TEST DRIVE: Drag Race Saturday, Church on Sunday with the Lexus GS450h Hybrid

<a title="Inhabitat: hybrid" href="http://inhabitat.com/index.php?s=hybrid" target="_blank">Hybrids</a> are always a compromise, right? Not anymore. Plenty of hybrids sacrifice power or performance in order to give us excellent efficiency, but they're getting better all the time. Case in point: the new <a title="Lexus GS450h" href="http://www.lexus.com/models/GS/explore/" target="_blank">Lexus GS450h hybrid</a>, which has Sport, Normal, and Eco modes that actually work. The <a title="Lexus GS450h Explore" href="http://www.lexus.com/models/GS/explore/" target="_blank">GS450h</a> is a bruiser on sport mode, with <a title="Inhabitat: sports car" href="http://inhabitat.com/index.php?s=sports+car" target="_blank">sports car </a>acceleration of 0-60 in under 6 seconds and decent performance, while still pulling off 32 mpg no matter how ridiculously we drove it (it's officially rated at 34 mpg). Eco Mode offered us more moderate but adequate performance with a sweet 46 mpg on offer. What did we think of the car? Come along with us on our week-long test drive and hear all the details. We're happy to report they're mostly positive.

The first thing we noticed about the GS450h was its beautiful interior. The half wood-style steering wheel is smooth and fat enough to fit well in your hands, everything is covered in cool gadgets or leather, and it's just well-built and thought out, generally.

This is the GS450h at its best angle, with a wide and low stance, beautifully executed LED strip headlights, and a sporty grille.

From the front, the GS450h looks more like other Lexus vehicles whether up- or down-market, but it's still a pretty car.

Lexus has been indicted recently for slapping this aggressive grille on its luxury cars, since so many luxury cars are elegant and refined. We say Lexus needs to prove its sporty worth and has made a good call juicing up the appearance of its cars. Slap this on all of them.

Headlights are part regular beams on top, part Audi-style LED light strip at the bottom. It's a beautiful glare in the evening light.

Hmm. We'll get to what's wrong with the mirrors in a second. From this angle all is well.

Wait. Why is the mirror casing a full inch and a half wider than the mirrors? Look how tiny they actually are. Blind spot cameras? No excuse for this strip of useless car body sticking out beyond the useable mirrors. Theyr'e not big enough to get a good view reversing, and that's ridiculous in a car starting at 59k.

All is well in the passenger compartment. Plenty of room, nice doors, continuing the wood theme in a tasteful manner.

Lovely lovely, and easy ingress and egress.

Nicely bolstered seats. This car will never toss you around... at least not if you're the driver.

Yes, nice doors. We're starting to think we have a door fetish or something (please see every other test drive ever written for Inhabitat).

Even the windows close quietly and smoothly on this car. So many details well-attended to.

Waiting for the details on the gadgets? Here's where this car starts to get cool. Check out the dials on this instrument cluster. Got that image in your mind?

Still got it? Normal and Eco modes have similar instrument clusters. But then....

Boom! Just changed out the dials completely on the left. Gone is the power monitor and charge indicator, and back is the old-fashioned rev counter. We love it.

Nice steering wheel, though we didn't use the buttons, as usual.

Here you can see how the car is a strange mix of old and new. New nav screen, old-fashioned clock on a wide dash. Old brushed-metal radio knobs above a high-tech HVAC system.

We're not crazy about the computer mouse style clicker tool for this nav screen, but at least within the menus it's all intuitive.

At night, the hashes on this clock light up with white lights, giving it a much more sophisticated appearance.

A closer look at the audio and HVAC systems.

Here you can see the gear shift, selector for drive mode, and the mouse selector tool at the top.

How excited are we that this drive mode selector tool does something useful? Maybe a little over-excited, but most of these are useless, requiring the driver to just add more pedal to the metal to do what they need the car to do. This one works great. Plenty of power in all modes, but awesome power in Sport and awesome efficiency in Eco.

The big thing on the bottom right is an arm rest that is only necessary because there is a toggle tool above it that works like a computer mouse to control the nav screen. Stupid, we and every other automotive journalist out there have always hated this thing, but you can get used to it if you have to.

Nice but simple sunroof on the GS450h.

It's a sunroof. They didn't try to get too fancy with it, but it works well.

Why do almost all cars look less sexy from the rear quarter angle? Why do the body lines fall apart right where the back pillars meet the body? If only we knew.

At least the taillights have some attention paid to them. They reflect the shapes present in the front grille. Nicely done.

Because this is a full hybrid but not an electric car or plug-in with a big battery, there are no compromises in cargo space.

Maybe not golf club worthy, but pretty good space. More than we needed during our test.

You can see the taillights well from the rear, but don't have to look at that shoulder line. It's a nice car from most angles.

So, racing on Saturday, and very presentable for a Sunday get-together. The Lexus GS450h is part sport, part luxury, and part green. We think it balances these roles quite well. If you have 60k to drop on a hybrid, go buy one now. You'll love it.