LFA not confirmed for Oz despite demand

Lexus Australia boss John Roca is confident the LFA will come Down Under, but he's stopped short of confirming its availability.

According to Roca, Australia may get as few as one per cent of the car's fixed 500 unit production run -- just five units. Though the local operation has asked for "around ten cars", he says it's not clear yet whether any of the carbon-fibre bodied 325km/h two-seaters will even be allocated to the Australian market.

Roca estimates if the car does arrive, by the time Luxury Car tax and other local charges are added it could cost as much as $750,000.

"We applied for 10 initially, but at this stage all they can give us any indication on is five," Roca told the Carsales Network on the Lexus stand at the Tokyo Motor Show yesterday.

"[Regarding price] All they've said so far is $US375,000. So if you translate that to ours, it's somewhere approaching the three-quarters of a million dollar mark."

Despite the stratospheric pricetag, Roca says interest remains high -- though much of it from 'in-house'.

"We've had expressions of interest on this car from the dealer group and it surpasses what we thought was going to be [a] difficult [number of cars to place]… The first people on the list are our dealers," Roca told the Carsales Network.

"If hypothetically we were [only] given five cars, I see it very difficult for those five cars to go beyond our dealer group to be quite honest. Our dealer principals would buy the cars."

If this were to happen, Roca says Lexus would require the cars to be on-sold eventually.

"We might put a limitation on the dealer group as to when the car would need to be passed on.

"There are two trains of thought: you can sell the car to an enthusiast and it can be parked in a garage never to be seen again; or we can utilise this [opportunity] as a brand thing, have 'drive' cars for customers to experience and get Lexus owners involved with the vehicle itself. If we were given 50 cars, this would be a completely different conversation, but with five cars you've got to try and maximise what you can [get] out of it," he said.

Beyond the dealer customer base, there are 'real' buyers out there though, says Roca.

"We know they [Lexus dealers] have VIP customers that have been diehard Lexus people for many, many years and read about the car, know about the car and expressed interest in the car. We've been quoting figures anywhere between $500,000 and $1.0m and it didn't shake anybody off of the tree... It didn't scare any of them away," the Lexus boss revealed.

Roca believes the limited production run will allow the LFA to set new heights in terms of the price private buyers are willing to pay.

"You can buy a Lambo this year, next year or the one after, but this car you can't. It's a one-off -- 500 [units] globally once off... that's a pretty bold statement.

"If you're a car collector or a true enthusiast you want one of the 500."