4 Things We’d Love to See Lexus Change About the NX 350

By Patrick Morgan - May 16, 2022

After a week with the NX 350, I wanted to be amazed, but I ended up hoping for a few changes.

Lexus’ NX 350 has a high number of ingredients to make it a hoot. It has a turbocharger. It has 4 cylinders. It has all-wheel-drive. It’s in the same parent house as the folks who make the LC 500, Supra, RC F, GR Corolla, GR86, and any great number of truly good cars. And truth be told, the NX 350 is a pretty decent driver’s car.

Let me preface the following list by saying that I’m a pretty tech-savvy person. This very article that you’re reading is being typed out on the HTML back-end side of WordPress. I regularly program data acquisition systems on race cars. Tech is no stranger to me. But the NX 350 sent me into a state of self-doubt I haven’t experienced since high school.

Lexus, change the buttons on the steering wheel, please

Lexus uses capacitive buttons on the NX 350’s steering wheel. By simply touching the button (not pressing it) you can see what you’re about to press via the head-up display. This is especially helpful because depending on what menu you are in, the buttons perform different tasks.

While that tech is meant to be helpful, it can be frustrating at times. Want to set cruise control? You have to navigate through five different button presses by the time you can set your speed.

Cruise control locks you out of your other dash displays.

Speaking of cruise control, you know those steering wheel buttons that change depending on the menu page you’ve selected? You can’t use them with cruise control activated. The menu you have chosen and the display you picked for the gauge cluster is the one you are stuck with. To change displays is pretty simple; deactivate cruise control, change the page, and then press 8 million more buttons to reactivate cruise.

Admittedly, that’s an exaggeration. While I can understand capacitive buttons and multi-function parts of a wheel, this one truly confuses me. A driver may want to switch between trip odometer or fuel economy displays while on cruise control. You can still switch between driving modes, but if you are in cruise and on your eco indicator (screen above) and want to see your boost gauge (screen below) well, you have to do so before clicking that cruise button.

Is the speedometer not always accurate?

Also relevant to cruise is the speedometer. You may want to slow down a bit because, on a number of occasions, we documented the car’s speedometer reading up to 5 miles per hour slower than the actual speed. We discovered this while using a GPS-based navigation app, and confirmed it with another GPS speed app on our phones. Shown here is a 45-mile-per-hour road, indicated speed was 47, GPS speed was 52.

The confusing part? The numbers weren’t always off. After discovering the discrepancy, we observed as little as 0 mph off. We’ve sent this information to our contacts at Toyota who have acknowledged they would look into the anomaly. We’ll make sure to update this section when we hear back.

Make the F Sport a little more F Sporty with Sound

With a little programming magic, Lexus can turn the 275 horsepower NX 350’s turbocharged 4-cylinder into a fun motor. As it sits though, it simply does things a good engine should do. Be powerful and quiet. But, we’d love to see Lexus put more of a burble into the exhaust note (active valve, perhaps?). Something to evoke the SUV’s sporty nature and get the blood warmed up just a bit more. F Sport handling package matched with a fizzy motor would be a seriously great combo.