I personally think GS looks great, and I would absolutely get a GS-F if it wasn't for their useless infotainment system.

 

Burnsie & highrev6 are both right.
It was the styling that really let 4GS down, but I thought it was more the 4GS bland tail lights & the bland dashboard, plus an outdated thirsty 3.5 V6, and a standard firm riding coil spring part numbers used across the range, rather than a firm riding coil springs that is only limited to the F Sport models.
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Interesting info. For Europe at least, there is no argument to be made about ES sales eating into GS sales. I think that the GS not having customizable trims is valid but it's also a pricing decision. You can offer all sorts of trims in all types of combinations and that means the customer pays more. Lexus decided to have two options. You get a GS packed with luxury or you can get the sporty model with the edgy styling - but the two shall never meet. That means you can't custom select options from one to the other. That's how they offered their cars for $10K less.

And the issue with styling? Yes, there is a problem with the GS and its styling. It looks bulbous from the side yet shrieks "Fast n Furious" up front. BMW has always evolved its styling year after year. Even the dreaded Bangle era 5s weren't as bad as people make them out to be. The 5s looks age quite well but their reliability of course is questionable. It seems that Lexus styled this car by committee. Overdone front ends and frumpy side profiles and indifferent back ends.

You can't sell a great car if it doesn't look the part. People are visual beings and they judge on aesthetics. The Germans have the formula. They don't hit home runs every time, but they do it in a consistent manner more often than what the GS, by eg. does.

 

I've had every generation of i-drive, and while the first generation was horrible, from the 2nd generation on they just been getting better and better, and I don't think I'll ever buy anything but a BMW just because of the i-drive alone.

 

E60 looked horrible, yet it sold like hotcakes.

 

The surfaces on the concept were more sophisticated and the spindle grill was more reserved.

I'm a big fan of the pre-refresh non-F-Sport GS450h with the LED headlights, but the refreshed models especially with the base headlights are just not good. It's no surprise GS sales tanked after the refresh.

 

I thought 2003-10 E60 was handsome, and I almost bought it over my 3GS.
Both 2003-10 E60 & 2010-17 F10 sold equally well, both peaking at 56,000+ units/year in the US.

 

I liked the E60 as well, it was a bit ahead of its time.

The 3GS was very handsome too.

The 4GS should have debuted with all models getting the hybrid's LED headlights, and the refresh should have had the tri-LED lights standard. A small cost but a huge impact on the look of the car.

 

I thought the 2015 4.5GS F with the L-shaped tail lights inside the 4-sided polygon looked like an afterthought and I predicted that those GS F tail lights would be used by 4.5GS350 of 2016, so I quickly purchased the original 2015 before production ceased.





I also preferred the flushness and smoothness of the original tail lights, as opposed to the way the upper line angles of the refreshed tail lights protrude or bulge out...

 

IMO it didn't look horrible, it just looked plain compared to what preceded it. The E39 was a classic elegant shape for its time and Bimmer fans were in an uproar because of the Bangle effect. But even the E60 used some classic designer tricks to lend a nice hint of elegance and break up the side profile.

Here's the 04 E60. Notice how the various lines of the car match up very nicely? You go from the twin grills with lines right up to the A pillar. Then you have a line running from the headlamps to the back tracing motion even while sitting still. The hood to fender gap traces right up to the A pillar. This disguises the fender well's top to hood distance.



Now look at how the GS treated this. There is no discernable texture from the top of the fender well to the hood and then there is this abrupt ending of the line between the fender to hood that comes to a sudden end at the A pillar. And the GS has this problem with always looking very heavy at its back end. BMW gets around this with sculpted lines to break up the big a*** back ends.



Even with nicer "pre-spindle" in the early years, the car's side has no lines or texture other than a tall boy look to it. Very slab sided. And it's what they did with the 3GS too. Large hatchback style body with a heavy back end and plain side profile. If Lexus had agreed to take input from outside the company they might have had a superb reliable hit on their hands, but chose to style the way they did. And they're paying for it.

Today's 5 uses the short rear deck, long hood formula and uses sculpting on the sides to help the side profile exude "sleek". The C pillar doesn't say this is a heavy a**s car.

 

 

In Europe, the mid-size GS is up against the BMW 5-Series and the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, both of which are not only hometown favourites, but models that have been around forever. That is 2 strikes against it.

In North America, the reason that the GS is not selling is probably a lot more complicated, and may all stem from the fact that it is competing against its sister model, the similarly-sized, yet less expensive ES.

Typical North American buyers are probably less concerned about driving dynamics and more concerned about getting the luxury badge for a good price. The ES definitely gives these buyers that.

For more discerning buyers, I agree with BippuLexus' price-brand correlation theory. True luxury-brand buyers are not shopping for "value" and getting the most car with the most features at the lowest price (especially when shopping established luxury brands, which Lexus is at this point in time); they are willing and able to pay for perception. To these buyers, a GS that is priced $10-thousand less that an "equivalent" 5-Series or E-Class would be perceived as a lesser car. If it is priced so low, there must be something wrong with it.

I do not believe that styling is a factor. There is a lot of loud talk about how ugly a new Lexus is, but reaction to styling is so personal -- what someone finds offensively ugly, someone else likes. And Lexus' currently styling does not seem to have hurt overall sales. (I remember when Audi first introduced its large Singleframe grille some years ago, and the initial reaction was that it was ugly and would spell the end of Audi. Yet, Audi still uses that same basic shape -- although revised and refined, and now it is copied by other, mainstream, mass market automakers -- and sales have not dropped.

There is another factor that plagues all Toyota (and Lexus) models and that is the corporate culture of Toyota. It is a large, profitable company that does spend a lot on R&D and has a history of technological innovation, yet it is a very Japanese company, meaning that it is very conservative, much more so than other Japanese automakers, in my opinion. What this means is that its new products are innovative, with modern technology but not perceived to be changed at all over its lifetime.

We see that with its new engines. Toyota's Dynamic Force engines are the most efficient engines in the world, at 40% thermal efficiency; even Mazda's critically-acclaimed SkyActiv engines (at only 29% efficiency) cannot match them. Yet, if history is a guide, Toyota will keep its Dynamic Force engines around for a decade (or more) with very little perceived changes to them.

Toyota is not perceived to be an automaker that keeps updating its technology (or its models) continually, like other automakers are perceived to do. The result is that late into a particular model's lifecycle, it is starting to seem stale in comparison with its competitors.

Toyota should learn to be less conservative, make more little changes in its models (like updating its infotainment systems), and blow its own horn more, so that customers don't think that a 3- or 4-year old model is 10-years out of date compared to its competitors.