The One Thing Wrong with the Lexus LFA
As a moonshot, the Lexus LFA is an incredible triumph of engineering and performance. But as a car, there’s one thing wrong with it.
The Lexus LFA is iconic. It’s one of the most epic feats of supercar engineering ever. I’ve openly gushed about it multiple times, and if I had the money, I’d buy one. But no car is perfect. We look back on the LFA fondly with nostalgia-tinted glasses, but there’s one thing wrong with it.
But let’s back up a bit. When it first came out, some people thought it was too expensive. It cost $375,000, almost as much as the Ferrari 599 GTB Car & Driver compared to the LFA in 2010. That’s over twice as much as a Porsche 911 Turbo S from the same year or four times the cost of a Nissan Skyline GTR. Yet both the Porsche and Nissan Skyline offer similar performance. More important to car companies, those cars made money, while Lexus lost money on each LFA it sold.
But the sticker price isn’t the problem. The Lexus LFA is no longer in production and today fetches upwards of $1 million or more at auction. Even when it first came out, people defended the price. Jeremy Clarkson said in his Top Gear review, “Arguing that the LFA is too expensive is like arguing that, at £100 billion, the Mona Lisa is too expensive. Or saying that there’s no point buying a £20 million Henry Moore sculpture when, for just a fiver, you could buy a nice stone otter from an Oxfam shop.”
Clarkson did have issues with the LFA, even though he described it as “the best car I’ve ever driven.” The lack of cupholders bothered him. He complained about the difficulty getting the seatbelt to fasten around his ample midsection. And he also said the gas tank is “exactly seven percent smaller than the fuel tank on a Zippo lighter.” Then Clarkson concluded his review by saying the LFA “belongs in a collector’s climate-controlled garage, as an example of the moment. It is emphatically not a car you are actually going to buy and use.”
And that is the biggest problem with the Lexus LFA. It’s not the price or the lack of cupholders. Nor is it the fact that it’s not designed for plus-size people. Or the fact that it has a small gas tank or any other piddly complaint…
No, the biggest problem with the LFA is that almost no one is actually driving and enjoying it as it was intended.
You see plenty of Porsche 911s driven regularly, many with well over 100,000 miles on the clock. Nissan Skyline GT-Rs are less common, but people are out there driving them. However, the LFA has become… garage art. A car you’ll only see on Bring A Trailer with barely 800 miles on the clock. It’s a car Cameron Frye would park next to his old man’s Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder in the glass garage.
Buying and parking a supercar is not unique to the Lexus LFA. There’s a McLaren in my neighborhood that never sees the light of day. I don’t know which model it is, only that it’s Monster Energy Green. The owner wears matching green shoes, a matching green jacket, and a matching green hat but never drives it. I suspect he sits in his garage on a matching green folding chair and admires it while drinking beer from a matching green bottle.
But I digress.
It’s a good thing that Lexus made the LFA a masterpiece and that it’s held in the same regard as a Ferrari or McLaren. Before the LFA, people saw Lexus as a purveyor of fine Toyotas. The LFA elevated Lexus’s stature. But in making the LFA a masterpiece, Lexus made it an object to covet. So good, so exclusive, and so valuable… people aren’t enjoying them.
Which is a tragedy. (You know, in the engineering sense.)
Earlier, I said I’d buy one if I had the means. I really would. But I’d drive the snot out of it. I’d drive it so much it would need weekly oil changes. Matt Farah’s Million Mile Lexus would get a run for its money. If I had a million dollars to buy a Lexus LFA, I’d make damn sure I got my money’s worth. For me, that would mean getting it out as much as possible and sharing it so people see it for what it is – an incredible car built to be driven.
Photos: Lexus
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