LFA Chief Engineer Haruhiko Tanahashi says good-bye

As intimated last week, Toyota’s production of its LFA supercar is coming to an end. On Friday, LFA #500 left the assembly line at the secretive LFA Works in Toyota’s Motomachi plant. After a week of testing, the car will be delivered to its undisclosed owner. (Read More…)

My experience with the Lexus IS-F was both impressive and rather sterile. I was put in mind of Samuel Johnson’s observation regarding Milton’s Paradise Lost: “[it is] one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

The same might be true of the IS-F… but here’s a fast Lexus that’s not just longer, it’s wider. And taller. And just plain big.

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15 years after the launch of the Prius, Toyota has sold 1 million hybrids annually for the first time, with hybrids making up 14 percent of the company’s sales so far in 2012.

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George writes:

Hello again, Steven,

You may recall our email last March regarding our 1992 Lexus SC300 5-Speed. Thanks for the reply; guess the timing was bad for you with tax time coming up. As you may recall, the car is all original, black with gray interior, looks and runs great, and has slightly less than 25K miles. Here’s the back story: (Read More…)

Lexus debuted a gorgeous mystery coupe, dubbed the LF-CC, and took all the fun out of it by making it a hybrid. I’ll take an Audi S5, thanks. Does anyone see a hint of Scion FR-S in the rear view of this car?

I’ve been seeking out Japanese luxury Junkyard Finds lately, so this fairly straight example of Toyota’s personal luxury coupe of the 1990s seemed worthy of inclusion in the series. (Read More…)

The LS and I have had a long relationship. Back in 1993 I was an impressionable teenager nearing that holy-grail of ages: 16. This meant I dreamt of driving constantly. My parents were Oldsmobile and Chrysler folks, so my choices were a 1980 Custom Cruiser, a 1985 Cutlass Ciera, or a 1988 Grand Voyager. The Oldsmobiles were diesel. Need I say more? One day my best friend’s dad pulled up in a brand-new 1993 Lexus LS 400 for the school run. I had no idea cars could be assembled with that kind of precision and my world was changed forever. Needless to say, when the Lexus invited me to the unveiling of the fifth-generation LS, my expectations were set high.

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Toyota is serious thinking of breaking a taboo. It is considering moving some production of its Lexus luxury brand from Japan to the United States, says Reuters.  The oddest part: The Japanese government might help Toyota to move the jobs out of the country. (Read More…)

BMW and Audi have embraced the “one sausage, many lengths” philosophy for their mainline sedans, and Lexus is the next lemming to jump off the cliff.

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GM may not be announcing expanded production at Oshawa, but a few hundred miles down the 401, Toyota is ramping up production of the Lexus RX at their Cambridge, Ontario plant.

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Back in November at the launch of the Lexus GS, a product planner who shall remain nameless turned the tables on me; when I started asking him questions about future products, like the possibility of a Lexus GS-F, he began to grill me about competitive product.

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The Lexus ES has been the best-selling Lexus sedan for decades, outselling every Lexus model except for the RX. While the ES was originally designed as the Japanese luxury brand’s entry-level vehicle in America, it is slowly becoming one of Lexus’ flagship products. To prove to us that Lexus has what it takes to reign supreme in the FWD luxury class they created in 1989, they flew us up to Oregon to sample the all-new, sixth generation ES 350 and 300h hybrid.

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Well, it was bound to happen. The ugly step-child of the Lexus lineup, the HS250h, is dead. And the too-tall corpse has been decomposing for quite some time.

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Today, I happened to be at Toyota’s Tokyo headquarters in order to personally get to the bottom of numbers nobody seems to care about. There was a minor riot in the usually zen-like lobby of 1-4-18 Koraku, Bunkyo-ku.  TTAC was there to investigate … (Read More…)

Google looks to be stepping their whip game up with the addition of a lexus RX450h. Joining the fleet of Prii is the luxury crossover, which Wired Magazine’s Damon Lavrinc discovered thanks to a tipster. According to Wired, Google claims that

“In the course of our work, we experiment with testing our algorithms on various vehicles to help us improve our technology,”

Which is a fancy way of saying “we got a Lexus for R&D reasons”. Lavrinc notes that the new car was spotted just days after California passed a bill mandating regulations for autonomous vehicle testing. If someone could explain to us why the Lexus has no license plates, that would be a start.