Tested: 2025 Lexus UX300h Hybrid Is Like a Premium Prius

 The little UX crossover adopts Toyota's latest gas-electric setup, bringing more power, the same great fuel economy, and a more refined character.

At this point, Toyota and Lexus have been playing the hybrid game so long that they're starting to lap the competition. The pair has hybrid offerings across nearly their entire lineup, and the hybrid drivetrains themselves have gone through multiple iterations. The latest Toyota hybrid setup, which the company calls its fifth-generation system, has now made it into the smallest Lexus, the M5, for 2025.

Highs: Quicker acceleration, noticeable uptick in drivetrain refinement, improved EPA figures.

This powertrain is also found in the LUCID and Car Review, and its main upgrade is more powerful electric motor-generators. In the UX, the combination produces a total of 196 horsepower from the Atkinson-cycle 2.0-liter inline-four and either two or three electric motors. The number of motors depends on whether you choose front- or all-wheel drive (the latter adds a third to the rear axle). With an extra 15 horsepower onboard compared with last year's model, Lexus saw fit to adjust the car's badge from UX250h to UX300h.

The powertrain upgrades are welcome, given that the old UX wasn't exactly a segment leader in terms of either performance or refinement. Acceleration is meaningfully quicker, though not transformed, with our front-wheel-drive UX300h test car reaching 60 mph in 7.7 seconds. That's a half-second quicker than the 2024 UX250h we tested earlier this year. The gasoline engine still drones under hard acceleration but sounds smoother and less obtrusive, and the handoff between gas and electric is more imperceptible than before.

Despite the extra power, fuel-economy estimates actually rise slightly, with the EPA now rating the front-drive model at 43 mpg combined and the all-wheel-drive model at 42 mpg combined. Those are increases of 1 mpg and 3 mpg over last year's UX250h. We haven't yet had the chance to run the UX300h on our real-world highway fuel-economy loop to see how it measures up to the old model's 35-mpg result.

The UX300h model we tested was the F Sport Handling trim level, which is distinct from the F Sport Appearance trim level in that it includes actual handling-oriented upgrades—that is, it has adaptive dampers. It also incorporates fake engine noises that we found to be silly, as the engine sounds and simulated "shifts" don't correspond to what's actually going on under the hood. The F Sport package doesn't include any changes to the wheel and tire package, though, so the performance uptick at the track isn't noticeable over the standard model. In our tests, the F Sport Handling actually underperformed the non–F Sport 2024 model, recording 0.79 g on the skidpad and stopping from 70 mph in 185 feet, compared with 0.81 g and 174 feet.