In Case You Hadn’t Heard, the Lexus LC 500 Is Kind of a Big Deal

By adpock - January 21, 2016

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The newly-debuted 2018 Lexus LC 500 isn’t expected to be a massive seller, but the lux 2+2 is already one of the marque’s most important models. And the car is still at least a full year away from wowing U.S. dealerships.

The car represents much more than sales, according to The Motley Fool‘s article “Why the New 2018 Lexus LC 500 Is a Big Deal for Toyota”:

“Big sales numbers aren’t the point. Toyota intends the LC 500 as a halo car, a model that elevates the image of the whole brand.”

If you’ve been following along at home, the LC 500 represents the exclamation point on the F movement. Though the $100,000 LC 500 hasn’t been given the F treatment itself (yet), the lux performance coupe is the culmination of Lexus’s design language and driving performance that has been getting more and more aggressive with each new F model.

The LC 500 is also a culmination of all that Lexus has learned from a technology and luxury standpoint. It represents the pinnacle of both, especially with the new carbon fiber friendly chassis, “GA-L,” which will give many of Lexus’s future models a tight, light base.

The endgame behind the F movement, and behind the LC 500, is that hopefully the rest of the world, outside of the U.S. and Japan, will notice.

We’ve been hearing about all this stuff for a while now. But it is significant that Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda believes in the importance of the car so much that he made a rare showing at the Detroit show to help launch it. In doing so, he called the car a symbol of Lexus’s “emotional direction.”

Sounds kind of familiar. But it’s still got a nice ring to it, no?