The 2014 Lexus ES 350. |
2014 Lexus ES 350. |
More than $8,600 in options found their way onto our tester: $500 for a blind-spot monitor with rear cross-traffic alert (folks, these things work...giving you a good heads-up in the supermarket parking lot when a car is still three or four spaces away but headed in your direction), $110 for 17-inch split-spoke wheels with liquid graphite finish, $1,015 for a lane departure alert system with intelligent high-beam headlamps, $2,625 for a hard disk drive navigation system with backup camera, 8-inch screen, voice command, a single DVD/CD player, the Lexus Enform infotainment app suite, $400 for a one-touch power trunk, $500 for intuitive parking assist and$155 for rain-sensing wipers with de-icer.
2014 Lexus ES 350 interior (Birds-eye Maple shown) |
The effect is incomplete without the $300 bamboo (or Birds-eye Maple) and leather-trimmed heated steering wheel and shift knob. Add $105 for a trunk mat and $64 for floor mats and you have an exact copy of our tester, which after $910 delivery, processing and handling fee, rang up at $46,089.
The 3.5-liter, 268 horsepower V6 has plenty of punch, gets pleasantly decent gas mileage (21 city/31 highway) and the crash ratings are all four and five stars. The ride is whipped-cream smooth and noise is a virtual non-factor except when you floor it and the twin exhausts make, for this day and age, a satisfying growl.
The ES 350 was, fairly in some ways, unfairly in others, branded as a "tarted-up Camry". Switching to the Avalon plaform could have resulted in just a change in the model name at the end, but Lexus has found a way to make it more than that...and a nice car in its own right.