Site News

This morning, the North American International Auto Show has opened its doors to the worldwide automotive press, including myself, and I will be bringing you a Lexus perspective to America’s autoshow.

I will be updating throughout the day as I go over every square inch of the Lexus exhibit, including the LFA supercar & the LF-Ch concept, and anything else that may hold interest to the Lexus enthusiast.

Updates after the jump. 

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Last week, I took the delivery of my first long-term road test vehicle from Lexus Canada—a 2010 Smoky Granite Mica RX 450h:

This is the full deal—an RX 450h with the Ultra Luxury package that includes Heads-Up Display, rear entertainment system, LED headlights, and fifteen-speaker Mark Levinson audio system. As far as I can tell, the only option missing is dynamic air suspension.

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Welcome to the latest edition of The Lexus Enthusiast! Developed over a two-month period, this is the fifth redesign of the site since its debut in May 2007.

First off, some key points:

• The entire site navigation has been simplified and reworked—gone is the needlessly complicated model database, and in its place is a simple top navigation that makes it easy to read news about your favorite Lexus model.
• Image size has been increased by a substantial margin, along with entire content area. This will also mean much larger videos.
• The comment system has been rebuilt and is now uses quoting and direct replies, similar to a forum (and a dash of Twitter thrown in for good measure).

It’s best to think of this redesign as a new “platform”, built to be as light-weight and flexible as possible. The previous site had grown far too complicated under-the-hood, making any improvements difficult and time-consuming. Thankfully, this will no longer be an issue, as all future development will be able to take advantage of this new foundation.

As always, all feedback is welcome. Please let me know what you think (or if you experience any issues) by posting in the comments or sending me an email.

As part of ongoing improvements, The Lexus Enthusiast has received a slight design refresh. The changes are subtle, but are meant to bring some added polish to the website.

To fix any problems you may be seeing, hold down the Shift key and click Refresh in your browser. If you continue to have any issues after this, please email me at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with your browser details (and a screenshot if possible).

By some fluke, the software that runs this website ate the final revision of my IS 350c & RX 450h story and published an earlier draft. I have rewritten the missing parts and the post has been updated. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

This past Friday, I attended a Lexus Canada press event in Kingston, Ontario, where I had the opportunity to test out the 2010 RX 450h and the IS 350C convertible. After an a quick briefing, we all loaded up into our first vehicle of the day and set out on a route through the surrounding Prince Edward County.

Here are some of my early impressions on Lexus’ latest models (full reviews at a later date):

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