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2015 Lexus LS gets tighter turning radius, new infotainment

Go back a couple of decades and the thought of a Japanese automaker challenging the German limousines would have seemed laughable, but 25 years later the Lexus LS is a mainstay of the luxury sedan market. And it didn't get there by sitting on its laurels, so it should come as little surprise that Lexus is offering some small tweaks as it enters the 2015 model year.
This time around the upgrades are rather minor, consisting primarily of a new multimedia system. It's got an updated navigation system with 12.3-inch display, revised backup camera imagery with dynamic gridlines, and an enhanced Lexus Enform App Suite that can control the locks, ignition, climate control and more, remotely.
While they were at it, Toyota's engineers also reduced the turning circle by four inches (on cars fitted with 18-inch wheels), and enhanced the F Sport package as well. Otherwise, it's essentially the same LS we've always known.

Toyota has two all-new 8-passenger SUVs in the works, and one's a Lexus

Toyota announced yesterday that its Princeton, Indiana, manufacturing plant is getting a big $803 million infusion of cash. The reason? Toyota casually dropped that it will soon build “two all-new, three-row SUVs” there. TheyÂ’ll be “designed with the active Gen Y American Family in mind,” which is another way of saying that Toyota is targeting Millennials. In case you missed it, Millennials are in their late 20s and 30s now! That means they have growing families and need more space to put them. Both new SUVs will seat up to eight passengers. The other big reveal is that both will be electrified. WeÂ’re going to assume that means theyÂ’ll be regular hybrids in ToyotaÂ’s case, though thereÂ’s every possibility for a PHEV “Prime” version, too. Both will have semi-automated driving systems, advanced enough that they will “allow for hands-free driving in certain conditions.” Plus, there will be a remote parking system that allows “the driver to park and unpark outside the vehicle using a smartphone.” The last nugget of tech Toyota is sharing with us is that both will use a new “digital key” that turns your smartphone into a quasi key and allows you to share it digitally with others. Another bit of information concerning these two is that one will be a Toyota, and the other will be a Lexus. What these two models will be named is not yet clear. Seeing “three-row SUV,” our minds instantly go to Sequoia. That model is as old as it gets these days, and is deeply in need of a redesign — the current generation launched all the way back in 2008. However, Toyota does not explicitly say that this news pertains to the next-gen Sequoia. In fact, previous reports of the Sequoia shifting its production location to San Antonio lead us to believe that this news has absolutely nothing to do with a potential next generation of the SUV. Coincidentally, the Sequoia is currently built at the Princeton, Indiana, plant thatÂ’s getting this investment — that official switchover to Texas is reported to happen sometime in 2022.  ToyotaÂ’s language in this press release, plus the knowledge that Sequoia is leaving Indiana, all indicates that these two three-row SUVs might not be rough-and-tumble body-on-frame off-roaders. TheyÂ’re likely going to be plenty capable (hitting that “active lifestyle” market), but the focus toward families suggests that comfort could be paramount.

Lexus in no hurry to be a big player in China

For a while now, China's spiraling wealth, population and development has had the world's luxury automakers in an expansionist fervor, with many executives exhibiting the sort of gleefully maniacal behavior historically reserved for gold-rush prospectors. Yet Toyota, of all companies, is exercising a surprising amount of caution in the Asian nation.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, Toyota's premium brand, Lexus, sold all of 64,000 vehicles in China last year, while BMW cleared its books of 326,000. In fact, it didn't even bother entering the market until 2005, while rival Audi built its first car in the market a decade and a half earlier. Even now, Lexus doesn't build any vehicles in China, and with the country's notoriously high tariffs on imports, that's a major disadvantage. Yet the business daily quotes Lexus executive vice president Mark Templin as saying that the brand is nowhere near ready to start building cars in the market. "We're not having those discussions about when we're going to go to China... We have a lot of work to do before we get to that point."
Part of that work includes establishing a more expansive dealer network - Lexus only had 99 stores as of 2012, while rival Mercedes-Benz had over two-and-a-half times as many, and it's still expanding. Adding a lot of dealers without having a goodly number of competitively priced offerings for them to sell may seem like an odd strategy, but Templin tells the WSJ that the goal is to "cultivate our image for quality and customer service and let the customers that we have go tell that story for us."