History of Lexus F Car rumors: how they evolved over the years

[ssun30]

This will be a history of how BestCar, which we now know is the best source for upcoming Japanese cars, reported on a family of Lexus high performance products equipped with the 4.0L V8 twin-turbo engine.

First report of the LC F and the 4.0L V8TT engine in July 2017
Render of LC F. Original rumored specs: 600PS/686N.m, priced at 20 million JPY (178k USD at 2017 exchange rates)

They also created their first render of the GS F using the same engine. They also said the 4.0 V8 engine will be 15% more efficient than the 5.0 2UR-GSE. BestCar never followed up on the GS F (or they deleted from their archives), and all rumors of that car came from Mag-X, which is a much less credible source.

Interestingly, they also reported a GR Crown (S220) with a 3.0L V6TT engine under development. Just a year later, GR Crown development was cancelled along with the 3.0L engine.


They got a more updated LC F render and specs on in Nov 2017. The V8 design targeted increased to 670PS/650N.m. They also correctly predicted Fall 2019 release of the LC Convertible.


First report of the LF-1 with the 4.0 V8 in May 2018. The power target for the LF-1 was 650PS. Expected release in 2021. The estimated price was 18 million JPY (160k USD at 2018 exchange rates).


In May 2018 they first reported the potential cancellation of the entire GS lineup. But they soon walked back on the prediction and said GS will only be discontinued in Europe.

First report of the new IS in Nov 2019. They expected a "major minor change" around June 2020, which became the current "3.3IS". However, they expected a full model change in mid-2021.


First report of the IS F with 2UR-GSE V8 in Feb 2020. This turned out to be the IS500 FSP. BestCar didn't get the model name and rendering right because later we know the IS500 FSP was actually a Lexus North America pet project that they pushed the Japan HQ to make. The design and prototype engineering were done entirely in US.


In May 2020 they predicted IS F release date of Oct 2020 and LC F in Nov 2021. They also confirmed the cancellation of the GS around this time.

In May 2020 they said the LF-1 development was not cancelled by the pandemic but delayed slightly to Jun 2021. The engine tuning was more torque-focused, going from 650PS/686N.m to 580PS/813N.m. BestCar was very certain the LF-1 will NOT be cancelled.

In Sep 2020 the first scoop of the LS F appeared, scheduled for Oct 2021 release. BestCar expected 2021 to be a big year for the F brand.


In Feb 2021 they got more updated renders of the "IS F" (which was actually IS500 FSP) and LS F.



In March 2021 they first reported the delay of the 4.0L V8TT engine for the LF-1, from 2021 to 2023. At this point they are still very certain LF-1 has not been cancelled, because "it will be a model to show Lexus' global presence" and Toyota cannot afford to cancel such a halo model. Keep in mind every scoop mentioned during this period turned out to be correct, so there's no reason to believe BestCar was imagining the existence of the LF-1.

In December 2021 they first reported the LFA revival. It's also in this report that they confirmed the delay of the 4.0L V8TT engine due to emissions compliance (Euro 6 to Euro 6d) and that has caused delays in the LC F/LS F/LF-1 program.

In March 2022 they finally admitted their mistake with the IS F prediction. But they only got the model designation wrong. In Feb 2022 IS500 FSP was released in North America.

In December 2022 they confirmed development of the LS F and LF-1 had been cancelled.

By early 2023 we know for sure the entire Lexus F lineup, including IS F, GS F, LS F, LC F, and LF-1 is dead.

 

[ssun30]

First report of the LFA revival in November 2021. They correctly predicted it as having a transaxle and dry sump. PHEV with 700PS engine and unknown total output. They call it a prediction CG instead of a full render, so this was BestCar's imagination not a real prototype.


In March 2022 they first reported the relationship between the Lexus Electrified Sport concept and LFA2: 1) LFA2 will be a Lexus branded PHEV in 2025 2) GR GT3 will be the race-only version in 2023 3) Lexus Electrified Sport will be a Lexus branded BEV in 2030. They claimed this car would not use a carbon fiber chassis, but a modified GA-L.

An updated render in May 2022. They reported the specs as 720PS ICE and 950PS total system output. The dimensions are 4600mm x 1950mm x 1200mm.


In Feb 2023, they first reported the architecture to be aluminum chassis + carbon fiber body panels. The predicted price is 40-50 million JPY (300k USD at 2023 exchange rates). Initial specs remained at 720PS ICE/950PS total, but the target weight was only 1550kg (same as gen 1 AMG GT)


In June 2023 they estimated production start in summer 2025. The exterior design was finalized and development was progressing smoothly. But they said the PHEV prediction was wrong and it's a HEV. Specs were downgraded a bit to 700-720PS ICE/900PS total. The surprising information was that at the time the price target was only 20 million JPY (150k USD).



In Oct 2024 they made their first high fidelity render that almost matched the final GR GT design. This is also when they became confused about the final product name. This is probably when the internal fighting over branding (LFR vs GR GT) happened. BestCar was leaning towards LFR for the production car and LFR GT3 for the race car (up until this point they had always called it the LFA, so their original prediction was actually correct). Production start was expected in Oct 2025. No changes to predicted specs at this point.



In their January 2025 report, they seemed to confirm this car will be released under the GR brand and Lexus lost. This was also when the estimated price tag increased from 20 million to 30 million JPY (130k USD to 200k USD) due to "increased parts and transportation cost". This new render is also getting very close to the release version.


In July 2025, they first reported delay and reduced power of the production car: 1) GT3 race car will start production at the end of 2025 2) production car will be delayed by unknown amount of time 3) output of the engine had to be drastically reduced and risk even more delays 4) the Lexus version will be a BEV.

This was also when Mag-X reported the chassis rigidity problem that caused a 2-year delay and emissions compliance problem that reduced system output from 900-950PS to only 650PS.

This version of the render almost perfectly matched the final car. BestCar's sources have definitely seen and touched this car before this date.

 

[sl0519]

Who… who the hell… which spy…who’s out there trying to destroy ma boy Lexus...

 

[mediumhot]

The closest we got was radically redesigned LC-F. To be honest it was so different from the original LC that it was a pleasant surprise from them to keep it LC badged.

 

[ssun30]

My understanding of the overall timeline:
Mid-2017: start of the LC F and 4.0L TTV8 program; GS F was also investigated internally (probably thanks to the concurrent GR Crown program).
Late-2017: performance targets and initial design of the LC F were set.
Jan-2018: LF-1 limitless concept by CALTY first appeared. LF-1 program was already under way and the powertrain options were already set: 500h multi-stage hybrid, V35A-FTS, and 4.0L V8 F model.
Mid-2018: 5th gen GS cancelled. GS F turned out to be only a design study.
Early-2019: Lexus IS major facelift design freeze and start of 4th gen IS full model change program.
Mid-2019: first finished engineering prototype of the 4.0L TTV8 engine and LC F. Start of LS F program.
Early-2020: Lexus NA designed and engineered a V8 IS prototype and presented to Japan HQ. It was greenlit for production as IS500 FSP.
Mid-2020: First LC F production-ready prototype ready for racing at 2020 24 hours of Nurburgring (delayed due to COVID). LF-1 very close to design freeze. IS major facelift release, 4th gen IS changed to a BEV based on the eletrified sedan concept.
Late-2020: Akio Toyoda began his plan to kill off F and create the GR brand. The GR GT3 concept was created with a very high level of secrecy.
Early-2021: Troubles with the V8 engine program started. LC F/LS F/LF-1 would fail to pass Euro 6d and EPA 2025. A redesign of the engine would cause a delay of 18-24 months.
Mid-2021: Development of the aluminum space frame chassis began. Target release of 2025 for the GT3 race car and early 2026 for the production car. Development of the Lexus BEV supercar started with a 2028-2030 target.
Mid-2022: LF-1 and the entire F lineup killed. Lexus NA still fighting for release under Lexus brand.
Mid-2023: problems with chassis rigidity and engine emissions compliance (again) were revealed. Program delayed by 2 years.
Late-2024: last-ditch effort by Lexus to get the branding for the V8 sports car. They lost it to GR. Electrified sports concept turned into the LFA BEV concept, but with less ambitious targets (probably no solid-state batteries) and an earlier than expected release date (2027).
Early-2025: chassis problems resolved and GR GT3 race car proceeded as planned. But the production car had to cut power output significantly. The hybrid system probably also had problems and had to be scaled back. Total system output reduced from 950PS to 650PS as a result.
Now: GR GT/GR GT3/LFA concept release. After an 8-year development cycle, there is still no production car in sight; GT3 customer teams have to race with the RC F for another year; LFA name is desecrated; Lexus was left with a laughable "performance" lineup with the likes of TX500h and LX700h.

 

[Gor134]

The only thing I'd say is off is the GS was cancelled much earlier, as Mag-X made it's announcement in December of 2016

 

[Will1991]

Lexus has been lost for so many years…

@ssun30 , they even found enough courage to “sell us” those beautiful LF-1 wheels on the TX

It’s like they know we know and want to rub it on our faces.

 

[mikeavelli]

If u missed it, i did see and touch the LC F and said will buy immediately. Wasn’t meant to be

 

[Kelvin2020]

If u missed it, i did see and touch the LC F and said will buy immediately. Wasn’t meant to be

It hurts me even more when you said this

 

[Will1991]

It’s kind of ironic, TMC cancelled all those F cars because 600hp would be low next to the competition, to keep developing it to reach 650hp with hybrid assist almost 10 years later; meanwhile everyone else just bumped V8TT so much it’s now almost sports car territory.

 

[mikeavelli]

This is all my personal thoughts. USA knew the importance of F but Japan did not. So USA saw value in it and Lexus Performance. It’s the reason most of us are here. I was fortunate enough to be part of this working through Lexus Racing and helping launch the IS 350/500 and now 2026 350. Even before that i did small part with the LC.

Somewhere Japan decided GR is 100% the wave. F was dead. They just didn’t say it. The good news is we got a new car designed as a track car first then for the road. Our RC F GT3 success is pretty impressive considering they turned them into race cars. So there is high hopes this new car is a FIA and IMSA winner and i assume SuperGT.

I assume F sport will eventually become GR Sport. The last couple of years have been full of triumph and tremendous disappointment. For those like myself that have bought and pushed Lexus Performance for 3 decades it is a very tough pill to swallow. i still haven’t processed it all tbh. I don’t think my family or friends or anyone besides you all could possibly know how I feel.

GR it is. I do like the red black and white colors lol. Knowing Toyota really wants GR to grow I’m excited to play a part.

 

[Will1991]

With more time to think about, less I understand this decision…

Almost everyone is turning for passion and history to bump sales and profit due to market uncertainty and a lot of current challenges - TMC just decided to kill everything the LFA and Lexus F made in a quick swing.

Ok, we will get a “free Lexus”, what the meaning behind this? More boats, overboards and a hydrogen ATV?

 

[mikeavelli]

I’ve been under the weather as well

 

[mikeavelli]

With more time to think about, less I understand this decision…

Almost everyone is turning for passion and history to bump sales and profit due to market uncertainty and a lot of current challenges - TMC just decided to kill everything the LFA and Lexus F made in a quick swing.

Ok, we will get a “free Lexus”, what the meaning behind this? More boats, overboards and a hydrogen ATV?

But can you blame them? Let’s take off the rose colored goggles (something i’m struggling with lol). F never was really asuccessful in reviews or sales. I’m talking new sales not a clapped out 17 year old IS F. They are in it for new sales. Ironically the LC seems to have sold better than any F product. That is what Lexus is truly great at. The LFA is maybe the greatest car anomaly of all time. No different than the original LS shocking the world.

Cadillac has the same issue with V. Cadillac = Escalade. Can their F1 racing and new products get them there finally? For the first time in recent memory one of my non car guy friends asked about the Ct5 V blackwing dumb name car. I gushed, told him get it. I was honestly shocked he knew about it. That car has easily doubled in price with options. Doesn’t bode well for sales

Let’s look at BMW M still maybe the standard bearer. Most m badged sold are suvs. BMW has fwd m sport models and buyers don’t care. they haven’t don’t a supercar since the M1. The XM is a flop but came to market (another suv). M2/3/4 review well. M5 is heavy but it’s selling so again buyers don’t care.

It took AMG getting bought out and invested in internally to become a powehouse. They always have some sort of new engine. Always a new product at the 63 or 53 level. Most sold are suvs now.

The good news is all indicators show GR will get the support. There is a unified theme and focus. Something that’s hard to do with Lexus when a dealer just wants to sell RX 350s all day and night.

 

[Will1991]

Although I fully understand your point of view, I also believe that I’m not alone while saying the first F (IS F) was the car that made me a Lexus Enthusiast and I did manage to persuade some 6 persons to change from BBA to Lexus.

Also, how many IS’s weren’t sold with the F Sport package?

That was all due to the F moniker cars.

Even not selling well on their own, they did manage to bump sales in a considerable way.

 

[LCLFV]

The point of M and AMG was not the success of individual M or AMG-badged models, which were always low-volume, it was so that there was an aspirational incentive for buyers to connect to something they feel is "more prestigious" within the brand they buy the car from. They may not own an M car, but they have the idea in their heads that M = prestige, and that's why the M badge is desirable. Thus, people go into a showroom and look at how cool (and expensive) an M5 is, and that encourages them to buy a 530i with the M-Sport pack because they want to be associated with the M5.

This is what Lexus tried to accomplish with the LFA and F sub-brand. And even though few people bought IS-F's or LFA's, the F badge had meaning and prestige in the minds of Lexus owners. You have to pay more money to uprade to an F-Sport product after all.

This is also why I feel like GR's place will confuse customers, because it's not a badge they can upgrade to within the current Lexus lineup, since the GR GT is meant to be an entirely bespoke vehicle with its own brand. Thus, its halo effect is pretty much killed for the Lexus brand. It may be a different story for Toyota owners, but would Toyota owners even know or care when the car doesn't appear in their own dealerships?

 

[Gecko]

The thing I'm most curious about, but I guess we'll never know is "Why?"

Was F not successful in Akio's eyes? Was this just an experiment that had to prove out in X time with Y sales numbers, and it didn't deliver?

Knowing that 5GS F, LC F, LS F, LF-1 and "LFR" were all well into development and close to being mature products, but killed late term feels like a massive waste of money which seems very unlike Toyota. Why? Why not give them a try?

Was this an ego thing for Akio, like so many of us believe? The LFA wore the wrong badge for him to love it, so he always wanted to put his own stamp on Toyota's performance legacy? All of this for ego?

Or was it a conscious effort to just defund the entire Lexus brand - IS, RC, GS, LS, LC, IS F, RC F, GS F, - because they felt like those aspirational products were no longer needed for Lexus to maintain (and increase) it's cash cow status?

Almost any other brand would have killed to be in Akio's/Lexus' position with those products and that brand equity, and they just threw it all away. Why?

 

[Gor134]

Why? Why not give them a try?

The existing models were met with lukewarm reception and I imagine Akio viewed the GA-L platform as a failure. Even the LC500 which we love here, has a beautiful sounding engine but it's not the quickest, while all of it's competition were pushing 500+hp.

I mean it is something we've heard in general right? That the GA-L platform is too compromised and whatnot (even though it is so heavy and stiff to begin with to support a TTV8!) I think he imagined the F models would.. not be enough to push the brand forward/bring back sales into those models.

I think it's pretty clear that although Toyota has really good engineers, I don't think they have what it takes to truly battle the German's performance sedans. Feels like they get stuck in development hell and then give up, idk if you remember the LS500 got delayed for so long when it's development first started in 2012 and still couldn't beat the W222 S Class which debuted in 2014, 3 years before the LS500 went on sale.

IS-F was great, but wasn't taken seriously until the '10+ updates where it got an LSD and retuned steering and other performance upgrades, RC-F has a frankenstein platform and although it held it's own against the Germans it fell behind pretty quickly, and the GS-F we all know was better than the IS-F but not enough to battle the M5/E63 as it was originally supposed to be a GS500.

And think about the sports cars.. the GR86 and GR Supra are awesome cars but they're not fully in-house developed, the GR Yaris is awesome but that's a sport compact.

I think they'd need to start completely from scratch with a whole new development team, which it probably is too late for them to do and too expensive, or collaborate with another brand like Mazda (remember the Mazda 6 x Lexus IS rumours, before the pandemic)

I don't think it was 100% for ego, though a decent part of it is.

 

[LCLFV]

I think it's internal sabotage. There's simply no other explanation as to why a whole generation's worth of products was discarded like this. Billions upon billions down the drain. A decision like canning the new GS to turn it into a low-volume hydrogen car is like cutting your nose off to spite your own face. I didn't think Akio was the culprit at first, but with his latest statement about how his greatest regret with the LFA was that it wasn't named after himself, I don't know how much more damning you could get.

If lack of performance on par with the Germans was really an issue, I doubt they would be okay with releasing the GR GT with a measly 650 HP from a TTV8 and electric motor. Lexus rarely if ever actually rivaled the Germans when it came to top-of-the-line performance, and the complaints people had with that wasn't necessarily that they were uncompetitive, it was simply that they thought they were charging too much. Journalists rained praise on the GS-F on day one from people like Clarkson to Chris Harris, with it quickly earning the reputation as an "E39 M5 successor" among them. But everyone also thought that Lexus was asking too much money for what it was. Same story with the LFA, though to a much more substantial degree.

Gerry McGovern, who was in charge of Land Rover's design direction for the past 20 years, was just fired from JLR, supposedly because his campaign to relaunch Jaguar under that one EV was such a colossal missfire after canning the finished XJ and the rest of the Jaguar lineup. What's odd to me is that we don't see this level of turmoil publicly with TMC even though they are not in a dissimilar crisis with how much they threw away from Lexus, and the radical re-focus on the Chinese market with the "Luxury Space" concepts. Koji Sato has been awfully quiet, while Akio is now more of a public figure than ever.

 

[ssun30]

The thing I'm most curious about, but I guess we'll never know is "Why?"

1. Akio Toyoda wants to leave a legacy. He wants to be seen as the person who "made Toyota great again".
2. A performance lineup without much motorsport success is meaningless. None of the Lexus platforms will be competitive in any championship.
3. GA-L is too compromised as a platform and these F products would be hopelessly uncompetitive even if they came out in 2021-2023. 650PS sounds like a lot until you realize LC/LS-F would weigh 2-2.3 tons.
4. I think TMC leadership really believe Lexus in its current form is healthy. And if they only look at the raw volume, Lexus is indeed better than ever. But they ignored Lexus is again having an average buyer age problem.