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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."

Here We Go Again: Lexus attacks EVs in new ad [UPDATE]

UPDATE: We got a comment from founding member of Plug In America Paul Scott on this ad. It's available below. The last time Lexus attacked plug-in battery vehicles in an ad, it had to apologize. The company is remaining on message, though, and has revisited a hybrid-vehicle advertising campaign that implies that driving a battery-electric vehicle is a big waste of time, because of all the charging you need to do. With the new spot, Lexus once again raised hackles of plug-in vehicle advocates because, once again, the accuracy is questioned. "The ad's message was that a consumer could [drive] a vehicle with advanced technology today, without sacrifice or change in habit." – Lexus spokesman Brian Bolain Lexus is running print ads (click to enlarge) in publications like Wired poking fun at EVs, the International Business Times says. Lexus highlights range anxiety in the spot, comparing the amount of time it takes to fully recharge an EV – and the idea that air conditioning and using the radio can shorten an EV's range – to the fun of just driving a Lexus. "The [print] ad was merely intended to paint a picture of life with a hybrid, which is basically no different from life with a traditional gas-powered vehicle, versus life with an EV, which can have challenges or at least uncertainties," Lexus spokesman Brian Bolain told AutoblogGreen. "In other words, at its core, the ad's message was that a consumer could participate in driving a vehicle with advanced technology today, without sacrifice or change in habit." The campaign picks up where Lexus's previous anti-EV campaign left off this spring. A website promoting Lexus's hybrids (and parent company Toyota's H2 vehicles) claimed that there was a hydrogen refueling infrastructure set up in 20 US states (not anywhere close to true). Plug-in advocates were also quick to note that higher-powered EV recharging systems can allow a plug-in to be recharged in far less than the four hours the Lexus site claimed. Of course, Toyota has a lot more skin in the game when it comes to hybrids and, starting next year, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles than it does for plug-ins. Through August, the company sold just 842 RAV4 EVs and about 11,500 Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids in the US. That compares to almost 19,000 Nissan Leaf EVs and a Tesla Model S count that's likely close to that figure as well (Tesla breaks out neither monthly sales numbers nor US-only sales for the Model S).

Anything but boring | 2018 Lexus LC 500 First Drive

This is it, the headliner, the main event. After years of Lexus promising to make less-boring cars and instead giving us countless spindle-grille facelifts, the 2018 LC 500 is here as the brand's new North Star. It's the official halo to mark where Toyota's luxury brand is headed. This is the car that we hope can bring an end to the relentless mentions of boring cars - which are themselves needlessly boring. And besides, "not boring" is a terrible metric for evaluation. What Lexus is really trying to do is give its cars some spirit, to transcend the paint-by-numbers stereotype that made this brand the luxury juggernaut it is today. By that yardstick, the LC 500 is a success simply based on how it looks. It's beautiful in a way that we couldn't predict from the 2012 LF-LC concept that foreshadowed it. The kind of beauty where instead of reflexively grabbing your phone to take a picture, you just stand there and keep looking. And pictures don't do this car justice, anyway. They soften the edges and reduce the massive draw of the wide shoulders. In person, looking straight at the LC, the car looks like it's 80 percent hood. In the rest of the lineup, the trademark Lexus grille's execution ranges from caricature (RC) to botched nose job (LX). Here it pulls everything together. From every other angle, the LC has some feature that seems excessive – in the best way possible. The proportions of the LC give off a distinctively functional vibe, and it's genuine. That hood is so long because the 5.0-liter V8's center of mass sits three and a half inches behind the front axle. The extra space up front is mostly empty - Lexus uses high-strength steel cross-braces to shore up torsional rigidity instead of adding structure ahead of the front wheels, and the battery sits under the trunk floor. For all the visual excitement, the LC is still a conventional vehicle. Aside from some advancements in the LC 500h's hybrid powertain, the innovation here is of the iterative type. It's interesting, in that Lexus is betting on emotional appeal and driving character at a time when the future relevance of both is up for debate. If anything, the LC is a car for the current automotive world, not the one to come. And despite extensive use of aluminum and sheet-molded carbon, the LC 500 weighs in at a hefty 4,280 pounds. That's right in line with the BMW 6 Series and a good deal below the Batali-esque Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe's 4,700 pounds.