1996 Lexus Ls400 Base Sedan 4-door 4.0l on 2040-cars

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2013 Lexus LS 600h L

I have spent the last seven days driving the Starfire Pearl (read: white) 2013 Lexus LS 600h L you see here. And after roughly 500 miles of errand-running, highway-cruising, commuting and people-schlepping, I can safely say this: I don't get it.
The LS hybrid is a nice car. It's comfortable, has every amenity you'd ever want in a luxury boat, and with its freshened appearance for 2013, it looks modern, integrating the company's new spindle grille into an overall package that's elegant. None of this is bad news. But let me explain why I still cannot wrap my head around the overall LS 600h L package:
Driving Notes

TMG still developing Lexus LS Sports 650 [w/video]

If you're going to make a super sedan, you'd better do it in Germany. That's where Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz do it, along with third parties like Alpina, Brabus and G-Power, among others. Deutschland is the epicenter of the movement, regularly churning out the most powerful four-door rockets in the world. It's also where one of the racing divisions for Toyota has been hard at work on the TMG Sports 650.
Toyota Motorsport GmbH started with a Lexus LS and turned it into a 641-horsepower, twin-turbocharged super sedan it revealed late last year at the Essen Motor Show. But though we haven't heard much about it since then, the team behind Toyota's F1 and Le Mans efforts are apparently still hard at work on the project.
Speaking with Lexus' own UK blog, TMG chief Alastair Moffitt revealed that the project started way back in 2010, shortly after Toyota shut down its F1 program and left the racing team with nothing to do. The 5.0-liter twin-turbo V8 was initially producing as much as 800 horsepower, but has since been refined to 650 so that it could theoretically be put into production and onto the road.

2019 Lexus UX 200 and UX 250h: Full details and specs from Geneva

Lexus is perhaps overdue to produce a small luxury crossover, in the vein of the hot-selling Buick Encore (which is a tiny bit smaller). And like the Buick Encore, it has a lower-tier brand counterpart: the Toyota C-HR, which is to the UX as the Chevy Trax is to the Encore. But enough about the Buick. What's the 2019 Lexus UX all about? For one, it is almost as outre as the C-HR, which is perhaps more radical because it's a lowly Toyota. Graced with a spindle grille and interior fixings that are influenced by, Lexus says, traditional Japanese crafts, it appears to be every contemporary Lexus trope combined into one compact vehicle — just 177 inches long in total, or about 5 inches shorter than a contemporary Corolla. That'll be good for the urbanites the UX is intended to woo, who need to park in tight spots. For wider, more open spaces, there are two powertrain choices. The 2019 Lexus UX 200 is one of the first applications of the new Dynamic Force Engine, a 2.0-liter inline-four with extreme thermal efficiency: 40 percent, Toyota claims. Read more about that engine (and the Direct Shift CVT, which the UX 200 also utilizes). The bottom line is, for the driver, the engines will be more fuel efficient and produce 168 horsepower, which represents an increase of 24 horsepower over the C-HR platform-mate, a sizable jump. The Direct Shift CVT should prove to be a more important improvement, offering more natural response when starting off from a stop. Anyone with CVT experience knows that this isn't a strong suit of that transmission type, even with years of attention paid to refining the experience. It's nice to see the sort of clever, driver-focused engineering that created the bizarre Lexus LC "10-speed" found in the LC 500h, which uses an e-CVT and a conventional automatic. It sounds strange and complex, but it works beautifully. We expect Direct Shift CVTs to be a serious improvement over the company's e-CVTs, and can't wait to test this aspect of the UX 200. The UX 250h snags the Dynamic Force engine and slaps a new hybrid system into it. Lexus expects the total output to be about 176 horsepower, which takes into account a rear axle electric motor (which makes the UX 250h all-wheel drive). That rear motor can accept up to 80 percent of available power at up to 43 miles per hour. It's not clear from the specs provided if the gasoline engine output differs from the UX 200.