LOL, exactly! Hotels have terrible furniture! And airline seats are usually terrible.

 

"Lexus engineers went to such obsessive lengths to capture the experience of a first-class airline seat that were to you shine a black light upon your new LS430 seat when taking delivery, you'd see urine stains and other bodily fluids had been meticulously preinstalled at the factory, along with thoughtfully deposited food waste already installed between the seat cushions and a recline button that had been carefully engineered to allow only partial movement before halting at the most uncomfortable angle as advised by Lexus's team of orthopedic surgeons"

 

No actually you would be the consistent king of this, that's why you buy new vs me buying shed due to better objective value lol!

 

If it was silver sure lol!

I would want one in silver over an Audi exclusive interior, however the D5 is off the table until all the issues with with 48v system are solved and it has product support established.

I also somewhat don't like the fact it doesn't feel as sporty as the D4 but that's just a preference thing, they are nice but I would rather drop $110k on an R8 and that's my plan next year. I already have a nice luxury 4 door selection and if I need a replacement/newer one I'll buy a Bentley for around 30-40k

 

The old full color model sales brochures were masters of this marketing-speak. Full color, beautiful photography and product descriptions that would make you feel really good about the car/model you were considering. No doubt they were expensive to produce but they were fun to read and take home. I think I have a few selected ones in the basement.

 

LOL you should be a writer for Lexus LS brochures.

 

things can and are changing.

haha... i was blown away by some of the furniture in hotels on south beach miami!

ok take the ***** swinging contest elsewhere... you feel 'very good' about your audis, w12's etc., and how 'smart' you are not buying new cars, as this post attests, but of course most people can't do the repairs you can.

many are 'proud' of their buying decisions for sure, but no need to use them to put down anyone else's choices in order to make themselves feel superior.

 

you and everyone else on the bold part. good job you have a friend in the biz!

 

I wish I had a friend in the business too.
Don't we all?

 

So we’re at the beach and we have both cars, we are leaving day after tomorrow and we had to move to a smaller room for tonight and tomorrow, so we loaded most of our stuff up in the van. Somehow my wife lost my key to the S560. Thankfully she has her key to it, so it’s not stranded here but no clue what she did with it. That’ll cost me a cool grand

 

Get your senses checked, my 20 year old LS430 still smells like leather inside. Japanese may find leather smells offensive, but LS400 wasn't for Japan, it was for America. We like leather. We had an Oldsmobile minivan with leather and it smelled great inside for crying out loud, you're telling me a brand new 1998 LS400 didn't have a leather smell? I'm not calling you a liar but that is odd. Remember, LS400 was for Americans not Japanese.

I didn't say they went to the International Space Station but yes, I firmly believe they did study high end things just like they said. LS430 was tested in a Japanese wind tunnel, that's "outside the vehicle world". Most of the reason the LS4/430s were such successes is because.... Lexus nailed what Americans wanted. By doing their homework. I don't have to tell you this.

 

I had a new LS400 and a new LS430 and two new LS460s, and none of them new smelled like leather. I’m sorry, but they didn’t. As a matter of fact, I even tried to use leather smelling air fresheners in both 460s. Can’t speak for the first gen LS400 but our 2.5 gen did not. Lexus vehicles have a very distinctive smell. In fact all cars do really.

Contrasted to the several new American luxury vehicles we had which did indeed smell like leather when they were new.

Big reason the LS400 was so successful is that it was cheap and excellent. It made you look at the competition and find it impossible to find any value there. Had it not been cheap also though it would not have been successful…value was always a huge player. The LS was not only designed for here, it was also designed for the JDM market and sold very successfully there.

Japanese wind tunnel? What is different about a Japanese wind tunnel? Is it somehow better than an American one? Or a German one? All cars are tested in wind tunnels. More puffery. Not trying to make you angry, I have spent WAY more on Lexus vehicles in my life than you have, I am a huge fan of them (at least of the older ones) I just don’t buy into the puffery at all.

 

At first it was. By the time your ‘98 came out they were close to $55-60k which was A LOT of coin then, in those dollars. It wasn’t as expensive as an S Class but oh they were up there.

A Japanese wind tunnel for bullet trains is what I meant. What’s different? We in America don’t have trains that travel 200MPH for starters. And, LS430 was most aerodynamic car in production when it came out. Maybe some claims are exaggerated but yes, they did their homework.

Lol I’m not angry at all, we just disagree. I’m not saying Lexus engineers went into every 5 star hotel and scrutinized it all, but oh they did their homework. Proof was in the pudding, and sales numbers.

I’ve stayed in a many very nice 5 star hotels with quite nice furniture btw. I’m not saying Lexus went to Ramada Inn or something lol.

 

When my dad got his LS400 the one thing that slightly disappointed me was that the leather didn’t look,feel, or smell like real leather. He’d just come out of a Jag so the contrast was obvious. The fact that Lexus had to put swing tags on each headrest saying “Genuine Leather” suggests they acknowledged the issue. Still a great car though.

 

When you considered a 7 series or S Class was $20-30,000 more it was still really cheap. $60k then is like $95k now, so they were like a LS500 or Genesis G90. Huge value.

UL LS430 loaded was about $8,000 less than a base S430 and 2-3k less than a base 740. base LS430 was $54,000…so about $20k less than a base S430. I know, we shipped them all right next to each other. Had they been the same price no way we would have gotten the LS430 my dad would have gotten what he wanted which was an S Class. The LS430 was so good and he was so happy with his LS400 he couldn’t bring himself to pay all that additional money for an S Class.

Lets think about that. How many wind tunnels do you think there are in Japan? Toyota booked time in the one that was used to design bullet trains. That’s all, then they can use that as a marketing puff “designed in the wind tunnel used to desig bullet trains” a wind tunnel is a wind tunnel. We don’t have trains here that go 200 MPH but that has nothing to do with aerodynamics. It’s because we don’t have the infrastructure, the space or the desire to make such trains and train travel here is nowhere near as desirable as it is there.

like the 12 takemi masters that made shimamoku wood trim that was in my 460s. They pretend that’s some huge honor and only so many masters were trained…when all they probably needed was 12 to be trained. How many years of training would they put in to people to design a wood trim option they only offered for 8 years or so and then abandoned? Makes no sense.

Another example is spring water. Do you really think glacier water is drained from some glacier floating in the arctic sea? Do they go out to it in a boat and chip it off and melt it and put it into bottles? Of course not it’s bottled in a plant. Do you think they just gather up spring water for Evian water and bottle it? Of course not, its made in a plant like every other kind of bottled water.

This is all just puffery that is used to convince people that their product is special and unique and it’s really not. It’s excellent and well made and designed and engineered, but it’s just a mass produced product built to a price at the end of the day.

So have I. No nicer than furniture you can buy for your house. It’s like furniture you would find in a Havertys home store and could buy with 0% financing. Why would Lexus designers look at that and not fine CARS like Rolls Royce’s and Bentleys? What does a table or a couch tell them?

Exactly, and reviews at the time mentioned that. MotorWeek has a retro review of the 1990 LS400 on YouTube and they mention that.

By the time our 98 came out the leather was VERY nice. But, it didn’t smell like leather inside they designed it not to.

BTW, my S Class never smelled like leather either.