Site News

Much to my excitement, The Lexus Enthusiast community has been growing steadily over the last few months. There’s now dozens of frequent commenters with diverse insight and strong opinions, and it’s been one of my favorite things to watch as the site builds in popularity.

In order to best serve this community, I’ve asked frequent contributor Dan to help me moderate and respond to the hundreds of new comments the site gets every week. Dan has been involved with this site since its very beginning (all the way back to The Passionate Pursuit days), and I was very happy when he agreed to assist me in making sure all of your comments and questions are answered. Thanks Dan!

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.