West Coast Editor James Riswick gives us a closer look at the interior of the all-new 2022 Lexus NX.
TranscriptJAMES RISWICK: This is West Coast editor James Riswick, and I'm in the new Lexus NX. Now, not only is this an all-new interior for the Lexus NX, what you see here is a lot of new switchgear and specifically a new infotainment system for the Lexus brand in general. So this is-- a lot of this is what you're going to be seeing throughout the Lexus lineup.
Now, first of all, this, this is the optional widescreen version, but there's a 9 plus inch base screen. So no longer do you have an annoying little joystick down there or touchpad. No, this is fully touchscreen. Generally speaking, the functionality of this is very similar to what you find in a Toyota, which is a good thing. I specifically like a very, very simple, easy-to-use radio interface.
Go here with the nav. It's very simple, again. That's a good thing. That's what's brought over from Toyota. What's been radically improved over that is just how nice this looks. It looks far more modern. It's a-- you know, the speeds have been increased.
So really, it's now fine. It's totally functional, especially with this widescreen. It's very big and pretty. And in terms of the luxury space, a lot of infotainment systems, like Mercedes, for instance, can be very difficult to use. This one seems to be pretty easy, at least in the time that I've spent with it.
The climate controls are also integrated within the screen here in the upgraded unit. The temperature controls are still physical knobs. You still have a volume knob. But anything in terms of controlling the seats, that is operated with touch buttons.
You can hear that it responds to you. Other new equipment down here, a lot of new switchgear in this car. This is a new drive mode selector you see here, and you do have wireless charging available. This is the new rendition of the Toyota Lexus electronic shifter. This is a design that's been around basically forever, back to like early Prius days.
And then you still have a Mark Levinson sound system. One thing that's a weird choice here is this wood trim. It's just there, very kind of tacked on. But I do like the pleather trim padded that wraps its way around here.
Now let's talk about these door handles. This is all new. These are unique. So you push in here. It's an electronic door handle, and you push to open it, kind of simple. But then if the battery dies or you just don't like that for some reason, you can actually pull this, and then it's an actual physical latch. So it's an electronic one and a physical one in one.
Now, that does seem, like, kind of overly complicated, but the reason for it is that this car comes with-- it basically integrates the door handles in with the blind spot monitoring system. So if the car detects that a cyclist, a jogger, another car is coming in your blind spot, it will lock the doors and prevent you from opening the door into them.
So that's a safety feature, also a door-saving feature. Otherwise, up here, you do have a new steering wheel. These are touch sensitive. Now, I will say they are designed to go with the heads up display. I honestly don't know what happens if you don't have the heads up display because I've only been in this car for 15 minutes at this point.
But when you touch one of these buttons-- that's for the audio system, and it comes up in the head up display to show you what you've selected. And then when you go over here to this side, this pulls up the cruise controls. Now, that's all well and good. Again, one, I don't know what happens if you don't have the HUD.
And if you're wearing polarized sunglasses-- let's see if I can make this work here. Well, the iPhone's better than my eyes, as it turns out. But if you're wearing polarized sunglasses, this might be difficult to see, so maybe not the best solution for these buttons because otherwise, if you try to operate-- you don't know what these buttons do for the adaptive cruise control system, nor what these do in relation to controlling the infotainment system.
So yeah. We'll see how that works over a longer period of time. Otherwise, this has Lexus's usually high quality interior. Excellent build quality, the materials are very good. This kind of large expanse is a little weird, kind of an old throwback. I'm not in love with it.
A lot of car companies now try to break up that space with different tiers or different trim levels. This is not one of them. But they're definitely going for more of a kind of cockpit feel with this. And you know, with this large screen, this is easy to use. It's-- you know, it's not as, say, high up as some of the older Lexus screens, but the trade-off of having the remote touch is probably-- is definitely a good one because that was not a very good user interface. This one is. So this is the interior of the new Lexus NX.
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