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Flower petal-covered Lexus UX 250h wins art car competition

We confess not to know the first thing about art, so perhaps we don't quite get why anyone would want to cover every inch of a Lexus UX250h with flower petals. It's not as if it's an easy thing to do. But not only has someone done it, the resulting car has actually won an art car competition sponsored by the luxury marque. Without the flower petals, the Lexus UX is actually a pretty sharp looking compact premium crossover. It wears the Lexus design language with its many crsip creases and angled lines better than most of its fellow L-badgers. In fact, we can think of others whose sheetmetal would look better under a veil of paper blossoms. The winning entry, created by a design outfit called Clap Studio out of Valencia, Spain, beat five other Lexus UX art cars to win the contest. It took artists Jordi Iranzo and Angela Montagud a month to attach the thousands of paper cutouts to the body. "Our concept is a Zen garden that represents a state of mind: calm, pure consciousness,” they explained. The duo also point out that the car looks very different depending on the light, as the petals reflect and cast shadows in varying directions. Other entrants included more traditional art cars, with elaborate paint jobs, textures, or random objects affixed to them. At least one appeared to be covered in actual, not abstract, flora. Only the winning proposal was actually built, it seems, so in real life only one UX was defiled (or beautified, depending on your taste). Again, we don't know much about art. Related video:

Lexus exec says he still fields complaints about the spindle grille

When Lexus debuted its spindle grille on the GS sedan and trademarked the design back in 2012, it was a sure sign the look was here to stay. It started making its way through the lineup, and now five model years later, it's on all Lexus vehicles. The one thing everyone can all agree on is, it's bold. And Lexus has doubled down on the design with the LF-1 Limitless Concept on display at the Detroit Auto Show. Some people surely think nothing of the grille. Others have equated it to a cartoon character, a beard trimmer, or a baleen whale scooping up krill. In one harsh, perhaps apocryphal criticism, a design professor is said to have likened the spindle to the mouth of the titular hunter-alien in the "Predator" movies. In a much more admiring spacefaring comparison, our Antti Kautonen said the grille of the LF-1 Limited Concept mimics a "Star Wars" ship's shift into hyperspace. That's a fitting analogy for the stunning and futuristic LF-1, which might be the single most dramatically styled vehicle at the North American International Auto Show. A couple of years ago, Toyota chief designer — and head of Lexus — Tokuo Fukuichi defended the spindle in a Reuters interview, saying "sexy" was a goal of the design, and dismissing complaints by saying, "Even polarizing designs, you get used to them after a while." That defense was "a while" — three years — after the new look caused an uproar at a 2012 Toyota stockholders' meeting, where some shareholders complained. Now it has been a while longer, and a Lexus executive says the spindle grille has continued to divide Lexus customers. Jeff Bracken, Lexus group vice president and general manager, told Carbuzz on the sidelines of the Detroit show last week that longtime repeat customers still can't get their heads around whatever it is the car seems to be getting its mouth around. "I'll be very transparent. It's our signature grille. Some of our models have a more expressive signature grille than others. The folks that look at it as somewhat polarizing would be, for the most part, the folks that have been with us since the beginning. In fact I'll take phone calls from some of these owners and will literally spend 45 minutes to an hour on the phone with me just expressing how disappointed they are," Bracken said. Bracken has actually been saying almost the exact same things about the grille for years — both to upset customers and to automotive journalists — for example, to Forbes in 2014.

Lexus RC F GT3 Racing Concept is green-flag ready

Lexus is hardly the first brand that comes to mind when comes to motorsports. In fact, it's not even the first Japanese brand. But Toyota's premium marque is showing new signs of understanding that it will need to at least pay racing further lip service if it wants to be viewed as a more emotionally connected brand with the wherewithal to challenge the Germans on every level.
Lexus has already made it clear it wants to race its RC F coupe, and at least philosophically, the new model certainly strikes us as a more appropriate racecar conversion than the SC 430 that preceded it. This just-unveiled RC F GT3 Racing Concept looks properly menacing sitting on the carpet at the Geneva Motor Show, and it while it's officially labeled as a concept, it's a model Lexus promises will be made available to racing teams in 2015.
Designed run in Group GT3 events, this 2,756-pound coupe has a front-mounted V8 derived from the production RC F tuned to deliver over 540 horsepower. Lexus' plan is to commit to a season's worth of testing this year before building them to order, and we expect to see them in the Japan's Super GT and Super Taikyu Endurance series, along with endurance events like the 24 hours of Nürburgring.