The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting

The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting

My first hour behind the wheel of the Lexus IS 500, I was thinking about it all wrong.

See, we've been led to expect certain things when an automaker shoehorns a big V-8 into a small, rear-drive sedan. Rowdy, neighbor-waking, vertebrae-pummeling things. Nurburgring lap-time-setting things. The V-8 engine is swiftly becoming specialized equipment, reserved for vehicles with vaunted letters on their decklids: AMG, M, V. The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting

Judged against that competition, the IS 500 can't quite hang. It's not a track-ready sports coupe disguised as a family sedan. It's something a bit more genteel—a wholeheartedly luxurious machine with a surprise dose of thrust and revs. And in a realm where seemingly every performance product has to be an all-out circuit weapon, that's refreshing. The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting

The full name of this vehicle is unwieldy, if not a slight overpromise: the 2022 Lexus IS 500 F Sport Performance. It's the first member of Lexus's new F Sport Performance line, one notch more serious than the mere F Sport variants the company has offered for years.

Explaining the IS 500 is decisively simple: Imagine an IS 350 powered by Lexus's tasty, naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V-8, the same one that motivates the gorgeous LC 500 and the perplexing RC F. The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting

Designers raised the hoodline and nudged the front bumper forward to fit the big eight-cylinder in this relatively compact sedan, and gave the car unique 19-inch split-spoke alloy wheels and blackout trim to differentiate it from its four- and six-cylinder siblings. Stacked double-dual exhaust tips nod to Lexus's last rambunctious V-8-powered compact sedan, the IS F, though this time, the tips are actually attached to the exhaust.

Sliding behind the wheel, the IS 500 offers up the same high-quality but slightly old-looking interior you'll find in the rest of the lineup. Lexus's dash design is a bit button-heavy, and the company keeps trying to convince us that a laptop-style track pad is somehow superior to a touchscreen. Thankfully, the system offers haptic feedback to let you know when your finger has found a button, and unlike Acura's infuriating mousepad, the cursor doesn't disappear into digital purgatory when you lift your finger.

But we're not here to talk about infotainment. Strike the start button, and the 4969-cc, 32-valve engine zings to energetic life. The chunky shift lever traces a sawtooth pattern stolen from an Eighties Mercedes, and thank goodness for that: no matter how hard the German automakers try, a fussy, overcomplicated joystick shifter will never do the job better than a lever moving through P-R-N-D—even if that lever isn't actually connected to anything in the transmission itself.

So The Lexus IS 500 Is Not the Rowdy V-8 Screamer You Were Expecting