The Lexus ES has spent nearly four decades being the car nobody argues about. Throttle House set out to see whether the eighth generation still earns that, and picked an odd way to test it: a road trip to eat chicken wings rated in the millions of Scoville units. The car underneath them was the all wheel drive electric ES, which the hosts describe as the quickest and most powerful ES yet at 340 horsepower. It rides on the Toyota Crown platform rather than the Camry underpinnings the nameplate used for most of its life. The hosts put the tested car at around 80,000 Canadian dollars, and say it arrives with one habit nobody asked for. It keeps telling the driver off.
Two things here deserve a buyer's attention before any driving impression. The first is the incident logging. The hosts report the car announced that an incident had been detected and saved a 20 second clip under hard acceleration and hard cornering, and that it did this 47 times over the course of the trip. Anyone shopping this car should ask a dealer where those clips live, whether they stay on the vehicle, and who can request them, because event data recording has become a live question for insurers and courts. The second is charging. The hosts say they plugged the ES into a Tesla station and it worked, which is now normal rather than notable for new EVs in North America since most major brands moved to Tesla's connector standard. That matters more day to day than any interior material, particularly since the hosts describe the car's range as unremarkable. There is a third question the video raises but does not settle: whether the electric ES is worth the step up from the Toyota Crown it shares a platform with, or from the four cylinder hybrid ES in the same showroom. Both hosts decline to answer, but it is the comparison a shopper at this price makes first.
On everything else the video is warmer than that setup suggests. The hosts call the ES benign in the best sense: well calibrated, quiet, and free of the small irritations that ruin a long drive. They praise real physical buttons on the steering wheel rather than capacitive pads, a pair of wireless charging trays, a centre armrest that opens from both sides, and the Mark Levinson audio system. The complaints are specific rather than sweeping. At the tested price they note there are no heated rear seats, no ventilated rear seats and no third zone climate control, which stings more now that the LS has left the lineup and the ES is the closest thing Lexus offers to a luxury back seat. Sport mode adds a synthetic sound and a vibration, and the hosts point out that Europe gets a simulated shift mode Canada does not. The exterior gets a harder time. The paint is a colour the hosts say is called wavelength, and they admit the reaction to the styling has not been kind, though one argues the black lower cladding exists to make a large car look visually lighter. And it is large. They say the ES is longer than a BMW M5, and that the rear badge now spells out Lexus rather than using the L found on the wheels and nose. Per the video, many new ES models are now built in China, while North American cars come from Japan, and the interior owes a visible debt to what sells in the Chinese market: simplified surfaces, better screens than Lexus usually fits, and ambient lighting cues.
Bottom line: the ES is still a decent answer to a question plenty of people quietly have, which is how to spend luxury money without buying a personality along with it. The electric version drives well enough that the styling arguments are beside the point. What is harder to accept at this price is a back seat with no heat, no ventilation and no climate zone of its own, in the car that now has to stand in for the LS. And a car that files 47 incident reports on one road trip is not calibrated for adults. Fix the nagging, put the rear seat content back, and this becomes an easy recommendation.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.