A Closer Look at the Lexus LF-CC Concept Interior

Absolutely -- fine by me, the seats actually work quite well in my experience.

I realized how silly I was after I wrote this -- the current IS F already has a LFA-inspired instrument panel.

 The hand brake you are referring at is the gear lever ;-)

The one thing I don't like about the interior is the puffed-up leather on the dash -- looks like it's hiding the production dash underneath.

Isn't that what everyone said about touchscreen phones? Although I do agree to a certain degree. Some of the buttons should remain buttons just like how volume buttons never disappeared.

There is some truth to this about the importance of tactile feel for human factors, this is part of the reason why there is force pressure response in the remote-touch controllers. With that being said, the touch-screen human machine interface (HMI) is part of the future designs ergonomic engineers and human factors specialists are looking at for vehicle interiors (usually a design gets made 5 years in advance). Trust me when I say, they test everything from the positioning of the buttons to the size, feel, so that there is less having to monitor where and what your doing and more time concentrating on the road.  I think Lexus has done a phenomenal job at their current HMI with the remote-touch and the giant center console. This is why we should expect a remote-touch controller, large center console and a small configuration of buttons clustered under the clock/vents to split to zones of the vehicle similar to the new ES/GS/CT. This way, the oldschoolers can use their buttons, and the newschoolers can use the safety and HMI features such as remote-touch and hands-free commands to control functions for safer driving.

I agree, but I must say that Lexus cannot and does not have interiors designed that early. They like to keep their products' design as fresh as possible upon production and not frozen for years on end. Only Mercedes-Benz even comes close to that figure and they were barely working on the S-Class W222 interior design in 2009-2010. Lexus interior design work is usually finished 12-18 months before production and the exterior about 20-36 months. You wouldn't have found the upcoming IS exterior/interior even as a final sketches 4 years ago nor the '13 GS.  The GS being the earliest spindle grille model was actually finished in 2009 and didn't even have the interior design completed until 2010. The IS interior design probably wasn't even fully designed until last year or early this year, so it's still pretty recent and nowhere close to 5 years. The concepts are usually done 8-12 months in advance and completed a month or two before introduction, so that's probably even fresher than the actual IS interior.

Correction: *as final sketches*

Quick question -- where are you getting these timeframes from? I'd be interested in reading the source material. Thanks! :-)

Really, the only touchscreen controls in the LF-CC that seem impossible are the ones on the steering wheel -- all the others replace controls that I would have to visually confirm before using. (Well, maybe not the volume knobs.)