Back in 1989, the comfortable and refined LS400 announced Lexus to the world, making established luxury manufacturers sit up and take note. Four generations on, this latest LS purports to do what Lexus has always threatened and be the complete luxury package while, at the same time, recapturing some of that first car's special feel in process.
There’s only one problem: the competition is large and burgeoning. Neither is it exactly glorious at first glance, for all Lexus’s talk of its L-finesse design language. But the LS600h will need to be a mightily good car to compete with the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7 Series and Range Rovers that populate this segment, the favoured choices of diplomats and world leaders everywhere.
On paper, Lexus is certainly talking the talk. It still looks awkward, but it’s still the first big Lexus that, one could argue, is good-looking in an unconventional kind of way. And, crucially, it’s the first that looks like threatening the Germans without copying them, thanks to its unalloyed luxury without Germanic aggression.
It’s a car so complex that the manual explaining the LS’s many, many functions runs onto several hundred pages, and that’s before you dip into the 218-page tome that explains the navigation system.
So for all its obvious appeal to the head, can this be the first big Lexus that appeals to the heart? Or has Lexus’s pursuit of perfection gone too far?
