Lexus heads down the long path to pedigree

Toyota's prestige marque acknowledges continuous improvement will only take you so far – brand magic needs more

Newly appointed Lexus Australia CEO Sean Hanley is refreshingly candid – blunt, even, as motoring.com.au discovered last week.

“If we’re to continue to grow as a brand, we need to speak to a broader global audience. Particularly those who view Lexus as a reliable but safe choice rather than an exciting one.

“For too long our product has failed to either excite or, on the other hand, offend. Our designs were safe...”

This would once have been the stuff of a rogue exec with nothing left to lose. But this was the Lexus chief's maiden speech to media, and it came straight off the company songsheet. The event was last week’s sneak peek into the LF-CC concept and the upcoming third-generation IS compact.

A two-door of muscular proportions, the LF-CC (pictured) has been wheeled out repeatedly since its debut at the 2012 Paris show. It now appears more likely by the day to join the IS in showrooms, pitched at Benz’s C Class coupe, Audi’s A5 and BMW’s 3 – shortly to become 4 – Series.

Hanley was in Sydney with a new IS350 F Sport to mark the company’s sponsorship of the Australian International Design Awards. There were as many design scribes at this press conference as automotive hacks.

Rarely if ever have ‘design’ and ‘designer’ been uttered in such concentration in the space of an hour: A Lexus design award, a Lexus design scholarship, a Lexus design pavilion at Flemington for the Melbourne Cup. Even the remodelling of Lexus magazine into the heavily design-conscious Beyond by Lexus received a mention. Set for release here later this year, the magazine, printed on stock obviously intended to impart tactile quality, covers not just cars but art, architecture and other haunts of designers doing design.

A Lexus-branded short film series, with emerging directors from around the world commissioned by the Weinstein Company to explore the theme that “Life is Amazing”.

An exclusive designer goods brand, Crafted for Lexus, is to appear in new 'Intersect by Lexus' retail concept stores opening in Tokyo, then New York and Dubai. The stores will enable guests “to engage with Lexus through design, art, fashion, culture, movies and technology” – with interiors by a world famous designer, of course.

All of this is aimed at drawing attention to the brand’s new “L-Finesse” design language, of which the LF-CC is the most succinct expression to date. Its point of focus is the spindle grille, which the brand likes to call “signature” but which is still new enough not to have been implemented across the full lineup.

It’s all happening by decree of the man at the helm of the Toyota juggernaut, Akio Toyoda. It’s time, he declares, to tackle the vanilla gorilla head on. But there’s a catch: how to expand its appeal in St Kilda and Bondi without alienating the loyalists in Kew and Killara.

Some backstory. Thanks to the philosophical guidance of kaizen – continuous improvement – Lexus has taken just 24 years to get uncomfortably close to what other big-name luxury marques have achieved, plugging away for a century or more.

Now, with analyst surveys the likes of JD Power confirming quality and comfort are well embedded in customer perceptions, the company is finding that the catch-up curve is getting steeper.

Practical things like panel fit tolerances, insulation and materials quality are the easy part. But automotive brand magic and its attendant sensory experience come with only the forging of a tradition unique to each enterprise. Character and identity evolve only through experimentation, risk and response to successes and failures alike. Read: time.

That’s where, for all its progenitors’ ingenuity, Lexus (founded 1989) cannot match names like Mercedes-Benz (1886), Audi AG (1909), Bayerische Motoren Werke (1916) and Jaguar Cars (1922).

Kaizen is probably the single biggest influence in boosting the quality of affordable vehicles in the latter half of the 20th century; not just Toyotas, but, through the osmosis of competition, all affordable vehicles. It’s also earned Toyota, itself now 76 years old, a reputation as a maker of quality whitegoods (yes, 2000GT and yes, 86, but you know what we mean).

Lexus took kaizen up a level, parlaying it into carriages so exquisitely thought out, so quiet and smooth and perfectly soft as to insulate you not just from the realities of the road but from your own feelings.

All of which led Top Gear to award the now discontinued SC430 convertible the title of the worst car ever made. If you’ve ever owned anything British dating back before about 2000, you’ll know that’s unfair. But it did serve, before many millions of viewers, to amplify the issues Lexus now seeks to redress.

What they’re looking for now is some jagged edge. “Today, customers are looking for more, in what their vehicles convey to their peers, their friends and their colleagues,” Mr Hanley said. “Over the last 12 months we’ve begun tackling that, launching cars that are more fun to drive, more innovative and, importantly, more emotive.”

Acknowledging design as the brand’s main point of weakness, Toyoda has set about redressing it. In two years, he’s remodelled the company as Lexus International. “That’s to open the company up to the best international talent – business and creative” – including from Australia, incidentally. Mr Hanley, a veteran Toyota sales exec, took over the helm at Lexus Australia when his predecessor, Tony Cramb, was appointed to the local board. That in turn came about with former local sales and marketing chief Matthew Callachor’s move to Japan as global general manager for Lexus’s planning division.

Under Toyoda’s direction, that’s begun at home with the acknowledgment that it’s time to stop building cars by committee. He’s started by chopping back a design approval chain of more than 200 executives to something much smaller and tighter. The idea: quicker, more intuitive decisions and purer designs. Mr Hanley added that this is reflected in changes to the local business, “reducing layers of management and empowering staff to make decisions, to trust their intuition, and more importantly, be courageous.”

The aim is to cut the whisper-chain between line management and board, to get rid of cells and silos and secrecy protocols, strengthening the autonomy of each international operation and encouraging them to collaborate. The idea, as Mr Hanley puts it, is “to keep our vehicle designs true to concept” by curtailing the bromidic effects of bureaucracy.

Lexus has been edging towards this for a few years now. In 2008 it fronted up in C63/M3 territory with the IS F, a small sedan with a 5.0-litre V8 packing a 300kW-plus punch with bulked-up bodywork and quad-exhaust bellow to match. Compellingly priced and no dullard on the road, it’s nevertheless failed to draw buyers away from the majors in any great numbers.

Two years on, the company upped the ante with a tilt at Italy’s finest: the all-carbon fibre, screaming V10 LF-A coupe. Some, including the same Jeremy Clarkson who’d so nastily smeared the SC430, put the LF-A among the finest drives they’d ever taken. Others chortled patronisingly at the $750K price tag. That kind of money, you see, is not just about lab-hatched perfection – it’s about the operatic drama and pedigree of a GTO or an Aventador.

By the reckoning of many including Lexus, however, it generated enough engineering praise – and sales in the aftermath of the GFC – to prove the point. But you can only prove that kind of point to a point. Now comes the hard bit: building a tradition on the benefits of kaizen while transcending it.

Claims to streamlining creativity and leveraging synergies are commonplace across the corporate world of our era. But for Lexus, the stakes are higher than most, simply because the results are there for all to see.

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Lexus heads down the long path to pedigree

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