Car Gazing
A sickening experience in a $100,000+ Lexus
New hybrid LS helps Lexus reach new, wealthier customers
By Derek Price
PASADENA, Calif. – This car makes me sick.
Literally.
Driving on the gorgeous Angeles Crest highway that snakes through the mountains above L.A., I'm behind the wheel of the most expensive Japanese car ever to grace American shores. It's the $104,000 Lexus LS 600h L.
That alphabet soup of a name may be hard to decipher, but it translates into something simple: a super-luxurious, super-efficient limousine. It has the power of a V12 engine with the efficiency of a V6, giving its well-to-do buyers the kind of guilt-free indulgence that has never been available in cars until now.
It's also a blast to drive, as I learned in the California mountains. It has a deep well of buttery-smooth power, almost like you'd expect from the V12 powered German supersedans like the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7-Series and Audi A8. It has a refined suspension that keeps it sports-car flat in the switchbacks, but at the same time it's so eerily quiet that you'd swear you were locked in a coffin under 10 feet of well-packed dirt.
And that's my problem. Here I am with a well-dressed Lexus technical guru in the passenger seat, zipping around corners like I always do, and – without warning – up comes my breakfast all over the LS's supple leather and hand-crafted dash.
Through a combination of power, handling and sheer silence, I had made myself carsick without even realizing it. I didn't know that was possible when driving.
As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, I had to walk into the swanky Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pasadena, Calif. – where the national press introduction was staged – while covered in my own ... well, you get the picture.
That's the exact opposite of the kind of entrance this car is designed for.
You see, it's fashionable for Hollywood's biggest celebrities to engage in environmental snobbery – as in, "I love Mother Earth more than you do." So they arrive at all the glitzy awards shows in Toyota Priuses just to make a point.
Thanks to this new top-of-the-line Lexus, though, they no longer have to endure the down-to-earth status of a mere Toyota. They can ride in a stylish, exclusive, comfortable car that's good for the environment.
Lexus hopes this car will help the company reach a new type of buyer – one with more money than even its existing customer base – by offering a combination of innovation and exclusivity that no other luxury car offers. The company expects to sell around 2,000 of these high-tech rides per year, ensuring their scarcity in all but the most upscale, ritzy cities.
Selling that many should be easy, given how good a car it is and how solid a reputation Lexus has built.
I only see one problem: luxury, in my mind, requires a little bit of guilt.
When I get behind the wheel of a V12 German sedan, I feel like Mr. Monopoly – I should be wearing a top hat and monocle with my nose in the air. It's something special, something memorable, something wonderfully wasteful.
But driving the hybrid LS doesn't feel like an event in itself. By all measurable standards it's just as good as the Germans, but it still doesn't feel like the kind of car I'll remember driving for the rest of my life.
Except for one moment when a breakfast burrito flashed before my eyes.
(Derek Price is a newspaper editor and freelance writer living in Texas.)
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