Originally Posted by Wheels Magazine

The marque has to come before the badge. While many old automotive brands have disappeared since World War II, few have been succesfully created. It seems to have been easier for Toyota to arrive at 'Lexus' than it was for Ford to conjure 'Edsel'. Both arrived after a selection process involving hundreds of names, then a short list, and then a final choice. Interestingly, both marques used the opening letter as the badge. For Lexus, the capital would be enclosed within an 'imperfect' ellipse. So imperfect was the this ellipse that it required six months of work and a precise mathematical formula to get right - with Edsel everything was imperfect. Molly Sanders of Molly Designs etched a very distinctive, stylised 'L', initially on titanium. Then he cut, filed, polished and surrounded it. But there can be many a slip between conception and reality: Molly's work went into competition with five other designs. The previous favourite had been an 'L' designed to look like a seagull's wings and sans ellipse. "That was too whimsical," said Molly. "I felt it needed to look like jewelery".
* The five finalist in the search for the lexus name were Alexis, Calibre, Chaparel, Vectre and Verone. Alexis was favoured but the Dynasty connection inspired the rework to Lexus.
* One of the early US advertisements (dubbed 'Bounce') for the LS400 showed a pyramid of 15 champagne glasses atop of the bonnet. Underneath, the car was travelling at 225km/h on a dyno.
* The project name for the LS400 was 'F1'. No, we're unsure why too.
* The 2005 Tokyo Show put Lexus in the Japanese domestic spotlight for the first time. With the demise of the Celsior and Soarer names (among others), the grey markets in New Zealand and Australia will doubtlessly suffer.
* Luxury Export to the US remains the best way of describing the marque.

Originally Posted by Rockville

that will show the LS460l park itself between two stacks of glasses. Another ad will have a Lexus racing gravity as one is on the ground and one is dropped from the air while they race the quarter mile....

Rock

Originally Posted by enigma888

LOL, or done in slow-mo to satisfy AMCI for accuracy!

It's fitting that the original 1989 LS 400 champagne glasses ad was recently unearthed on the web, and now the successor LS 460 evolves that ad further.