Originally Posted by SW10ES

I like the remote touch controller a lot, I have it in the GS. My experience comes from having had two previous ES's of two previous generations, in fact I drove my old 2003 ES tonight. That car doesn't have a piece of hard plastic anywhere. Everything is soft touch, or nice metallic plastic for the switchgear, etc. Leather is excellent quality, and triple stitched. The next generation (which I also had, a 2010) saw declines in leather quality with a coarser, thinner leather being used that was only double stitched, thinner carpeting, hard touch plastics on the lower dash. Lower rent looking gauge cluster. In fact, I skipped the black interior on my 2010 because I felt the parchment made the interior look richer and hid some of the low end plastics.

The 2013 add the door panels to the list of places with hard plastic, and most inexcusably the cups around the door interior door handles where your fingernails hit every time you go to open the door, leather is even coarser to where quite frankly I felt the NuLuxe felt nicer. The plastic around the start/stop button is hard, as is the dash plastic around the climate controls and console top. You no longer have woodgrain on the console top. Then you have decontenting such as no more adaptive lighting, etc. Instead of being satisfied to hide the cheap plastic away where the driver and occupants don't touch, now its right out there when you don't see that on even non-luxury vehicles. My Jeep for instance has better materials in places where you touch.

On the exterior, you loose the chrome trim (which is a taste thing), but then trimwise you have cheap flimsy black plastic trim at the rear of the bumper, you have cheap clip on faux chrome tailpipe tips where my 2010 had beautiful welded fully rolled tips.

I think the 2013 interior looks better than the 2010 I had's, but once I really spent some time with the car and started exploring that interior with my hands...cheapness is just everywhere which doesn't work for me...so I moved up to the GS...which has all the quality I was looking for...albeit obviously at a higher cost.

My point was...you used to get that quality in the ES...but you don't anymore. I'm not trying to deride the ES, its a great car and I drove them happily for many years and hundreds of thousands of miles, I'm just really frustrated with the direction Lexus took with the car.

Originally Posted by SW10ES

Yeah the GS could use it too, but for some reason when I look at the GS, the lack of that trim doesn't look wrong like it does when I look at the ES...