2006 Lexus IS 350

A beautiful car that is surprisingly fun to drive but can it beat its main rival, the BMW 3-Series?

by Thane Peterson

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Speed, classy interior, paddle shifters

The Bad: Cramped rear seat, lack of stick shift

The Bottom Line: A Bimmer rival, but can it rival the ’07 Bimmer?

Reader Reviews

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Up Front As I test drove the new Lexus IS 350, I kept wishing car reviewers could do blind test drives like the blind taste-tests that wine writers do. This car is designed to compete head-to-head with BMW's 3-Series, the darling of most driving enthusiasts, so it's hard not to nitpick the Toyota (TM) upstart.

But would our judgments be the same if we could isolate the driving experience and weren't sure which car we were driving at any given time? I'm not so sure. I've done blind taste-tests, and they can be pretty humbling.

The IS 350 and the BMW 3-Series sedans are similar, at least on paper. Both have rear-wheel drive with the engine up front. The Lexus is 180 in. long, 71 in. wide, 56 in. high, and weighs 3,527 lbs. The Bimmer (this year's 3-Series is called the 330i, while the '07, which comes out in October, is designated the 335i) is 178 in. long, 71.5 in. wide, 56 in. high, and the '07 with an automatic weighs 3,605 lbs.

The Lexus' wheelbase measures 107.5 in., the 335i's is 108.7. The Lexus even looks a little like a BMW, especially from the side, and it seems designed to have a sporty, German-style road feel.

The Lexus' big selling point this year is that it has a more powerful engine: The 305-horsepower V6 that was in my 2006 IS 350 test car compared with a mere 253 horsepower inline six in the 2006 BMW 330i. However, as of the 2007 model year (surprise, surprise), BMW has matched its rival. The engine in the new 335i is a twin-turbocharged inline six that delivers 300 horses.

The BMW costs more. The 2006 Lexus IS 350 starts at $36,030, and the base price is only rising by $265 for the '07 model, which is much like this year's. In the real world, the average buyer is paying $39,765 for an IS 350 right now, according to the Power Information Network—which, like Business Week and BusinessWeek.com, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Cos.(MHP).

The 2007 BMW 335i with an automatic starts out more than four grand higher than the Lexus, at $40,670. However, according to Power, the real-world selling price of the 2006 3-Series right now is $41,570, only slightly higher than the Lexus.

The IS 350's exterior fit and finish are flawless. The gaps around the doors, hood, and trunk are narrow and uniform, and the car looks sleek. The IS 350 has a remarkably low co-efficient of drag—a measure of how slippery a car's exterior is—of just 0.28.

That lack of wind drag is one reason the car is rated to get a reasonably good 21 mpg in the city and 28 on the highway. In a stretch of 212 miles of driving I only got 21 mpg, but I drove the car hard. As with a BMW, the Lexus runs on expensive premium gasoline.

The new Lexuses are hot sellers. Toyota has sold 31,794 IS 250s and 350s combined though the end of July, while BMW sold 68,941 3-Series cars of all types in the U.S. in the same period.

The average IS 350 spends a mere 15 days on dealer lots before selling, according to Power. By contrast, the BMW 330i spends 26 days on the lot, which isn't bad considering that the new, improved 3-Series is about to come out.

Behind the Wheel I can only give driving impressions for the Lexus because I haven't yet driven the new 3-Series sedan. But I can tell you that both cars are quick. BMW says the 335i will do 0 to 60 in 5.4 seconds with a manual transmission and 5.6 seconds with an automatic.

Lexus says the IS 350 will jump from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds, but it did better than that in my tests. With some practice (which was a lot of fun) I got my times down to 5.2 seconds using the paddle shifters, versus 5.7 seconds letting the automatic transmission do the actual shifting. This is a car that can compete with the Bimmer speed-wise, if that's what you're interested in.

The Lexus also handles extremely well. As with a BMW, weight is almost evenly distributed between the front and back (52% in the front versus 48% in the rear), which helps make the IS 350 feel stable.