Throwback Thursday: MotorWeek Retro Reviews 1990 LS400

By adpock - July 23, 2015

90 Lexus LS400

Kids these days don’t know what it’s like living in a world without Lexus automobiles. But though it may sound terrifying to them, it wasn’t so long ago a Lexus-less world is what we had. As recently as 1989, the company Lexus wasn’t even close to being part of our lexicon.

To give you a sense of how much Lexus has accomplished in the last 25 years, you needn’t go any further than the first line of today’s Throwback Thursday MotorWeek “Retro Review”: “There was a time when no one would consider the words ‘Japanese’ and ‘luxury car’ in the same sentence,” chirps the ever amiable John Davis in the video below. Then Davis shows off the Acura Legend, whose popularity is ushering in a “new wave” of Japanese lux makers.

Then the RetroReview introduces everyone to the 1990 LS400. And first impressions obviously went a long way.

Davis and company love the car, for many splendid reasons, but they boil it down to price (a “non-German” base of $35,000), performance (a 4L V8 all-aluminum 250-horsepower engine delivering “more than acceptable” 16.9 second/ 85 mph quarter-mile runs), ride (handling so good it’s “equal to some of Germany’s best”), interior design (whoa! back-lit analog gauges disappear when the ignition is off!) and luggage space (even with the very fancy compact disc changer back there.)

The best part of the video is at the end though, after Davis admits that any faults the team found should be considered nitpicking: “In all our years of evaluating cars, we’ve rarely had to work this hard to discover fault with a particular automobile,” says Davis. Who then predicts Lexus is going to be a “household word, in better neighborhoods everywhere.”

Smart guy that John Davis. I think he’s going places.