Before departing for Seville, Spain, to drive Lexus’s new voluptuary coupe, the LC 500, I was obliged by the event staff to acquire an International Driving Permit from an office of the American Automobile Association. This ridiculous bit of cardboard, with artwork from the age of mimeograph forgeries, certifies that the bearer possesses a valid U.S. driver’s license…which, sigh, I have right here in my wallet.

After passing the AAA’s fog-a-mirror test and handing over $20, I was issued these grave bona fides.

What’s with the IDPs? They were required because the cars that Lexus brought to Seville were late prototypes. The LC 500 (and LC 500h, the significantly ballsy hybrid version) won’t hit U.S. stores for months. The Spanish DMV was being implacably uptight about it, for no obvious reason. And just like in Italy with Ferrari’s “prova” cars, the test cars were obliged to wear wide red plates on their front grilles.

That was a loss, since the car’s daring frontal composition—its grille a fishnet hourglass, or the warp and weave of existence—is kind of the point. There’s so much drama I’m surprised they didn’t make me get an Equity card.

This car is about building the Lexus brand, plain and simple. Indeed, this is the way auto makers used to do halo cars, with one wistful look at the project budget and a shrug. The LC is in every way estate grown, designed in-house and built in the clean rooms of Motomachi assembly plant by master craftsmen called Takumi. With production aimed at 4,500 units a year globally, the car won’t generate much in the way of profits. Indeed, the accountants probably see the LC as a vast, Ultrasuede hole into which to throw money.

But it will generate heat. By God, you will say the company name when you see this car, and you will look twice. Management has made certain of it. It’s nice that we’re in Spain, since the LC’s melting-with-the-heat detailing recalls the bendy clocks of Salvador Dalí.

Another nuance is the brand’s sudden patrilineage and elder worship. As part of Lexus’s reimagining, the company president and CEO, family scion Akio Toyoda, has been fitted with Enzo Ferrari’s loafers. Toyoda-San is now Chief Brand Officer and also Takumi master driver.

As the company tells it, the LC program was born shortly after the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in August 2011. In confidential interviews at Pebble Beach, Toyoda-San learned that Americans thought the Lexus brand was boring. What?! said no one in attendance.

He vowed no one would say their cars were boring again.

Five months later, at the 2012 Detroit auto show, Lexus unveiled its beguiling, bedeviling LF-LC concept coupe.

It’s taken five years to fulfill that promise, which I imagine Toyoda-San making while standing on a putting green, a fist raised to the sky like Scarlett O’Hara. But here we are. Next month, at Detroit, the LC coupe will stomp down the runway ahead of the first reveal of the fifth-generation LS sedan, a four-door enveloped in the same stylistic silk as the LC and built on the same majority-steel architecture, which they call the new Global Architecture-Luxury (GA-L).

Here’s a bit of download: The LC is a front-engine, rear-drive 2+2 luxury coupe, with a majority-steel unibody that looks to me, at least, future-proofed for a convertible variant. The LC is 10 inches longer than a Porsche 911, thereabouts, and roughly the same shorter than a Mercedes-Benz S Coupe. The LC is
surprisingly easy to get in and out of.

The six-figure GT coupe market isn’t hotly contested these days, and if you read no further, please know I think the LC 500 takes the stuffings out of anything in this category. The interior is gorgeous—nobly appointed, serene in space and design, with smart tech deposed in a stitched-leather landscape with dull-silver streams and suede door gussets shaped like dune ridges. In these troubled times, are you looking for one thing we can all agree on? Light your keister in this driver’s seat, my reigning favorite. I even had chief engineer Koji Sato draw a human butt for me to explain the seat foam’s damping gradients. We talked into the night.

Buyers have a choice from two powertrains, but I’m setting aside the 500h for another review. The LC 500 brings a creamier-than-usual execution of the corporate 5.0-liter V8—naturally aspirated, always on the cam, its resonant voice like Morgan Freeman pumped into the cabin by special acoustic tunnels. The engine software holds this butter churn to 471 hp at 7,100 rpm, but there’s plenty of tuning room for future F Sport and F performance variants.

The V-8 is hooked to a new 10-speed automatic transmission of Toyota’s own design, an electromechanical device of horological complexity and celestial serenity that I can’t do justice to here (four planetary gear sets). But with its evenly spaced ratios from 2nd to 9th gear, the transmission delivers one of the car’s signature moves. The engineers call it “rhythmic shifting,” which we experienced on the main straight of Circuito Monteblanco, near Seville:

Beyond a left-hander in 3rd gear, slightly uphill, the main straight opens up. The LC 500, in Sport S+ mode with the optional rear-wheel steering system engaged, drifts through fully composed, on throttle, tires chirping, but feeling wide as a barn, I must say.

Back to 100% throttle and...Whaa-thum! Whaa-thum! Whaa-thum! Whaa-thum! down the straight, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 200-millisecond gearshifts coming in march cadence. That’s a new one on me.

The LC 500 courses through mid-speed corners like a boss, granite solid, thoroughly planted, with plenty of rubber and a super-profundity of stance. The e-assist steering feel is hefty and connected. When the six-pot calipers sweetly bite those big front rotors, LC has no trouble dancing into a corner on its anti-lock toes.

Near the limit, yes, the big coupe does handle a bit nose heavy. That’s the V8 talking. And with a curb weight of 4,280 pounds, the LC 500’s power-to-weight (9.1 lb/hp) is firmly in grand-touring category. And yet it still manages to bolt from 0-60 mph in 4.4 seconds and hit a top speed at 168 mph. I guess that’s the 10-speed talking.

In any event, I’m not bored.