The Effrontery of It All

I bought myself a new car recently. This time around I really did myself proud. Not just some humdrum set of wheels, but a Lexus RX 350h in Copper Crest color, with a Palomino leather interior, and a trim level high enough to give me the majority of the requisite bells and whistles. Gorgeous luxury SUV that exemplifies Lexus design and engineering in all its considerable glory.

Along the way, I read a number of reviews of the 2026 RX 350h, and particularly, I sought out the legions of YouTube reviewers and guides. This was entertaining. The video how-to guides are invaluable, in that they take you through the car in detail and let you know what's available, how it works, and how to manage it. I learned more in about two hours of watching such videos than I got from the user manual, a turgid tome that comes off as having being written by a litigation-phobic committee.

But the reviews are another matter. I couldn't keep from noticing that YouTube car reviewers are almost indistinguishable from YouTube audiophile reviewers. They are male, almost invariably white, somewhere between about 25 and 50. All but a vanishing few of them manifest as straight. Some of them are sincere and helpful, others are obnoxious blowhards. Most fall somewhere in between those two extremes.

What got me about these reviews, after having consumed a goodly number, is how similar the reviewers' opinions are. Right away I noticed that most of them heap praise on the RX 350h. It would be strange if they didn't. It's a superb car, totally worth its upper-tier price range.

But I got a kick out of the way that they almost invariably honed in on two aspects of the RX 350h that bugged them, although neither is a negative for the folks who are attracted to the RX 350h in the first place. The first had to do with the car's driving persona, and the other with its safety features.

On the driving persona: the Lexus RX 350h is aimed at people who value a whisper-quiet cabin and an utterly smooth, serene ride, not to mention stellar build quality, premium materials, and rock-solid reliability. Which means that it isn't going to appeal to folks who are into performative driving. It won't co-operate with attempts to make it corner aggressively or build up G forces on the freeway. The gas engine is modest, the shifts from electric to gas mode and back are imperceptible, and the transmission is an eCVT that eschews palpable changes of gear ratio. But these reviewers can't seem to help themselves in their constant carping on the car's lack of aggression. I get it: they're automobile enthusiasts and they vastly prefer a car that is more of an adventure to drive, instead of coddling the driver. But people who buy an RX 350h want to be coddled. The reviewers could bring up the car's genteel driving persona briefly and then drop it. Except that they don't.

The other is the suite of driver-assist features that are available on all RX models. They're darn helpful. I don't mind getting beeped at if that means I'm not going to bump the fenders into a parking stop or turn into traffic unwisely. Furthermore, I'm all for the way the car will slow down automatically if you're behind another car at a stop sign, or that it warns you about changing lanes unwisely, or that it won't let you open the door onto a passing bicycle or car or pedestrian, or that it will do everything in its power to avoid a collision. It will even drive itself on the freeway, more or less, and can become autonomous in traffic jams. My crystal ball tells me that Lexus will adopt fully autonomous driving sooner rather than later, but Lexus being Lexus, they won't do it until the tech is matured and reliable. That's the Lexus way.

The real blowhard reviewers reveal themselves quickly with their exasperation about the safety features. They seem to consider them a personal affront, an insult to their manhood or something like that. (We all know how some straight guys are about driving, after all. Just parking a bit crookedly is enough to set them off.) One particular reviewer couldn't stop carping about the way he was expected to keep looking forwards; there's a camera on the steering wheel that keeps an eye on you. It's there to ensure that you're paying attention—that's a good thing—and also to help should you pass out or the like—that's an even better thing. But some of those guys get so pissy about it.

So while YouTube car reviews are interesting enough in and of themselves, particularly if it's a car you just bought that they're reviewing, I find them even more intriguing in the mirror they hold up to certain toxic male attitudes and behaviors. I suppose that's to be expected since temperate people are unlikely to be YouTube car reviewers. But as is so often the case, the reviewers wind up telling us a whole more about themselves than they do about the car they're reviewing. And more often than not, that ain't pretty.