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Lexus LS

1 Toyota-cho, Toyota City, Aichi, Japan

Last updated

The original 1989 Lexus LS 400 was Toyota's answer to a specific, deliberate question: could a Japanese manufacturer build a car that matched a Mercedes-Benz S-Class or BMW 7 Series on refinement and reliability, sell it for tens of thousands of dollars less, and back it with a level of dealer service the German brands weren't offering at the time? Toyota's engineering team benchmarked the LS obsessively against its German rivals during development, reportedly disassembling and studying competitor vehicles down to individual components, and the resulting car arrived with a near-silent V8, panel gaps and paint finish that outscored its German rivals in contemporary comparisons, and a reliability record that, decades later, still shows up in long-term ownership surveys as class-leading. The launch itself became a case study in customer-service disruption: Lexus dealers reportedly performed door-to-door pickup and delivery for warranty service in the LS's earliest years, and a widely reported voluntary recall in 1990 — handled by flying repair kits to customers' homes and driveways rather than requiring a dealer visit — became a textbook example other automakers later studied directly. More than three decades and six generations later, the LS remains Lexus's flagship, and the car most directly responsible for permanently reshaping how "affordable luxury reliability" gets defined against European rivals that had, until 1989, faced essentially no serious competition on that specific claim.

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