5th Generation (2018+) Lexus LS 500 & LS 500h Megathread

[CRSKTN]

Lexus was once Toyota’s cherished child, but now it feels like an orphan.

I doubt it ever was. I bet you it burned Toyota deeply that they had to workshop an entirely new brand identity to be able to pass for luxury because "Toyota wasn't good enough".

Unfortunately for them, using Lexus as a testing ground for ideas and tech too risky to be a Toyota just meant Lexus was the only thing people cared about or had passion for in TMC. So they would take whatever Lexus proved up and corporatize it and ruin it and let Toyota cannabilize it.

All of Toyota's best, most brand building products were skunk works or opportunistic projects that weren't made terrible by the "if-beige-was-a-person" deadweight human beings warehoused in the Japanese jobs program that is TMC.

I refuse to believe that when doing the design competitions for recent models Toyota of Camry & Sienna that it wasn't intentional to go with designs aping touches from cars like the LC and LS (like the rear light shape and treatments).

Get people to pay a premium for something, shamelessly lift from those products for your down market offerings which you will also dedicate more resources to, laugh at your customers, cut corners on the next generation, use momentum and reputation to release more corner cutting minor refreshes, laugh at your customers, get backlash, atrophy your key models while simultaneously tying to maintain positioning in the market, laugh at your customers, use those product shortcomings to shoehorn toyota/crown/century offerings in their place, and so on.

 

[Flagship1]

I doubt it ever was. I bet you it burned Toyota deeply that they had to workshop an entirely new brand identity to be able to pass for luxury because "Toyota wasn't good enough".

Unfortunately for them, using Lexus as a testing ground for ideas and tech too risky to be a Toyota just meant Lexus was the only thing people cared about or had passion for in TMC. So they would take whatever Lexus proved up and corporatize it and ruin it and let Toyota cannabilize it.

All of Toyota's best, most brand building products were skunk works or opportunistic projects that weren't made terrible by the "if-beige-was-a-person" deadweight human beings warehoused in the Japanese jobs program that is TMC.

I refuse to believe that when doing the design competitions for recent models Toyota of Camry & Sienna that it wasn't intentional to go with designs aping touches from cars like the LC and LS (like the rear light shape and treatments).

Get people to pay a premium for something, shamelessly lift from those products for your down market offerings which you will also dedicate more resources to, laugh at your customers, cut corners on the next generation, use momentum and reputation to release more corner cutting minor refreshes, laugh at your customers, get backlash, atrophy your key models while simultaneously tying to maintain positioning in the market, laugh at your customers, use those product shortcomings to shoehorn toyota/crown/century offerings in their place, and so on.

If Toyota believes they are going to upsell centurys in the north american market, they should study maybach when it relaunched and now.