LEXUS: 35 YEARS OF PRECISION

The forward-thinking history of this luxury marque shapes its electrified future.

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In the 1980s, a group of determined engineers gathered with one ambitious goal - to build the best car in the world. Eschewing the brashness of the era, they were not going to shout about their mission. There would be no bombastic pre-launch marketing campaign. No. They were just going to do it, steadily and methodically.

The Lexus LS 400 arrived in 1989 like a Fortune 500 CEO striding confidently into a shareholders meeting: silent, calm, meticulously attired - and utterly dominant. Everything about it was designed with obsessive precision. The doors shut with the kind of mellifluous thunk that suggested affluence, serenity and offered immediate respite from the noise of the outside world. Incorporating hundreds of new patents, its welds 1.5x stronger than the standard on automobiles of that time, the car was mechanically faultless, impeccably reliable - but undeniably exciting, coming alive with a nudge of the accelerator.

This was the birth of Flagship 1, the result of 'Circle F', a project helmed by Eiji Toyoda, a legend of Japanese automotive engineering, who'd instructed his engineers to create a car "bet

ter than the best in the world". That's right. Not just equal. Better.

Since then, Lexus has not so much marched as glided across the luxury landscape, propelled by its own "Yet Philosophy". It's an approach that goes something like this: Can a car be powerful, yet quiet? Fast, yet efficient? Bold, yet tasteful? It's an extremely delicate balance. And yet, one Lexus deftly continues to achieve.