittering. The satellite navigation as the home screen still seems a bit weird to me, even three years after it debuted, but the stacked icons on the right-hand side of the screen act as a sort-of home screen.

The RX has wireless Apple CarPlay to go with the wireless charging, but it does seem that the wireless Android Auto is still on its way. It connected quite happily to my iPhone and didn’t miss a beat, so that’s the first hurdle cleared on that front.

With AM, FM and DAB, you won’t be short of things to listen to wherever you are.

Lexus Connected comes with a three-year subscription, giving your remote access to a variety of vehicle functions as well as a sat-nav update. Like its Toyota sibling, it’s not exactly going to set your world afire, but it’s free for three years, unlike its sibling.

The RX scored the maximum five ANCAP stars in 2023. ANCAP awarded it 90 per cent for adult occupant protection, 89 per cent for child occupant protection, 89 per cent for vulnerable road user protection and 93 per cent for safety assist.

Having eight airbags – including a front-centre airbag to reduce the effect of head clashes in side impacts – certainly helped the score along. Being a five-seater, there are two ISOFIX points and three top-tether anchors.

The Sports Luxury spec adds to an already impressive safety list, with adaptive high beam joining the auto-on headlights. This feature is not as subtle as those on other cars with matrix LEDs, and it sort of paints the road ahead with a high beam but it’s quite coarse. Having said that, it does the job, it’s just quite noticeable.

The rest of the systems are commendably well calibrated, with the common bugbears of over-enthusiastic lane-keep assistance and toxically-annoying driver attention monitoring mostly well behaved. The key thing about the latter is you can switch it off and it won’t come back on until you tell it to.

Given the pretty limited vision out the rear, the around-view camera and excellent blind-spot monitoring – along with good old-fashioned big mirrors – you’re in good shape.

It’s also worth pointing out that despite electrically controlled door latches, the lever you press can also be pulled like a normal interior door handle. My wife didn’t even use the lighter-touch press button, it was natural to use the actual mechanical operation.

Insurance came out at $3466 per year based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances. That seems reasonable for a car of this price and is well under five per cent of the new car value.

The standard Lexus warranty runs for five years/unlimited kilometres with servicing but once a year or every 15,000km with a flat $745 per service for the first five, meaning $2235 over three years and $3725 over five. A Mercedes GLE will cost over $4000 for three years (albeit with a more generous mileage limit), a BMW X5 will be $3570 for five years. Genesis blows everyone out of the water with five years of free servicing.

What Lexus does best, however, is after-sales service. It’s genuinely legendary, I’ve never heard even the mildest complaint about it. When you put that together with rock-solid reliability and awesome build quality, a Lexus is one of the lowest-drama cars you can buy.

The RX’s 5.4 litres-per-100-kilometres combined-cycle figure is a bit of an eye-opener – this is a lot of car to be pushed along by such a small amount of fuel, just a litre more than I’ve managed in the real world with a Corolla Cross.

And, to be fair, we had a fairly solid miss at 7.4L/100km. While that’s a fair way off as a percentage, that’s still not a huge amount given the car’s size, weight and frontal area.

If you can pull off the official figure, you’ll cover 1200km on a full tank while I would cover just under 900km. Both are impressive, especially considering this isn’t a slow car.

As Lexus has been at the hybrid game for quite some time, you pretty much know what you’re getting – smooth, quiet and, in more recent times, effortlessness. Lexus’s parent company has put a bit more effort into pushing a bit more power via electrons, and it shows.

The total output of 184kW doesn’t sound like a lot for a two-tonne SUV these days, but the torque benefits mean the RX is reasonably fleet of foot. The petrol engine will find maximum torque because the CVT will allow it to rev into the sweet spot of 4300–4500rpm as well as feeding in the 270Nm at the front and 121Nm at the rear from the electric motors. It’s not a shove, but the RX moves smartly.

One of the extras you get as part of the Sports Luxury spec is variable adaptive suspension. This carries with it a default sporting setup that somehow manages to deliver a ride quality that does not generally happen on a car with 20-inch wheels. It is still on the firm side and I did notice the weight of the wheels, especially on potholes, but given it competes with sporting SUVs from Germany, the firmness is to be expected.

If you did want a more plush ride, I’d suggest the smaller-wheeled Luxury is for you, but it’s certainly a very tidy handler as a result of all that rubber and the well-tuned adaptive damping. 

On the move, whether you’re knocking around town or heading for the freeway, the RX is extremely quiet. Even with the CVT occasionally sending the 2.5-litre turbo four into the upper reaches of the rev range, it’s never more than a distant whirr.

At very low speeds, the RX creeps around almost silently, and would be silent if the mandated vehicle-approach notice didn’t give off its Jetson’s-style hum to let pedestrians know you’re there. In stop-start traffic, the battery seems to have enough juice to keep the engine off for quite a while.

The all-wheel drive is quite handy, too, ensuring good grip in slippery situations, but again, the wheel size and very much road-biased tyres are probably not going to see you mud-plugging anytime, at least not with any vigour.

Cruising in the RX is quite lovely. You could cover an enormous amount of distance in a day and still feel fresh as a daisy at the end of it all. Your two rear seat passengers would also be perfectly fine as the cabin is a cocooning space with every eventuality covered.

As is common with a lot of hybrids, the RX’s towing capability is modest. With just 1500kg braked towing capacity – and I say 'just' because for vehicles this size, that’s not a lot – you’ll be looking at small boats and trailers.

Cheeringly, the 600kg payload means that when you’ve reached the rule-of-thumb towball limit of 10 per cent of the weight you’re towing – in this case 150kg – you’ll still have a bit of room to move with actually carrying people.

Bottom line is, however, this isn’t exactly a towing beast and more of an occasional tower.

Buying a Lexus is rarely a mistake and the RX is not that rarity. It is worth spending time in the spec sheet and, let’s be honest, considering other versions. The Sports Luxury spec isn’t quite Lexus-y. My wife – a confirmed Lexus fan – was not appreciative of this version of the RX.

I kind of felt the same. While I prefer the sport-minded approach of, say, BMW, it doesn’t quite fit the RX, so dropping back to the Luxury with its no doubt plusher ride (that I would probably complain about being too soft) might be the answer here.

But if you decide the Sports Luxury is for you, then as long as you don’t mind the big wheels and the small compromises that come with them, I’m certain you’ll enjoy it for its smoothness, ease of ownership and knowledge it will outlast humanity, current world events excepted.