L.A. Auto Show: The Lexus IS; first rabid, now topless
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[Update: read the review of the Lexus IS 250C and 350C here.]
Ah, the cliches of Paris in October. Cool air, warm baguettes, hot espressos. What better way to enjoy all the niceties of a French automne then driving down the Champs-Elysees … in your Japanese hardtop convertible?
Well, it made sense to Lexus, who chose October’s Paris Auto Show to introduce the world to its new drop-top, the IS 250C and IS 350C. Why it didn’t wait for an auto show in a warmer, more appropriate clime is a little vague. Maybe company officials like France’s crepes more than our huevos rancheros. Regardless, we North Americans had to wait another month before Lexus debuted its latest convertible to our continent at the L.A. Auto Show.
Following the trend of a majority of carmakers, Lexus went hard with the roof in the form of a three-panel affair that becomes sun-friendly in a scant 20 seconds. Stylistically, designers kept the front of the car looking very similar to the IS sedans -- wild stepchild IS-F notwithstanding. Yet head toward the rear of the car and there’s no mistaking that this one’s different. Lexus designers had a different template as their foundation because there is no coupe variant of the IS, thus forcing them to start from a different point than designers of coupe-based convertibles like the BMW 3 series, Mercedes CLK and Infiniti G37 convertible.
Evidence of this is clear as the rear of the vehicle is an exercise in contrasts. On one hand, the new LED taillights and rear fascia are a clean, handsome design in their own right. However, taken as a whole, the rear end looks too heavy, especially when viewed from the side. There’s just too much metal on the deck lid, which prevents the car from looking nimble and lithe.
Powertrain offerings remain the same as the sedans: the IS 250C gets the 2.5 liter, 204 horsepower V-6 with either a six-speed manual or six-speed automatic while the IS 350C gets the 3.5 liter, 306 horsepower V-6 with the 6-speed auto.
Lexus has provided plenty of luxurious amenities inside for the driver and his or her coterie that make a Lexus a Lexus, with nothing you can’t find in the sedan variant. What are unique are settings on both the climate control system and the audio system that automatically detect when the top is down and adjust accordingly.
In a February review of Lexus’ ferocious IS-F, our own Dan Neil described the car as a standard IS 350 that had contracted rabies. He then said such a hyper-performance Lexus was pointless yet not surprising, because the company needed something to compete with the likes of its European rivals’ in-house tuners, such as BMW’s M-series and Mercedes-Benz’s AMG.
Yet one could argue that there was an even larger hole in Lexus’ relentless quest to match its bratwurst-munching competitors. And thankfully it’s now addressed this gap, not by going rabid, but by going topless. The open-air fun begins in the late spring of 2009.
--David Undercoffler
