Lexus don't have a reputation for being an exciting car company, and to be honest, it's justified. My IS200 is a ridiculously boring car. It;s a diesel, an 04 and in beige. How mundane can you get? But it's not all bad. It's really well built, never goes wrong and is as reliable as a wood-burning stove.
It handles about as well as a sofa and has the power of two dead cows, but hey, I didn't buy it for performance. It does what I need it to do when I need it doing. That's all I care about.
Overall, it's a big saloon with plenty of space and a lot of kit. It won't keep you awake but it will keep the pennies in your pocket.
Let's be honest, Lexus's aren't exciting cars. They're built for old men and women like me, and they do the job just fine. They woft us about in supreme comfort and luxury. They keep us from falling asleep and help us with our daily lives. They are cars that just do the job.
I love my Lexus IS200 because we've had it for quite a few years now and it's yet to go wrong. So that's a good 7 years of absolutely nothing going wrong or breaking. That's mightilty impressive.
The boot is rather large and can handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and with the lovely leather interior, you can still impress the neighbours - and annoy them too!
I'd recommend the diesel engine variant, as this one will get you over 50mpg and mean you hardly ever have to visit a petrol station.
The Lexus IS250 is a good car on paper - crammed full of features, reliable and well built with some fairly impressive performance statistics. But my experience of owning one has been disappointing.
The engine is nippy when it has to be but essentially it has to be worked too hard in order to perform sustainably. It's gearing is just odd, and I have no idea why Lexus repeatedly fail to deal with this important aspect of their cars. The gears have far too much length, which is all the more surprising considering there are six of them. There's nothing wrong with the performance in theory but it just feels painful in practice.
The handling on the Lexus IS 250 is probably average but personally I don't like it. There is next to no responsiveness and it's stiff and just not fun. The interiors, also, turn out to be pretty impractical once you've lived with them for a while - the back is cramped and the dash is insensible. It's not that the Lexus IS is a bad car, it just doesn't really work very well.
Lexus still has a wiff of the poor man's Mercedes to it, but I think this is impossibly unfair. Sure, it's Toyota's 'posh' sub-division, but over the years, it's become an entity on its own. My Lexus IS is the perfect example of that.
Calling the IS comfortable would be an insult; a word hasn't been created to describe how comfy this car is. I've driven 4x4s that have a harder ride. It's by far and away the best thing about it and everyone always mentions it when they take their first drive.
If you want a smile on your face and life-changing perfomance, find another car. If you want to be noticed by your peers, find another car. If you want respect from German-car drivers, find another car. But if you want a fast, comfortable and relaxing car to take you from A-to-B, you've found the car.