Long-term update: Lexus IS 300C from a woman's perspective

Long-term update: Lexus IS 300C from a woman’s perspective


For someone who’s not overly enthusiastic about cars, the Lexus IS 300C surely came as a surprise to me, something worthy of making a few good comments about. Looking from the exterior, personally, any 4-door sedan as I see it, is a ‘family car’ to me. This is what I thought of the Lexus IS 300C too as I got a first glimpse of it from our balcony. I later noticed it had only two doors.

While it did look like a compact family car to me at first, once the roof started coming off, like a Transformers robot, the boring automobile suddenly started appearing sportier. Well at least for a lady, getting into a convertible car, with its roof rolling down in front of a crowd of corporate colleagues certainly makes you appear more affluent and showy. Soon after, I suddenly have some colleagues who are already requesting me to take them closer to the vehicle for some mobile-camera photo shoot.

Once inside the car, in roof-up mode, the experience is quite more sophisticated than one can expect. Giving a contemporary feel with two different colour tones, the spacious leather seats, smooth ride, neat interior design, the vehicle is a treat to ride in. It feels more like a luxury sports car aiming towards a trend-conscious crowd.

However, against all that goodness, one thing I dislike amongst all the automated functionalities, is that all the doors do not unlock when the driver unlocks his by touching the “smart” door handle. I can never enter the vehicle as a passenger unless the driver manually pushes some button against his armrest to unlock my passenger door, of course only after knocking on the window. Also, while leaving the car, each time that I have to push a button on the door to unlock it, I am reminded of my father’s vintage fully-manual 1980 Isuzu. We went through the instruction manual but got lost in it, and we never found the settings for it in the touchscreen computer, but then we searched the internet and finally found some convoluted procedure to unlock all doors at once, by holding down the ‘lock’ and ‘alarm’ buttons together on the keyfob for 5 seconds. We will try that out later.

Original Mileage When Borrowed: 4,640 km
Latest Mileage To Date: 8,100 km
Latest Average Fuel Economy: 10.2 litres/100 km
Cost of Latest Problems: Dhs 0
Cost of Latest Maintenance: Dhs 0

Total Non-Fuel Running Cost Since Borrowed: Dhs 0

Read all 2012 Lexus IS 300C long-term updates

What do you think?

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Comments

  1. U can trying pushing smart door handle twice hence 1st will one will open it door the 2nd wil open the passenger one
    I have the same in my Infiniti FX I think it might be the same

  2. The Mazda6 has a similar feature(w/button on the door handle to lock the doors) however when you slip your hand in to grip the driver’s door handle all the doors unlock.

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