Earlier this 12 months, I spent practically 1,000 miles in a Lexus LC 500 coupe on a highway journey to go to my outdated school city. It was a improbable highway journey companion, a automotive I may’ve spent days and days in, however there was one thing extra to it than that: Familiarity. In some way, this $111,550 automotive — one thing I may by no means afford to take a look at exterior of a mortgage or press occasion — felt like a outdated pal.
After a number of hundred miles or so, I found out how precisely that labored. It wasn’t that Lexus engineered the LC 500 to instantly really feel like dwelling, the best way the Acura Integra does, however as an alternative that the Lexus’ character harkened again to one thing from my very own previous: The Scion FR-S I owned again once I was day by day driving these Rochester roads. Regardless of all of the consolation, the facility, and the sophistication, the LC 500 preserves a few of its little brother’s sports-car spirit.
Full Disclosure: Lexus loaned me an LC 500 for a thousand-mile highway journey, making it the most costly automotive I’ve ever avenue parked in Brooklyn.
The LC 500 is, in nearly each approach conceivable, a really completely different automotive to my outdated FR-S. They’re each front-engined, rear-wheel-drive, four-seat coupes designed by Toyota, however that’s about all they share. The Lexus is a high-dollar train in consolation and luxurious, whereas the Scion price me $14,000 out of the again of a central New York supplier’s recent trade-in lot. The Lexus has a 471-horsepower V8 engine mated to a laggy automated transmission, whereas the Scion has a improbable handbook gearbox bolted to some form of small four-cylinder tractor motor. The Lexus comes from Toyota Metropolis, the Scion comes from a Subaru plant in Gunma. They need to not, by all logic, really feel comparable.
But, in defiance of all identified legal guidelines of aviation sense, they do. The Lexus’ suspension is softer, extra compliant over bumps and extra wallowy in visitors, but when thrown right into a nook it communicates by means of the steering wheel like that stiffer Scion. The LC is greater, heavier, and extra highly effective, but it by no means feels lumbering or constructed just for straight-line velocity when put next with the smaller, lighter, slower FR-S.
That’s to not say the 2 vehicles really feel the identical, however that they communicate to their driver in the identical language. Like C-3PO speaking to Owen Lars’ moisture vaporators, automobiles all have their very own little intricacies in how they impart, their very own dialects. From reverse ends of Toyota’s sports activities automotive spectrum, the LC 500 and the FR-S talk in the very same approach. Study to get together with one, and the opposite will come to you simply as naturally.
The LC 500 is greater, quicker, smoother, and extra snug than a little bit Scion FR-S, however a blindfolded driver would have the ability to inform from behind the wheel that the 2 share familial ties. Their character isn’t simply the results of how they’re designed and assembled, however of a whole bunch of 1000’s of little selections in all places of their growth — selections made, in each instances, by Toyota. They’re brothers, with their very own little secret language.
