You had the crappiest, most neglected LS430 (before you got it) ever made. It must have been wrecked before you got it.

I've never in my life heard of doors flexing in any LS let alone a 430.

 

Oh wow ... life imitating art ... IYKYK

 

Lexus vehicles in particular are very sensitive to tires, they need good tires to be as quiet and isolated as they are supposed to be. Compared to my S Classes for example, you can put any tires on these and not hear them

 

All of his Toyotas and Lexus vehicles were beat to hell prior to his ownership. 😂 And he’s had to bring them back to life

 

No it's just a low stiffness chassis and old seals, I had to replace all of them and add a chassis brace.

 

Explain my brand new purchased sequoia having a cam tower, valley, and timing cover leaks under 75k miles among other annoyances?

Also my issue the entire time is that you don't get a good enough experience for the effort and time needed to keep these perfect/in spec. I do not like having my cars anything less than perfect and I have found there is no difference with high end Lexus and high end Germans with the latter having better packaging and prices on parts.

Would you rather do the exact same job for $100 an hour or $175? That's my view

 

I can’t remember any chassis flex like that in our LS400 or LS430

 

You never had 20 year old door seals, they are loud as hell going over tracks. The 3rd gen section has many complains of the seals making noise when the doors shift if old, I replaced mine but most just relube them.

The 430 is a sub 20k nm/* chassis so it's to be expected

 

True, but thats worn out seals not chassis flex. If chassis flex were an issue you would feel it in new cars too.

 

because there isn't any, both cars have an exceptionally stiff chassis which is a big reason they barely creak at all and have such good ride compliance over rougher pavement... just more audi recruiting from striker lol

 

You do feel it, it's not a stiff chassis and my 06 moves around in all the same ways but it's so new that you never hear it. The LS just isn't that stiff of a car and part of that helps it conform to the road and have that floaty feel to an extent but I rather have an ultra stiff car and the suspension do the work.

 

The W222 is 27500nm/* and the W222 is 40500nm/*

Meanwhile the LS460 was a "40% improvement" over the LS430 with the 40% extra landing it at 22000nm/* I don't know what you consider stiff but a Phaeton is 37500 for example and a MK5 golf is 18500.

An 8th gen accord is 16400, 6th gen civic 10700, and 03 stang is 16k with the refresh and all they changes they made pushing 21k

I consider something to be "stiff enough to not bend most of the time and let the suspension work properly" at the 20k mark. It also seems that the car makers who use advanced suspensions also tend to target that range. A fun way to sanity check the numbers is to put a mark between your two doors, jack a rear corner up to the point that entire side comes off the ground and see how many MM the doors shift relative to each other.

It may surprise you how much a sub 20k car moves especially if it's a long vehicle. This is something I've been aware of for over a decade when I first got into suspension tuning and was taught the importance of making sure the whole frame doesn't deflect when the suspension does work. The tuning methods are totally different if you have a soft car vs a stiff one and a stiff one is superior with the added benefit of feeling far more solid at all times.

There is a reason the Germans proudly announce their chassis specs and Lexus makes you DIG or test it yourself.

 

do you know what the original oldsmobile aurora was? the car that "broke GM's testing machine" lol

what about the W126 and W140? that was what toyota was aiming to match

 

One sec let me go check if I can find anything official on those

 

Looks to be around 12k NM/* for the FWD GM G body cars, the Seville is the one I found the best figures for claiming 53-58% increase over the prior gen and working backwards that would put the newer one around that range. To be fair to GM that is indeed WAY more than anything else they had at the time as the C4 with T tops was 6500nm/* with the FRC being 9k....meanwhile at Porsche the 996 was pushing 27k

W140 is 22-27k from everything I found with it holding steady around there till the W222

From what I found back when I first got my LSs I did a lot of digging and found my 430 was 18-22k with the LS400 according to Japanese press media being 20% less than that so somewhere around 17k..ish. Very hard to know because Toyota/Lexus only share for certain cars like the LFA at 39130 because there were exceptionally proud of that cars bespoke carbon chassis. At the time it actually unseated the VW Phaeton for a little while until the refresh R8 and D4 A8 came out but anything over 30k or so is just purely showing off unless you are doing insane stuff or chasing the ultimate in body silence/safety.

The LS460 is the first car Lexus made that is in the high 20s low 30s and is why Mercedes stiffened the hell out of the W222 and refresh W221, it was a major leap forward in general if we exclude the Peich fueled insanity of the Phaeton and its related cars. First gen A8 was 25k, the D3 was very very proudly touted as 36k in 2003 with the target being to match the Phaeton with 1000lb less weight and the D4 is 25% more than the D3 with a slight caveat that the LWB cars are "only" 42k vs the full 45k of the SWB cars. The Audi figures are really easy to find because I have them in my commemorative books that match the cars lol!


If you want anything else it will have to wait a few days, my source for modern stuff is a test driver in the chassis department of Honda at the Marysville plant/test and design center. I regularly annoyed him to ask the engineers to lookup stuff like this but I only saved stuff I cared about and these are all Hondas figures when they test/benchmark other cars so if you want older stuff I probably can not get it that easily as they will not have it.