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Lexus goes from land yachts to water yachts with this boat concept

Just this week, Lexus unveiled its fully redesigned flagship, the LS sedan. But the term "flagship" seems a bit misplaced now that Lexus has revealed an actual ship. Well, the Lexus Sport Yacht may be a bit small to be called a ship, but it's as close as many automakers will get. According to Toyota, the idea for the boat came about when the company's CEO, Akio Toyoda, was trying out one of the marine division's new yachts that use Toyota diesel engines. He wanted to see what a sporty, luxury yacht using Lexus design would be like. At his behest, the Toyota Marine Department and Lexus got to work on the concept you see here. More than a clay model, this is a fully-functional nautical machine. The Lexus Sport Yacht was constructed from carbon fiber by Marquis-Carver Yacht Group in Wisconsin, and has a pair of V8 engines shared with the Lexus RC F (and GS F, and LC500). You can even see through the clear engine compartment cover that they share the same bright blue-painted intake manifolds. Compared with the automotive applications, each engine makes a bit less power at 440 horsepower. When you have two of them, though, that becomes less important. Together the engines' roughly 880 horsepower can propel the boat to a top speed of 49 mph. The Lexus Sport Yacht comes complete with many luxury amenities. There's seating for eight on the deck. Two of those seats fold out from either side of the captain's chair "for very special guests." The captain also has access to a pair of touchscreens, a small one in the wheel and a massive one ahead of it for instruments and other information. Down below, the forward passenger cabin is loaded with leather, wood, air conditioning, a table, and sofa seating for six. The yacht's galley has a sink, refrigerator, and stove, and the bathroom comes complete with a shower. Don't expect to see the yacht on sale anytime soon, since this is just a concept at the moment. That being said, luxury automakers, including Aston Martin and Mercedes, have started competing in the yacht market. And while Toyota's marine division hasn't built a pleasure boat since the Epic line, it probably wouldn't be too difficult for the company to start building this Lexus. Related Video:

1 in 7 Americans say they might buy an EV next, as sales of electrics surge

About one in seven driving Americans may likely purchase an electric vehicle as their next car, according to an AAA poll, meaning that as many as 30 million Americans may pony up for an EV within the next three to five years. While some of the motivation is environmental, survey recipients say that lower maintenance expenses and solo access to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes are also among the factors behind potentially going electric. Take a look at the AAA press release on the study here. The poll indicates that about as many people are planning to buy an EV for their next car as are looking to buy a pickup, which is impressive given that the best-selling US vehicle is the Ford F-150. And things should only improve, as about 20 percent of millennials polled said that their next car would probably be an EV. The results are all the more encouraging, at least among green-car advocates, because gas prices have fallen about 40 percent within the past five years, meaning that there's less of an incentive to go electric from a purely economic perspective. Through the first quarter of this year, US plug-in vehicle sales were up about 63 percent from a year earlier to about 39,000 vehicles. Meanwhile, when it came to AAA's annual green-vehicle awards for this year, Tesla's Model S and Model X took the large car and SUV categories, respectively, while the Chevrolet Bolt and Volkswagen e-Golf were listed atop the subcompact and compact lists. The Lexus GS 450h hybrid and the Ford F-150 took home AAA's best green vehicle in the midsize and pickup truck categories. Related Video:

Lexus in no hurry to be a big player in China

For a while now, China's spiraling wealth, population and development has had the world's luxury automakers in an expansionist fervor, with many executives exhibiting the sort of gleefully maniacal behavior historically reserved for gold-rush prospectors. Yet Toyota, of all companies, is exercising a surprising amount of caution in the Asian nation.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, Toyota's premium brand, Lexus, sold all of 64,000 vehicles in China last year, while BMW cleared its books of 326,000. In fact, it didn't even bother entering the market until 2005, while rival Audi built its first car in the market a decade and a half earlier. Even now, Lexus doesn't build any vehicles in China, and with the country's notoriously high tariffs on imports, that's a major disadvantage. Yet the business daily quotes Lexus executive vice president Mark Templin as saying that the brand is nowhere near ready to start building cars in the market. "We're not having those discussions about when we're going to go to China... We have a lot of work to do before we get to that point."
Part of that work includes establishing a more expansive dealer network - Lexus only had 99 stores as of 2012, while rival Mercedes-Benz had over two-and-a-half times as many, and it's still expanding. Adding a lot of dealers without having a goodly number of competitively priced offerings for them to sell may seem like an odd strategy, but Templin tells the WSJ that the goal is to "cultivate our image for quality and customer service and let the customers that we have go tell that story for us."