My feeling is this: it ain’t no ragtop. Ragtops are fun-in-the-sun, cast off your shirt, kick up your heels, American Graffiti, a ’32 Ford Roadster, a Caddy El Dorado. This 2014 Lexus IS350 is a coupe that just happens to fold its steel top and hide away in a trunk that, now filled with top panels, is useless.
My, aren’t we being traditional here? We’re exercising orthodox automania: a convertible must have a folding cloth top. This is how it’s always been (with a few demented exceptions; viz. Ford’s Rube Goldberg attempt at the hardtop convertible genre in the late 1950s), and this is how it will always be.
Well….. things change. The world changes. Lexus has actually been making folding hardtops for more than a decade — they introduced the SC430 in the 2002 model year and it performed quite well, thank you. The point of all this is that the hardtop convertible is, nevertheless, a compromise. (For motorcyclists, the flip-up full-face helmet is the same kind of compromise – we want that rigid coverage over the entire face, but when it’s hot out we also want to flip up the chin and visor portion to get some air on the face. But a flip-front helmet is not as strong as the one-piece full-face helmet.)
The compromise in the hardtop convertible goes like this: we want to throw down the top, but, when you think about it, how often is the top down? Not as much as it is up. When it’s up, depending on the plushness of the top, we get wind noise batting that canvas mercilessly at 70 miles an hour. Further, for the paranoid among us, we just know that if we park a ragtop on a city street and go have dinner, when we return there will be a nice long gash in the roof – placed there by a thief or just a mischievous miscreant. Hardtops don’t get treated that way.
And the beauty of that hardtop is that when it’s up it’s a solid piece of steel — it gives the strength of steel and it doesn’t make any noise. In other words: we can have a droptop when we want it and we can have a hardtop coupe. But we sacrifice trunk space when the top is down. (We also sacrifice good looks, at least in the case of the IS350, because it’s difficult to make smooth lines out of a top that comes apart in pieces.)
What about the rest of the car? Our test IS350 came with the stock 3.5-liter V6, with 306 horsepower and a six-speed automatic that had the usual manumatic options: paddle shifting or console stick back and forth. It’s become common and I wonder how many drivers actually shift into Ricky Racer mode.
Our test car had the $2,550 F-Sport package, which replaces the 17-inch alloy wheels with 18-inchers mounting fatter summer tires, along with hot and cold running seats. We also had navigation, sonorous Mark Levinson audio, rear view camera and the parking sensors that beep at you when you’re within a mile of a fence you might hit while backing up. Conspicuously missing were the driver seat memory buttons. This may be the first Lexus I’ve been in that didn’t have memory seats. I thought they fairly invented that convenient option and put it on every car they made. Apparently not.
On the road, the IS350 is Lexus-quiet at speed and I kept listening (in vain) for the creaks and squeaks of that moveable hardtop. It worked as advertised and really did feel like a fixed roof car. But I also knew (as I know with my flip-up motorcycle helmet) that it isn’t the real deal. The question, at least in the car application, is whether it really matters that it’s not the real deal.
In the end, this car retails for $55,445, (it has a base price of $46,990) and gets middling fuel economy of 19/27 mpg, city/highway.
If you’re looking at these, I’d also look at the G37 version put out by Lexus’s closest competitor, Infiniti, as well as those put out by BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
For more consumer information on cars, check these Web sites:
Safety data can be found at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Reliability information can be seen in the dependability studies conducted by J.D. Power; and at Consumer Reports.
Fuel mileage figures are available at this site, maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy.
For trivia lovers: the sticker you see on the window of every new car for sale in the United States is known in the auto industry as the “Monroney.” It is named for U.S. Senator Almer Stilwell (Mike) Monroney, the Oklahoma Democrat who sponsored the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958, which required all new cars to have labels that detail the price of the car and its options.
Comments are closed.