2006 Lexus RX400h review from North America

Quite a bit, see review.

I work for a luxury resort, and we use these as shuttle vehicles.

The interior is nice, but our latest ones (we change them every year) have a DVD player on the ceiling, many guests bump their head on it, I am surprised it is not broken by now.

Brakes: we had numerous cases when people not accustomed to driving these get in fender benders on property - the brakes are "special", before they actually brake the power take off kicks in, so if you are going about 5 or 10 mph, and try to brake just slightly you feel a drag, but the car keeps going.

Rear view mirror inside is useless, the tailgate is not built for looking through it. They put a back view camera in the panel, but guess what, at night its useless too, because the back up light is so week. But I have to say, current model is a little better, the one we had last year you had to open the driver door to safely back up at night, which is not very safe (joke intended).

Now comes the major complaint - if you don't realize it, the hybrids can actually get a dead battery, and they consistently do after 1 year of operation. Why? To start the system this car relies on a minuscule battery, like on a motorcycle, and it just doesn't have enough juice to put the car in "ready" mode, especially if you left the keys in ignition, which is a big no-no, because of the Christmas tree of lights that come on first. This is not a single incident, it happened to all 4 vans last year, and this year, 2 out of 4 are already that way. We now carry a jump starter in every car. It looks really silly, but it's better than being stuck with a guest on board.

Gas mileage counter says 5 mph or 9 mph or something like this, maybe there is a trick to it, we just don't know. But I have yet to figure the actual gas mileage. And we do fill them up quite a lot.

Acceleration is very good, and suspension is great over speed bumps, which we have plenty. As a result, tires wear out fast. And I mean fast, and they are not cheap either, we buy everything top quality.

Bear in mind, these are all brand new cars, with less than 20k miles on them.

I do hope Lexus marketing people read these surveys, because I wrote to Lexus magazine, and of course they ignored me.

Other than these glitches the car is nice. I am driving a 92 Corolla, and I'd love to drive a RX400h home instead. But for that amount of money, I can put a down payment on a house, and drive my good old Corolla indefinitely.