#GX460

I’m trying to imagine the buyer who walks into a Lexus dealership, ready to buy an SUV. The options can be overwhelming. No fewer than five distinct models with a bit of ground clearance dot the clean, modern showroom and perfectly aligned aisles of fresh deliveries.

The RX is the gold standard of luxury crossovers, of course – and it’s now available with a third-row great for small children, small dogs, or golf clubs. The NX and UX lean toward the more affordable scale, for upwardly mobile folks who don’t need to be mobile with a ton of stuff.

The 2020 Lexus GX460, however, is in a weird spot. It really doesn’t give the passengers much additional space over the RX, but it’s a much bigger vehicle overall. It’s a rugged, body-on-frame beast that can tame many an off-road trail. It doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the Lexus lineup – bigger LX notwithstanding. But it clearly meets the needs of many, many drivers.

That was fast: Two days after Consumer Reports slammed the Lexus GX460 with a “Do Not Buy” rating, and one day after ToMoCo halted the sale of said vehicle, Toyota already has a fix. Today at lunchtime in Tokyo, Toyota said to The Nikkei [sub] that there will be changes to the Lexus GX460. This in an unusually quick response to CR’s assertion that the SUV’s tail can wag too much when the gas pedal is released while turning at high speeds.

No, Troy Queef hasn’t been hired by Consumer Reports to bring a “dab of oppo” to the magazine’s SUV reviews. Nor is lift-off oversteer a particularly fun, predictable or desirable handling trait, especially in a 5,000+ lb luxury SUV. And according to CR’s write-up, the cause is a bit of a mystery:

We perform this evaluation on every vehicle we test, which includes the 95 SUVs in our current auto Ratings. No other SUV in recent years slid out as far as the GX 460, including the Toyota 4Runner, which shares the same platform as the GX.

To confirm our results, we paid for the use of another GX 460 from Lexus and experienced the same problem.