2008 Lexus IS F - Review

The IS-F's steering wheel, complete with paddle shifters, is comfortable and offers good feedback

Enlarge PhotoThe rear seat's lack of room is worth mentioning, but it's hardly noteworthy. The 3-series, C-Class, Infiniti G35, and essentially every other mid-size luxury sedan on earth all lack much in the way of room in the back seat. It's for children, packages, and occasional trips with adults, not cross-country touring.

Technical
The 5.0L V8 under the hood of the IS-F is anything but ordinary, despite its derivation from the LS-series. Rated at 416hp (310kW) and 371lb-ft (502Nm) of torque, the engine pulls readily from any RPM, and keeps right on pulling to redline.

But the music starts at about 4,000rpm. That's when the vacuum valve opens up the secondary intake box and the car can really breathe. The sound of that tuned length of air vibrating as it enters the now-howling V8 engine, combined with the blatty note of the exhaust is an aural delight every gearhead or hotshoe should experience at least once in their lives.

That exhaust note may appear to be piped through two pairs of stacked oval pipes out back, but in reality those are just pretty plastic pieces molded into the bumper for show - the real exhaust outlets are unremarkable, thin and made of plain steel. A cursory squat behind the car will prove this unfortunate fact, and in a sense, this minor deception encapsulates the nature of the car.

Once you're done dancing on the accelerator, there's surprisingly little to backup the car's promise. No manual transmission is available; instead an eight-speed automatic with paddle-shifters is standard. Set the car into full sport mode by toggling some switches and the eight-cog system behaves well enough, but there will be no really on-the-edge driving here without compromise.
Perhaps it's a personal bias I have toward doing my own shifting, maybe it's a lack of faith in computers, but the element of car control that's taken away with the automatic gearbox is downright annoying when it comes to driving the IS-F hard. The paddle shifters work well enough, the transmission is surprisingly quick for an automatic when in sport mode, and it even rev-matches (sort of), but the big picture is still a feeling of being held back.

Other aspects of the car's arsenal are similarly hit-and-miss. The brakes are strong and confidence-inspiring, repeating their work readily in back-roads driving. The suspension balance, on the other hand, tends toward being a bit too soft for seriously quick transitional work, and overall chassis balance is viciously biased toward snap oversteer - be very careful completely disabling traction control, especially if it's wet out, though in the right hands it can still be balanced on the edge.

On the Road
During the daily bits, however, it's perfect. Docile, demure and even doddering - all adjectives that can happily be used to describe the IS-F as you one-hand the car around neighborhood bends, soaking up the bumps with the relatively compliant suspension on the way to work, spilling not a drop of coffee. Passengers will never notice the '-F'-ness of the car, so long as the driver keeps their right foot from getting itchy, and the IS-F melts into the background of simply driveable passenger vehicles. Oh, it'll leap to freeway speed and beyond after a brief lag when you bury the pedal, but otherwise it's perfectly passive.

All of that might sound like anathema to the enthusiast that wants to be seen in their hot sedan, but the Lexus is a supremely capable daily driver in a way that many more hardcore vehicles simply can't be. And perhaps that's Lexus' brand of performance - it performs best in the 99% of the situations it will actually be driven, giving up the last 10% of its performance for civility and comfort.

Fuel efficiency will leave a bit to be desired, though, if the IS-F is put to the commuter test. Rated at 16mpg city and 23mpg highway, my real-world average under a mix of moderate city and highway use with a few good floggings thrown in was just a tick under 13mpg - abysmal by modern standards, but right about what one would expect from a 400hp+ V8 sedan.