L-FINESSE, LEXUS STYLE
New LS develops Lexus’s design philosophy

Design is increasingly a defining factor in the luxury car market, as differences in performance, reliability and equipment levels between rival models grow smaller. It is a factor that has become highly influential for Lexus in the development of its new generation models, leading to the creation of a new design language, L-finesse.

Lexus’s new LS flagship limousine is the latest expression of L-finesse, with key elements of its styling following cues established in the new generation GS and IS models. In turn, these production models follow design thinking expressed in the earlier LF-X and HPX show cars presented in 2002 and 2003.

Simon Humphries, Lexus Group Manager for Design Strategy, explained how L-finesse was developed: "When the first Lexus was launched, it was perceived as advanced, forward-looking, a new take on luxury. But it also had a certain finesse, an element of understatement.

"Over time these qualities started to become disparate, and Lexus designers faced a challenge to reunite them in a style that is both leading edge and human. This process gained the name L-finesse."

Although L-finesse informs the look of a new generation of Lexus models, Humphries emphasises that it is not about creating an instant family look, or cloning models on a single theme. He said: "Put very simply, L-finesse is everything that can’t be measured by numbers or specifications. It’s the character, personality, everything that is intangible about Lexus. What we’ve tried to do is define that and guide design to a unique direction and position in the marketplace."

L-finesse is strongly influenced by Japanese cultural traditions, including the concept of Seamless Anticipation in hospitality, where a guest’s needs are catered for, before that need is realised by the individual. In the new LS this can be witnessed in the sequenced illumination as the driver approaches the car, gets in and sits at the wheel, which is both welcoming and practical.

Intriguing Elegance is another dimension of L-finesse which draws on Japanese design tradition. "People often think of Japanese design as just being minimalist, but actually it isn’t. It has a lot of simplicity, but it is by no means simple," said Humphries.

This is illustrated by the complex curves which dominate the coachwork of the LS 460, for example in the way the lines of the bonnet and wings meet the car’s frontal area. Inside, the same concept can be seen at work in every element, from the instrument panel to the seat cushions.

Another element of L-finesse is the arrowhead shape used in many different aspects of the new LS, as well as the earlier IS and GS models. In the LS 460 is it clearly visible in the design of the car’s front end, the sharp outer surfaces of the arrowhead represented by the headlamps’ higher position in relation to the radiator grille. The sharp outer edges of the arrowhead contrast with softer inner lines, as in the grille itself and the line of the rear window.

The all-new Lexus LS 460 goes on sale in the UK in January next year.

Unbridled high-tech luxury

Today's cars are already so technologically advanced, the only thing left is to build one that drives for you. The all-new 2007 Lexus LS 460 comes awfully close to crossing that line.

Although this replacement for the LS 430 doesn't actually drive itself, it is the first luxury sedan that will take the reins from the driver's hands and park itself. That's right, park itself. The LS 460 can be parallel-parked or reversed into a conventional space without so much as a manicured little pinkie touching the wheel.

This innovative system is in addition to a more powerful, more fuel-efficient V8 engine, the world's first eight-speed transmission, standard and long-wheelbase body styles, and the usual top-notch Lexus quality. These upgrades elevate the Lexus LS 460 to rival the recently redesigned Mercedes-Benz S550.

Your chauffeur's next car
The Lexus LS 460 L is the company's first long-wheelbase model, and while it hopes the expanded offering will attract new buyers, the targeted audience is a relatively small group of high earners. Lexus expects to sell approximately 30,000 LS sedans in the U.S. in 2007, with the long-wheelbase version comprising less than 30 percent of that volume.

Measuring nearly 203 inches in overall length, the LS L is 4.7 inches longer than the standard LS, and rides on a 4.7-inch-longer wheelbase. The 116.9-inch wheelbase of the standard length LS 460 is 1.8 inches longer than the wheelbase of the outgoing LS 430.

Weight is also up. The LS 460 weighs 4365 pounds and the LS 460 L gains an additional 100 pounds. But even with its expanded feature content, the LS 460 weighs just 375 pounds more than the 2006 Lexus LS 430.

Powertrain deluxe
No matter which LS wheelbase you choose, the car comes standard with an all-new 4.6-liter V8 with intelligent dual variable valve timing. This is the world's first electrically controlled valve timing system, replacing hydraulic control valves to improve cold-start performance and increase power output as well as fuel economy.

Despite its small displacement, the engine makes almost as much power as the 5.5-liter V8 in the Mercedes-Benz S550. Officially rated at 380 horsepower at 6400 rpm and 367 pound-feet at 4100 rpm, this ultrasmooth V8 puts out 102 hp and 55 lb-ft more than the LS 430's old V8. The Benz peaks at 382 hp at a lower 6000 rpm and 391 lb-ft of torque at a much lower 2800 rpm.

The Benz also packs a seven-speed automatic, which is so last year. Lexus has mated its powerful new V8 to an eight-speed automatic which has fewer parts and is 10 percent lighter than the previous six-speed unit, yet is similar in size. Lexus also says that 1st and 2nd gears are low to improve launch performance, and gears three through eight have closer ratios for better fuel economy. The sedan's estimated EPA ratings of 19 city/27 highway are way up from the previous 18/25 rating.

Next spring expect to see the LS's EPA numbers climb even higher when Lexus adds the LS 600h L, the world's first vehicle with a full hybrid V8 powertrain, to the model lineup.

New suspension improves ride and handling
A new lightweight multilink upper and lower double-joint front suspension with hollow stabilizer bar provides straight-line stability and further quiets the LS's already tomblike ride. This setup also shortens the LS's turning radius, now best-in-class at 17.7 feet for the 460 and approximately 18.5 feet for 460 L depending on whether it has 18- or 19-inch wheels.

Weight has also been cut from the rear suspension, which uses struts with multilink control arms and a stabilizer bar to further isolate passengers from road bumps.

In addition to the standard suspension setup, an improved air suspension with Normal, Comfort and Sport modes is an option on only the LS 460 L. It's controlled by a switch on the car's center console, unless it receives feedback from the Vehicle Dynamic Integrated Management (VDIM), the LS's all-encompassing vehicle stability control system. Instead of reacting to an already occurring driving situation, VDIM is designed to anticipate vehicle instability in every direction while making stabilizing corrections and adjusts accordingly.

Electric power steering and big brakes
Newly developed electric power steering replaces the LS 430's old rack, turning down the volume even further on noise, vibration and harshness. It also works with VDIM to improve safety. Add the optional air suspension and it integrates variable gear ratio steering as well, providing a sportier feel to the otherwise light and often artificial-feeling electric steering.

Large, ventilated four-wheel disc brakes and an electronically controlled brake system work together to slow this luxury flagship. Opt for the L's Touring package and you'll get high-performance pads and 19-inch wheels along with the air suspension.

Comfort comes in several configurations
All of these high-tech mechanicals are complemented by the LS 460's quiet, sumptuous interior. Leather, leather and more leather covers the expansive cabin, accented by the finest wood and metal trim. Your chauffeur can chuck the driving gloves. The new, baby-smooth steering wheel is buffed beyond belief — twice as many times as in the past, and for three hours compared to the half-hour process used on the LS 430.

A 16-way power driver seat and 12-way power passenger seat will support even the most discriminating backside. The LS 460's Comfort package includes climate-controlled front seats, heated rear seats, a heated steering wheel and a rear power sunshade. The Comfort Plus Package adds rear power seats with power headrests, rear side airbags and climate-controlled seating in the back as well.

As sumptuous as the 460's interior is, comfort is taken to a whole new level in the 460 L. Its Rear Seat Upgrade Package includes the Comfort Plus Package, plus four-zone rear air-conditioning with air purifier and a ceiling-mounted air diffuser, a rear cool box for storing beverages, power rear door sunshades and a rear audio control panel. Finally, the Executive Class Seating Package adds a four-person seating configuration with a center console and retractable table, a power recline right rear seat with massage and a leg rest, a rear-seat DVD system with power-opening 9-inch screen and infrared rear-seat body-temperature sensors so the chauffeured needn't be bothered.

Actual legroom measurements for the front and rear haven't yet been released, but there's ample room, no matter which body style you choose. Cargo room is also plentiful, with both the 460 and 460 L offering 18 cubic feet, except for vehicles equipped with the four-zone climate control system, which reduces cargo volume to 12 cubic feet. A convenient one-touch open-close power trunk lid is a stand-alone option.

Does everything except cook you dinner
As you would expect in a Lexus, there's an endless assortment of bonus electronic gadgetry. In addition to the two levels of parking assistance — a Dynamic Radar Cruise Control system and Pre-Collision system that paces the car in front of you — an all-new navigation system with real-time XM traffic reports that reconfigure drive routes based on current traffic congestion is available.

Standard stuff now includes push-button start and Bluetooth with the nav system. Audiophiles will be blown away by the optional Mark Levinson Reference Surround, a 19-speaker audio system that pumps out 450 watts of power.

But the star of the show is the Advanced Parking Guidance system that includes a dozen exterior sensors. Allow the car to measure the desired space by slowly passing it as you would to position yourself to parallel-park, pausing to let the car's front side sensors mark the distance. The target space then appears as a box on the nav screen for confirmation of its precise location. If the box appears squarely in the open space, push the activation button and release the steering wheel. It does feel slightly eerie as the wheel spins on its own, but driver input is still required to control the car's speed by modulating the brake pedal.

Crossing over to greatness
At the 2007 Lexus LS 460's starting price of around $70,000, Lexus' new flagship takes aim at some of the best cars in the world, including the Audi A8, Mercedes-Benz S-Class and BMW 7 Series. The new Lexus may not be as pretty as the Audi, or as powerful as the Mercedes, or as driver-focused as the 750i, but it is the only one that can park itself. And in the fad-driven, gizmo-obsessed luxury sedan market, that makes it the darling of the moment.

Edmunds attended a manufacturer-sponsored event, to which selected members of the press were invited, to facilitate this report.

Passion takes a back seat

Lexus' LS 460 has it all: seats with massage function, a fridge. It even parks itself. But will anyone love it?

DAN NEIL
August 30, 2006

IF you follow car culture, one of the first things you'll learn about the 2007 Lexus LS 460 — the fourth-generation flagship of Toyota's luxury marque — is that it has the ability to park itself. The car's optional Advanced Parking Guidance System allows drivers to sidle up to a spot, press a touch-screen button and the car will then glidingly reverse itself into the space, either parallel or perpendicular to the curb.

While others may report this breathlessly, you'll allow me a hearty, unstifled yawn. First of all, any technology that further enables the decline in minimum driving competence is untimely, at best. Second, the system requires that the parallel spot be 6.5 feet longer than the car (23 feet for the standard-wheelbase LS 460). I don't need a computer and a rearview camera to dock in such a huge space. A white cane and a Labrador service dog would do just fine. Also, the car takes forever to achieve this bit of parking prestidigitation. I'd be on my second latte by the time the LS finally put out its mooring lines.

The auto-parking feature is a headline-grabbing gimmick in a car run cheerfully amok with them. For your delectation, I submit the count-'em eight-speed automatic transmission, a world first. Finally, relief for the deprived owners of the quaint and rudimentary Mercedes S-class, who get along with a mere seven.

Perhaps your tastes run toward science fiction. The LS 460 L — the long-wheelbase model — offers the optional four-zone climate control, which uses an infrared camera to measure backseat passengers' body temperature (and, one guesses, to scan for signs of incipient menopause). A fully optioned LS 460 L would also be equipped with 11 air bags (another record!), 19 surround-sound speakers, a 30-gigabit hard drive (storage for 2,000 music files with room to spare for the navigation data), and five powered sunshades, to tick off just a few of the car's supernumerary excesses.

What is going on here? Call it the anxiety of affluence.

As much as the Lexus nameplate has become the default choice for the sensible careerist looking for a well-built, well-priced luxury car, the brand still ranks near zero Kelvin on the prestige thermometer. You can cite all the ways that Lexus is a great car — best-selling luxury nameplate in the U.S. for six years running, perennially at the top of the J.D. Power heap in initial quality, vehicle dependability, customer satisfaction and return business — and I'll tell you that none of that matters. Compared to luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, BMW and Audi, Lexus has the emotional appeal of a public golf course.

Consider that in a survey of brands mentioned by hip-hop artists in the 2005 Billboard Top 20 (a rough but handy measure of a brand's aspirational power), Lexus didn't even crack the top 50. Mercedes-Benz was No. 1, with Cadillac (3), Bentley (4), Rolls-Royce (5) and Chevrolet (7) in the Top 10.

Meanwhile, the market for high-end, prestige-driven luxury goods is exploding: Donzi powerboats, dinners at Guy Savoy, Rolex watches, Angelo Galasso bespoke shirts. Americans spent an amazing/appalling $440 billion on luxury consumer goods in 2005, and much of that wound up in their driveways. Lexus' futurists expect the prestige luxury market — code for the aforementioned Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Cadillac — to grow 50% in the next five years.

For Lexus designers and engineers pondering the LS 460, the question was how to ride those coattails. How to make the company's flagship sedan stand for more than blithe and bloodless perfectionism and cut-rate luxury? How to make the most Apollonian brand on the market more Dionysian? How to engineer longing?

Seeking an answer, the company's marketers consulted with prestige luxury brands such as Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton. One thing they learned is that expensive is not the same as exclusive. Such companies typically offer a grand cru line, and these top-shelf, hard-to-get items drive acquisitiveness for the whole brand.

And so we have the Lexus LS 460 L, the company's first long-wheelbase model, which can be optioned out the wazoo — climate-controlled reclining rear seats with foldout ottoman and shiatsu massage function; rear-seat refrigerator; 9-inch ceiling-mounted video monitor. This stuff wouldn't look out of place on a Maybach. This will be the first Lexus that, fully kitted, will come close to the six-figure level.

Lexus doesn't expect many 460s to be ordered so extravagantly and that's just fine: These cars are essentially audition pieces. You could say the same of the hybrid version of the car, coming next year. With the Hybrid Synergy Drive all-wheel-drive powertrain stuffed into the car — for the life of me, I can't imagine where — the fully optioned LS 460 L will rank as the most technologically dense vehicle on four wheels. Also, Lexus is considering a performance division of its own, like Mercedes' AMG.

Meanwhile, the standard LS — still handsomely provisioned in mass-market trim — will run closer to $65,000 (pricing hasn't been announced, but will be announced sometime before the cars will begin arriving at dealerships in October).

The other factor in making Lexus a more emotional brand is styling. For the past couple of years Lexus has been promoting its L-finesse design language, a meringue-whipped form vocabulary that has appeared with increasing insistence on the ES, GS and IS cars. The hallmarks are a lowered grille, concave shallows along the cars' high sides, and diverging contours raked dorsally front to rear.

Here any tidy explanations of the new LS run out of oxygen, because a car that should have been an expressive and beautiful bit of dream-smithing isn't. It's not a bad-looking sedan, and it does have the look of the L-finesse avatars, but the instant I laid eyes on it, I was disappointed. Compared to the lyrical singspiel of Mercedes' CLS or the Audi A8, the LS is a dirge. Actually, it kind of looks like a Toyota Avalon with a post-graduate degree.

One reason the car looks so constrained might be that it is so aerodynamically optimized. The LS achieves an astonishing 0.25 coefficient of drag (with optional air suspension that lowers the car at high speeds). This is close to the same aero efficiency of a Prius. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more expressive elements of early design iterations were scoured away in the wind tunnel.

Here we stumble, again, on the tension between the perfectionist Lexus brand and the quote-unquote prestige luxury market. The prestige market is not about tirelessly fettling car bodies for better fuel economy. It's about building amazing looking cars.

So while the LS 460 should be commended for its fuel efficiency — its lightweight, super-efficient 4.6-liter engine and multiplicity of gear ratios give it class-leading mileage (23 per gallon) and ULEV II emissions rating — it's kind of beside the point. Prestige class cars light their cigars with hundred-dollar bills.

What's it like to drive? I only had a couple of hours in the car during last week's press event, so I want to return to the car for a proper road test. My initial impression is that it's fantastically constructed. For instance, Lexus goes to the trouble to hand-sand the body, twice, before final painting. And, per usual, the big sedan is deadly quiet and nearly vibration free (whether these traits are consonant with passionate motoring is open to debate). The materials — leather, wood, suede — are superb. Lexus buffs the leather for the steering wheel for three hours to give it a kid-glove feel. And yet, the central console, transferred out of the GS sedan, isn't particularly rewarding — more like a high-end arcade game. Currently, the S-class is the state of interior art.

It's certainly quick enough. Thanks to the relatively short first two transmission gears, the LS gets out of the blocks in good form. Zero-60 mph goes by in 5.4 seconds, about as quick as Mercedes' S-class, which has a liter's more displacement.

It's also large enough. The "couple distance," the space between the front and rear seats, is as much as 45 inches.

Los Angeles commuters will love the LS. In addition to the crystalline surround-sound stereo, iPod compatibility and Bluetooth hands-free phoning, the car offers XM's NAVtraffic service, which monitors traffic conditions in real time and will help you route around SigAlerts and delays. Also, the car has what's called Brake Hold function, a switch-activated system that allows your foot to be off the brake while the car is stopped.

As tech-y as the U.S.-spec version is, the one sold in Europe is even more trick, with optional features such as lane-departure warning, collision avoidance braking (the U.S. model charges the brake hydraulics but does not actually slow the car) and rear-end pre-collision bracing: When the car's rear sensors detect that a vehicle is about to hit you from behind, it activates the seat belts and positions headrests.

Yes, yes, a very nice robot. A gifted colleague of mine asked the perfect question: Will there ever be a Lexus owners club? Of course, the cars are splendid appliances. But will they ever be cherished automobiles like those of old-world marques BMW or Bentley? Yes, they can park themselves. But can they soar?

Consider that in a survey of brands mentioned by hip-hop artists in the 2005 Billboard Top 20 (a rough but handy measure of a brand's aspirational power), Lexus didn't even crack the top 50. Mercedes-Benz was No. 1, with Cadillac (3), Bentley (4), Rolls-Royce (5) and Chevrolet (7) in the Top 10.

Consider that in a survey of brands mentioned by hip-hop artists in the 2005 Billboard Top 20 (a rough but handy measure of a brand's aspirational power), Lexus didn't even crack the top 50. Mercedes-Benz was No. 1, with Cadillac (3), Bentley (4), Rolls-Royce (5) and Chevrolet (7) in the Top 10.