Lexus RZ - Reliability & safety
Lexus’s first dedicated EV platform will have been tested to its limits to ensure reliability
With the might of Toyota behind it, and a certain weight of expectation around the Japanese giant’s first dedicated electric platform, you can be sure that the Lexus RZ has been developed to be as reliable and trouble-free as possible.
If you do need to visit a Lexus dealer, you can expect some of the best customer service to be found anywhere in the new-car market, according to owners that have fed back to the Driver Power ownership survey.
Every version of RZ has lots of standard safety tech, including adaptive cruise control, lane-keep assistance, front and rear cross-traffic alert (it warns you of vehicles that’ll cross your path when reversing out on to a road), and traffic-sign recognition. Like the Subaru Soltera and Toyota bZ4X, the RZ has a driver monitor system to ensure you’re paying attention to the road. If it thinks you are falling asleep or your attention wanders, it’ll ping up a warning.
| Key standard safety features | Euro NCAP safety ratings |
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Warranty
The standard Lexus warranty is three years or 60,000 miles, whichever comes first, which is similar to the sort of cover offered by the company’s premium rivals. There’s roadside assistance for the same period, too.
However, where Lexus pulls out an advantage is with its extended warranty. If you book a service at a Lexus franchise, then the company will cover your car for an additional 12 months or 10,000 miles, up to a maximum of 10 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. Even better, if a regular service is missed or work is done on the car outside of the network, that won’t affect its eligibility; it’s just the time and mileage limits that apply.
The RZ’s battery warranty of eight years/100,000 miles can be extended to ten years or 600,000 miles, which is unmatched in the EV world.
Servicing
Electric cars have fewer moving parts to maintain, so logic dictates that service costs should be cheaper when compared with combustion-engined models. That formula can be applied to the Lexus RZ, and the company’s fixed-price service plan costs just over £20 a month, which is around £15 a month less than a similar plan for the NX petrol hybrid SUV. However, that still means you need to budget around £700 for three years of maintenance costs when some rivals offer free servicing.
