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Anything but boring | 2018 Lexus LC 500 First Drive

This is it, the headliner, the main event. After years of Lexus promising to make less-boring cars and instead giving us countless spindle-grille facelifts, the 2018 LC 500 is here as the brand's new North Star. It's the official halo to mark where Toyota's luxury brand is headed. This is the car that we hope can bring an end to the relentless mentions of boring cars - which are themselves needlessly boring. And besides, "not boring" is a terrible metric for evaluation. What Lexus is really trying to do is give its cars some spirit, to transcend the paint-by-numbers stereotype that made this brand the luxury juggernaut it is today. By that yardstick, the LC 500 is a success simply based on how it looks. It's beautiful in a way that we couldn't predict from the 2012 LF-LC concept that foreshadowed it. The kind of beauty where instead of reflexively grabbing your phone to take a picture, you just stand there and keep looking. And pictures don't do this car justice, anyway. They soften the edges and reduce the massive draw of the wide shoulders. In person, looking straight at the LC, the car looks like it's 80 percent hood. In the rest of the lineup, the trademark Lexus grille's execution ranges from caricature (RC) to botched nose job (LX). Here it pulls everything together. From every other angle, the LC has some feature that seems excessive – in the best way possible. The proportions of the LC give off a distinctively functional vibe, and it's genuine. That hood is so long because the 5.0-liter V8's center of mass sits three and a half inches behind the front axle. The extra space up front is mostly empty - Lexus uses high-strength steel cross-braces to shore up torsional rigidity instead of adding structure ahead of the front wheels, and the battery sits under the trunk floor. For all the visual excitement, the LC is still a conventional vehicle. Aside from some advancements in the LC 500h's hybrid powertain, the innovation here is of the iterative type. It's interesting, in that Lexus is betting on emotional appeal and driving character at a time when the future relevance of both is up for debate. If anything, the LC is a car for the current automotive world, not the one to come. And despite extensive use of aluminum and sheet-molded carbon, the LC 500 weighs in at a hefty 4,280 pounds. That's right in line with the BMW 6 Series and a good deal below the Batali-esque Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe's 4,700 pounds.

Super Bowl commercials: Steven Tyler, Emerson Fittipaldi, Keanu Reeves and more

Sunday is Super Bowl LII, which means America will immerse itself in high-calorie potluck fare, garish halftime-show entertainment (Justin Timberlake, bringing sexy back, but not that kind), the most expensive and over-the-top TV ads of the year, and — oh yeah — a football game between two teams connected by Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line. What else you gonna do on the first Sunday of February? As usual, automakers plan big, splashy TV spots to reach all those gajillions of eyeballs glued to the teevee, though the list may be shorter than in previous years. Here's a roundup of what we know is coming. Hyundai Hyundai will test the football/futbol divide with a 60-second spot starring a youth-soccer ref who arrives for the game dramatically and just in time in his 2018 Kona. Only it's Super Bowl Sunday, so he — along with the two coaches, and apparently most of the parents — are eager to get on with their game-day plans. Advantage: football, being the message, we guess. The ad does make a quick plug for Hyundai's BlueLink nav system, but this is only nominally about the car. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Hyundai also plans a 60-second ad that recognizes people fighting pediatric cancers and highlights its own nonprofit organization that focuses on the cause, according to Reuters. Kia This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. The Korean automaker will put Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler behind the wheel of its new Stinger on an abandoned racetrack. The former " American Idol" host promptly puts it into reverse, going back to his '70s heyday, courtesy of some CGI, to the strains of "Dream On" played backwards. Trotting out an almost-70-year-old to relive some classic rock glory fits the Super Bowl template to a T. Two-time Formula One and Indianapolis 500 champ Emerson Fittipaldi also makes a cameo. It airs in the third quarter. Lexus This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Lexus teams with Marvel Studios to preview its forthcoming movie "Black Panther," which arrives in theaters Feb. 16. In "Long Live The King," the Black Panther, a.k.a. King T'Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, dispatches some bad guys to recover stolen Vibranium after clinging to the roof of a speeding 2018 LS 500 F Sport, driven by co-star Danai Gurira.

2019 Lexus ES 350 F Sport Quick Spin Review | Yet another Lexus surprise

The 2019 Lexus ES 350 F Sport truly cements that "driving like a Lexus" now means something far different than it ever did before. It's not dull, it's not anonymous and old ladies probably won't like it. It should not be painted pearlescent white. Instead, the new ES is genuinely engaging to drive, feeling every bit like it was spawned from the same gene pool as the lustworthy LC coupe and surprisingly sharp LS flagship sedan. I actually enjoyed driving it more than the BMW M550i, and I liked driving that car quite a bit. Seriously. No one is as surprised by that statement as the guy who typed it. It really comes down to what you feel through that F Sport steering wheel, through your heels planted in the floor below, and the seat of your pants that's now placed lower in a sportier driving position. The 2019 ES 350 is one of those cars that manages to shrink around you as you hustle it along, feeling much smaller than its full-size sedan dimensions would indicate. It may be based on the Avalon, but that car never felt as lithe and responsive as its Lexus cousin. The extra structural rigidity of the ES is part of the equation. Now, to be fair, the ES in question is the F Sport model fitted with the optional Adaptive Variable Suspension derived from the divine LC, which no doubt helps the dynamics compared to lesser ES trims. But judging by the impressions of others, plus the rest of Lexus' redone lineup, lower-trim ESs seem to drive well. Even the base cars come with novel swing-valve shock absorbers designed to ably soak up bumps while keeping things level around corners. The electric power steering motor has also migrated from the column to the rack – a sure fire way to improve steering feel. And that it does, plus Lexus has a knack of tuning the various steering settings (Normal, Sport and Sport+) to be subtle in their increase of effort. There's no overly stiff weighting to satisfy the notion that "sporty" steering equals "stiff" steering, as is often the case in cars with variable drive settings. Appropriately, I drove in Normal around town and in Sport+ on my mountain road evaluation route. The differences aren't night and day -- it still feels like you're driving the same car -- it's just been tweaked slightly for ideal performance. These drive settings also adjust the adaptive suspension, if so equipped.