Warren Brown Likes the 2015 Lexus IS 350 F Sport

The 2015 Lexus IS 350 F Sport was reviewed recently by Warren Brown, automotive columnist for the Washington Post. After driving nearly 1,200 miles on the windy mountain roads of New York’s Bear Mountain and Storm King Mountain, his verdict is in — and it’s good.

“Darkness comes with a vengeance in these parts, wrapping the roads in a blackness that encourages you to praise God for the invention of high-intensity-discharge headlamps,” he wrote. “It helps if those headlamps are optionally ‘intelligent,’ as they were in the IS 350 F Sport that I drove. That means the headlamps automatically, temporarily adjust to low beams on dark roads when traffic approaches in the opposite direction.”

That’s not the only safety features he liked. Comparing the 350 F Sport to the BMW 3-Series, Brown highlighted the front and rear ventilated disc brakes, four-wheel anti-lock brake protection, electronic brake-force distribution, emergency braking assistance, pre-collision safety system, blind-spot monitoring, and electronic parking assistance — all features of the standard model.

Not only did the safety features win a thumbs-up, but the price did as well. “In the world of high-performance entry-level luxury automobiles (estimate $40,000 to $50,000),” he wrote, the Lexus IS 350 F Sport “appears to be a good deal.” Compared to the BMW 3-Series, Brown wrote that the Lexus offers more for your buck, even with advanced package options.

“The IS 350 F Sport comes standard with a 3.5-liter, 24-valve V-6 gasoline engine with variable valve timing (306 horsepower, 277 pound-feet of torque). The all-wheel-drive version gets a six-speed automatic transmission that can also be operated manually. The rear-wheel-drive version comes with an eight-speed automatic.”

And although the Sport uses premium grade fuel, it offers three drive settings: Eco, Normal, and Sport. Brown noted that he drove mostly in the Sport setting and averaged 22 miles per gallon on the highway. He did not say what he averaged in the mountains, but the ISO Sport has a city EPA rating of 19 miles per gallon.

Now that we’ve gotten Warren Brown’s stamp of approval, we hope we can get yours as well. Come into your go-to Lexus dealer of Chicago and test drive the all-new 2015 Lexus IS 350 F Sport, and see how it works for you. On any terrain, we guarantee a safe, smooth ride.