SA Road Tests

Welcome

This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
*To read one of our road tests, just select from the menu on the left.
*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.


We drive Star Wars in the 2012 Lexus GS450h F-Sport

Quits at 55?

Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday August 8, 2012

Lexus’ GS medium saloon car lineup was originally two regular V6s displacing 2,5- and 3,5 litres, and a hybrid using an Atkinson cycle version of the bigger engine with supplementary electric motor. Then an engineer with George Lucas fantasies slipped a rogue model past the bean counters. He took a GS 450h, gave it a Darth Vader face, built in some Franco-German technology and called his creation F-Sport. It is rumoured that he hasn’t answered emails or taken any calls from Accounting ever since. Kidding of course, but I like to tell it that way.

Franco-German technology, you ask? Surely only a Frenchman could dream up rear-wheel steering that continuously calculates optimum angles as you drive and applies up to two degrees of assistance as needed. At most speeds below 80 km/h the front and rear wheels turn in opposite directions. In certain conditions at higher velocities, they turn the same way. It’s science, you know.

 And it usually takes a German to smuggle in adaptive suspension that not only tightens up as you twist a button, but watches how you drive and adapts continuously. In Sport+ mode, available only on this model, low-friction front and rear shock absorbers optimise damping in response to prevailing conditions. The back ones, with larger and stiffer lower bushings, have been inclined further rearward and automatically increase differences between inner and outer damping when driving through corners, thereby reducing vehicle roll.

Like many modern cars, the GS 450h offers five driving modes, selected by means of a rotating dial and buttons on the centre console. These are labelled Snow, Eco, Normal, Sport and Sport+. A sixth option, EV, allows the use of battery power alone and has its own button. Don’t get excited by thoughts of driving everywhere in EV and never using petrol again, though, because it just isn’t practical.

To begin with, it switches off as soon as you apply reasonable accelerator pressure to keep up with traffic and it quits at about 55 km/h anyway. Its only practical application is in the kind of stop-start crawling you do when easing past collision sites and disabled trucks on freeways. If that’s part of your daily life, I’m happy for you in a twisted way because that’s when you will save some fuel.

Seriously, though, why would you buy a cool-handling 3.5-litre V6 with electric motor supplementation, putting out a combined 252 kW and massive torque, if all you want is to save some fuel? There are lots of little cars that do that job better. Let us simply say that, given its head, it pulls like a giant and overtakes at the speed of thought. A nice little roar under pressure also helps you remember why you spent this kind of money in the first place.

Speaking of spending, the heated and ventilated front seats and especially the driver’s chair, are almost worth the asking price on their own. Three memory settings and umpteen powered adjustments for reach, backrest rake, tilt, height, bolstering, lumbar adjustments in-and-out and up-and-down, plus under-thigh extension, make it the stuff of dreams. The poor passenger has to make do with reach, rake, height and in-and-out lumbar support alone. Shame.

Apart from all this, the GS 450 F-Sport is comfortable, quiet, sexy and loaded with toys, but I'm overrunning my word count. If you would like to see the launch report and more technical detail, click here

The numbers
Price: R753 700
Engine: 3456cc, Toyota 2GR-FXE Atkinson cycle V6
Power: 213 kW at 6000 rpm
Torque: 345 Nm at 4600 rpm
Electric motor: 275 Nm
Combined Power: 252 kW
Transmission: CVT with 6 virtual ratios
Zero to 100 km/h: 6,1 seconds
Maximum speed: 250 km/h
Real life fuel consumption: About 8,6 l/100 km
Tank: 66 litres
Boot: 465 litres
Warranty: 4 years/100 000 km
Service plan: Lexus Distance Plan Complete

What We Do

This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.

What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.

My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so I do actually exist.

I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!

Comments?
Want to ask a question, comment or just tell me you thoroughly disagree with what I say? That's your privilege, because if everybody agreed on everything, the world would be a boring place. All I ask is that you remain calm, so please blow off a little steam before venting too vigorously.