According to a Green Car Reports interview with Lexus International executive vice-president Mark Templin, there are no current plans to build a Lexus city car based on the LF-SA concept:
“We never intended to build a car that small, and we don’t plan to build a car that small right now,” explained Templin.
“It’s a pretty consistent phenomenon that’s happening everywhere—that these cities will become more congested and traffic’s going to be bad, and parking’s going to be bad, and maneuvering cars in all these cities is going to be difficult,” said Templin. “So there’s going to be a trend to downsize in cities…and we just started exploring, and asked what does that look like? What would that mean to Lexus, long-term, big-picture?”
This is hardly a surprise — in every discussion on the LF-SA, Lexus executives have been very clear that the concept is a design study meant to explore the future of city driving.
They may be wildly different, but the LF-SA and the LF-LC coupe concept share a similar mission: to gauge interest and show a glimpse of the future. Consider that the LF-LC was introduced in 2012 and has yet to be released as a production model shows just how long we could be waiting before a Lexus city car.
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