Lexus RX 450h car review – ‘It’s right on and a status vehicle’

The satnav is so attentive it's like having a butler

You can tell a lot about a car by the people who admire it. When young men swarm it in the streets, you know it is renownedly fast and has red piping. When people at the school gates like it, you know it looks new (there is something about playgrounds - they dampen the petrolheads and amplify a love of tidiness). And when a car, much like the Lexus RX 450h, attracts the attention of men who look like advertising executives (slouchy attire, confident hair, always in their 40s) you know it's both right-on and a status vehicle.

It's a tricky combination, being fundamentally contradictory: if you care about climate change, you forget about status, surely? Except not really: the Lexus speaks to the crazy mixed-up people we truly are. Its hybrid efficiency has to be weighed against the old-fashioned inefficiency of its two-tonne bulk. It is modern all the way from its shapely headlamp cluster to its cavernous front grille; old school in its leather interior, and the fact that a lot of its not inconsiderable bulk is given over to driver comfort. It's an SUV in which the passengers feel like they're in a hot hatch, and the boot could belong to a 70s saloon. Yet the driver feels like she's in an armchair, and that's what counts.