Lexus IS220d SE-L review

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Lexus IS 220d 2.2 SE-L Road Test

Test date 20 December 2005 Price as tested £27,942

For Sharp looks, handling, powerful brakes, equipment

Against Engine refinement, low-speed ride, rear-seat and boot space

By its own admission, for the 15 years it has been in the UK market, Lexus has been happy to be the luxury brand with the least easily defined image. It has meant that while you need to be a certain sort of person to want, say, a BMW, anyone might have a Lexus on their shopping list.

It’s more than a little telling that not only do lead characters in shows as gritty as Spooks and Waking The Dead drive Lexus products, but so too do rather more lightweight comedic small screeners such as Martin Clunes in Doc Martin and that most famous of all fictional Lexus drivers, Alan Partridge.

These product placements have been made because Lexus has twigged that to want a Lexus, first you must know what one is. And this very anonymity with which Lexus has hitherto been so comfortable is responsible for the fact that, in the UK, the marque has a brand recognition of just six per cent. It seems that topping the JD Power customer satisfaction survey five years in a row is just not enough.

So it has been decided that Lexus needs to embrace the automotive mainstream and this, the new IS220d, is the car that’s going to do it. You spotted that little ‘d’, didn’t you? We will find out during this test whether the fact that there is now a diesel Lexus says more about how far diesel technology has progressed, or how desperate Lexus is to offer a product that does not automatically exclude the majority of its potential customers – as petrol power does in this and most of the other classes in which Lexus competes. For now, however, be advised that this is not only Lexus’s first ever diesel, it is its first ever four-cylinder car.

Is this a big leap for the Lexus faithful brought up to believe that refinement was the one Lexus immutable? Maybe, but we have seen already that Lexus needs to widen its scope beyond the narrow traditional confines and, besides, Jaguar did exactly the same in 2003 with the fine X-type diesel.