Клубное интервью с главным инженером и дизайнером нового LS

So, to answer why the SUV is sharper than the LS or the LC when it comes to the new LC and the LS we wanted to give a direction to our future chapter, the visual anticipation, so this is a branch of that we are pursuing. And when we started with the RX and the NX, we already had this idea for the future vision, however we wanted first of all to change this boring image, the old image, and to shift it to a more emotional stage, so we wanted to attract more awareness to our RX and NX series, therefore the design was pretty sharp. And however, the LC and the LS, they are of legit cars, and they are also supposed to give more of this premium feeling and therefore we try to be not too sharp, rather simpler, rather smooth and have those stream lined movement on the surface and this was only able to realize because of the new platform we develop for them.

So why did you decide to totally abandon the V8 engine because there are a lot of people who really enjoy this V8 engine, mainly people from old school. Yeah, I understand that you will answer that it’s about performance of the new V6 engine but still our members of our Lexus club, they ask whether you can introduce the V8 in future again. Because the V8 gives other feelings during driving.

Of course we had a lot of research on that topic before we kept up with our development and what we realized was that even it is in the The F-segment and the customers of the F-segment very much desire those powerful powertrains. When we consider five years or ten years ahead we need to be more environmentally friendly, so we had a lot of thoughts about how to combine this environmentally friendliness and the future brand that we want to be and here we had a lot of research, we conducted research on the feedback of our customers and we found that our customers buy the V8 engine because first of all they like the performance and the acceleration so we try to realize the same performance and acceleration worth the V6 engine and we succeeded in doing that by combining the V6 turbo and the tenth speed automatic gear to achieve the same acceleration speed as in V8 powertrain and as we succeeded in doing that in our development we decided to go for the V6 and of course it is more efficient than the V8.

Do you have in plans, to produce LSF in future with V8 engine?

Not at the moment.

Does the efficiency of powertrain and dynamics of the new hybrid LS decrease when the battery is low?

Well, I think, of course, if you just continue pushing the accel and accelerating the car the battery goes down and then the performance will also be influenced by that. However as originally we have 220 kilowatts as a power so I don't think that you really much feel that there is a loss in power.

So, I understand that the new more perfect engineering innovations are based on the new more complex technology. And these new, complex technologies, they require a high quality fuel. In Russia we have problems with that, sometimes the quality of fuel is not that great, sometimes bad. Do you maybe make such tests for the new cars? Do you test the influence of the low-quality fuel on a car? Because the new engines are a high technology thing and it requires really high quality fuel.

Well, of course the fuel quality is very important issue therefore we conduct many evaluation researches on that topic. Therefore I can’t really tell how the quality is in Russia, but as long as you really much are not below our estimated quality I would say there shouldn’t be any problems with that however I can’t really tell because I don’t know what the quality in Russia is in reality and at the same time we have some alerting systems within the car that will tell the passengers or the driver to get the car to a check-up, so as long as the users will follow those reminders and the alerts, I think it shouldn’t come to a huge disaster that the engine will be burned or something like that.

So the users of Lexus club, they’re interested what kind of testing do you do before launching the car on the market, because in our country we have bad roads, have extreme low temperatures and they are interested what kind of testing do you do.

We test our car in various environments and as we have those discussions about Russia also within our company as we heard that the conditions for cars in Russia are pretty tough. We try to conduct a precise research to test for our cars in those tough environment, so when it comes to the cold weather we try to test them also in a minus thirty to a minus forty degrees, what is the performance of the car like or the engine, how does it behave within those tough conditions and we conduct also quality checks within those conditions to improve also the resistance of our cars.

So, let’s talk about design. The exterior design of LS it’s a tribute to fashion and interior design is too innovative and we know that people who buy LS, they are quite conservative. Are you not afraid to lose those conservative people, who would like maybe more calm interior, who would enjoy it? And does it also mean that the new LS is aimed at young audience?

I think as for the interior we strive for a brand shift and we want more originality of Lexus into the car and maybe you thought it’s a little bit too brave maybe, too big change in design, but when you have a second look at it, those elements in design they all have also functions, they are combined with functions, for example, display has it’s function. And to select the driving mode for example you have a … handle and a steering wheel, and the lines at the airband, they have some certain functions, so I tried to combine all those functions, the functionality with the design, and we do hope, that those as you said rather conservative clients would also accept those features as we put emphasis on the material, the quality of the material, and try to be more sophisticated in detail in order to achieve a universal design, so that you could say “alright, it’s also interesting for younger generations but together with all those material, the functionality, the sophisticated design, that also our traditional, conventional users can get used to it and so this design gets rather universal.