Is Lexus killing (discontinuing) the GS Line ? (Merged threads)
12-31-18, 04:23 PM
#451
receipts please ?
It seems you either work at TMC or your the only consumer thats seen this invisible press release where Toyota says they will no longer be playing in the midsize luxury sport sedan segment.
Excerpt from Lexus Europe
‘New development work would have been required in order for the GS to comply with the forthcoming change in emission regulations that will become mandatory in Europe by 1st September 2018. Given the fact that the GS is positioned at the higher end of the E-premium saloon segment where sales perspectives are limited, we have evaluated that such investment could not be justified.”
Last edited by highrev6; 12-31-18 at 04:29 PM.
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signdetres (01-01-19)
12-31-18, 04:48 PM
#452
More Model 3 numbers.
Again, apologies as I am having trouble posting multiple links.
Tesla vs. Porsche and Jaguar
Again, apologies as I am having trouble posting multiple links.
Tesla vs. Porsche and Jaguar
12-31-18, 05:59 PM
#453
On top of all that, I don't want touchscreen for everything like opening the glove box... seriously? Too much digitization would make me insane. I like tactile response of physical buttons over screen presses. The fact that Lexus left out the A/C button option but included it in the software bugs me but that's a whole another thread. LOL.
The quality issues listed are just not true. There have been issues, especially on the earlier cars, but this is cherry picking problems. Our car has been flawless thus far.
I drive a 2013 GS350 F Sport, which we both flat-out love; in February we bought a 2018 RX450h, another wonderful vehicle.
So the bar is pretty high.
As far as the technology (inc. the touch screen), I agree with you. This car is not for everybody.
A good candidate is a user who can forget what they know about "cars" and be open to something different. There are no buttons.
The Model 3 has been described as an I-Phone on wheels and a "Silicon Valley Car".
After a short time, you just might be hooked. Perhaps take a test drive; the interface for the basics is very easy.
If you appreciate the technology in a new Lexus, you will take to this car. It is different; that does not make it bad.
I will say this: this car is the future. If Lexus just builds an EV GS without the Model 3's futuristic approach, they will disappoint and perhaps lose.
Just my 2 cents based on my recent personal experience.
Again, I would have called these kinda statements silly 2 weeks ago. Not now.
Last edited by JeffKeryk; 12-31-18 at 06:07 PM.
12-31-18, 06:16 PM
#455
receipts please ?
It seems you either work at TMC or your the only consumer thats seen this invisible press release where Toyota says they will no longer be playing in the midsize luxury sport sedan segment.
Excerpt from Lexus Europe
‘New development work would have been required in order for the GS to comply with the forthcoming change in emission regulations that will become mandatory in Europe by 1st September 2018. Given the fact that the GS is positioned at the higher end of the E-premium saloon segment where sales perspectives are limited, we have evaluated that such investment could not be justified.”
12-31-18, 06:54 PM
#456
https://lexusenthusiast.com/2017/08/...ur-door-coupe/
01-01-19, 05:23 AM
#458
Instructor
Jeff, didn't realize you bought a 3 with your original post.
One of the biggest differences which led to me pulling my deposit back was the suspension tuning.
Lexus, Bmw and Mercedes have nailed down suspensions to perfection.
I like a good handling car like the 3 that handles with a sports car in the curves, aka the GS suspension,
the ride quality is a deal breaker for many looking for a polished suspension tune
One of the biggest differences which led to me pulling my deposit back was the suspension tuning.
Lexus, Bmw and Mercedes have nailed down suspensions to perfection.
I like a good handling car like the 3 that handles with a sports car in the curves, aka the GS suspension,
the ride quality is a deal breaker for many looking for a polished suspension tune
01-01-19, 08:26 AM
#459
drgrant we agree
So you're going to talk perf cars with us when you have a garage full of snorefest? 
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but to view such cars as exchangeable or equivalent with cars in the GS's class is kinda funny, although I am seeing a dumbing down, a myopic view of cars as appliances etc, by the general public (not saying you're one of those, either, btw) but it's really depressing from the POV of people who like cars, there's this constant onslaught of the bleeding edge now being represented with junk like Tesla's rolling car built around an x-box/television set geegaw syndrome, vs a bunch of people who want slugbucket SUV/CUVs that literally induce sleep the first time you take a hard corner and about 90% of which might as well release a dose of ambien into the passenger compartment every time you step on the gas and there's nothing there. My beater 2005 ES330 for all its mush and lack of big power is still more exciting to drive than most of this crap joe/jane consumer seems to be interested in, for some bizarre reason. Probably because their friends have one, etc.
I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. Maybe I should buy a Ford Escape base model and then just recline the seat and pass out by the time I get home from
work.... lmao.
Also we're talking Toyota here. Manufacturing capacity? If they need that they can make that happen. Look at what they did with the RX 350, demand was up so they started making noises about pumping them out in america to meet demand, and they did just that. They're not afraid to press buttons and make things happen if it benefits them. They're not backed into a corner on manufacturing capacity.
Problem with brand vanity is its a fickle beast. Companies like Range Rover could mount a vitrified dog turd as a hood ornament and like 20% of the loyalists would still buy it. Then every time Lexus tries to change the styling they end up doing a face-plant, because they're trying to make something that doesn't look like what everyone else is making, and good luck with that. Look at the crap Hyundai is going through with the Genesis, although its almost there, but still, theres an entire legion of people that won't buy them because of the brand. (it doesn't help them either, that, before the last 5-10 years, they have had a lot of absolute gutter trash junk in their product history, a problem Toyota/Lexus mostly doesn't have... ) but the idea is the same.
It always helps because one hand washes the other. If Lexus had better leasing programs that would alleviate a lot of it. There are a lot of people in this segment that enjoy setting cash on fire. Also a large contingent of lexus owners are a different sort of beast. Go on cargurus and you'll find a bunch of Lexus sedans of various generations with 120K+ on the clock with only one owner being listed. A lot of us buy these cars so we can run them a long time. Finding certain cars in some cases is actually difficult- because people hang onto them. In a way this is another challenge they created for themselves; Lexus has somewhat saturated its own market of buyers. Getting new buyers to the brand is a lot more challenging and a whole other ballgame.
Lol well you could say this about any sedan, but the whole reason most of us here are buying coupes and sedans is we don't want some clunky, slow, soulless crapmobile like everyone else is driving. Those vehicles have their place but sedan buyers largely aren't going to ditch a GS, BMW, MB, sedan/coupe, for a "truck". The GS never targeted those people to begin with, and it's the whole reason why Lexus has a whole other product line for the (mostly) "mediocritautomaton" crowd that wants an SUV like thing so they can "ride high off the road" blah blah (insert other lame excuses here).
Most of the people buying a GS (or for that matter any of the german competitors) care very little about resale value. Hell most of the low mileage people are leasing cars in this category, which is basically setting cash on fire.
Also you keep making it sound like there's some kind of mutual exclusion based on a limitation of resources going on here for Toyota. If they thought that producing less popular cars actually hurt their ability to sell more of everything else, they would have stopped making them a long time ago.
If you're talking about things like Ford dumping cars, that's not much of a shock. I'm honestly surprised that GM still makes any of them too, outside of the Corvette. Most of the mainstream american sedans and coupes are pretty much junk and don't have much allure left. There is literally nothing that 75% of american cars do at this point that can't be done better by an import mark. Chevy can't even make trashboxes anymore that people want to buy. Most of that market has moved to Toyota/Hyundai and others.
As far as SUV thingys, Lexus just added another one, IIRC, and I think they'll add more in the future as well or change the LX and GX, etc. That has little or nothing to do with whether the GS should exist or not.
The only time the GS/LS/ES etc would ever be a liability to Lexus/Toyota is if the cars started costing them more money to manufacture than they make... about the
only solid argument that could be made there is that with cars like the GS they have lost potential buyers to BMW/Audi/MB because of the lack of juice under the hood and potentially things like infotainment, etc, and potentially brand vanity issues as stated earlier. (and that's a complex thing to hack, frankly).
Toyota doesn't have much problem with revenue or to do R&D. Not to mention all the AFV/battery/eco **** crap right now is in a huge, turmoil driven state of transition, the transitory junk being peddled now by Tesla et al will likely be unrecognizable in 10 years from whatever tech emerges as being actually viable. The devil is in the details of course. Toyota invests in all that crap as well as stuff like the Mirai, etc, and they probably have a lot of other ***** in the air as well. The key is viability.
They don't have to kill off the GS, just reroll it and potentially make it competitive again. It needs a refresh, a new powerplant (to bring the 0-60s into the Sub 5 range, for one, even WoWo makes a polestar XC60 that will do Sub 5 in a much heavier car) and a much better infotainment system that isn't quite as dated, but without the mistakes a lot of other vendors have made.
-Mike
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but to view such cars as exchangeable or equivalent with cars in the GS's class is kinda funny, although I am seeing a dumbing down, a myopic view of cars as appliances etc, by the general public (not saying you're one of those, either, btw) but it's really depressing from the POV of people who like cars, there's this constant onslaught of the bleeding edge now being represented with junk like Tesla's rolling car built around an x-box/television set geegaw syndrome, vs a bunch of people who want slugbucket SUV/CUVs that literally induce sleep the first time you take a hard corner and about 90% of which might as well release a dose of ambien into the passenger compartment every time you step on the gas and there's nothing there. My beater 2005 ES330 for all its mush and lack of big power is still more exciting to drive than most of this crap joe/jane consumer seems to be interested in, for some bizarre reason. Probably because their friends have one, etc.I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. Maybe I should buy a Ford Escape base model and then just recline the seat and pass out by the time I get home from
work.... lmao.
Also we're talking Toyota here. Manufacturing capacity? If they need that they can make that happen. Look at what they did with the RX 350, demand was up so they started making noises about pumping them out in america to meet demand, and they did just that. They're not afraid to press buttons and make things happen if it benefits them. They're not backed into a corner on manufacturing capacity.
Problem with brand vanity is its a fickle beast. Companies like Range Rover could mount a vitrified dog turd as a hood ornament and like 20% of the loyalists would still buy it. Then every time Lexus tries to change the styling they end up doing a face-plant, because they're trying to make something that doesn't look like what everyone else is making, and good luck with that. Look at the crap Hyundai is going through with the Genesis, although its almost there, but still, theres an entire legion of people that won't buy them because of the brand. (it doesn't help them either, that, before the last 5-10 years, they have had a lot of absolute gutter trash junk in their product history, a problem Toyota/Lexus mostly doesn't have... ) but the idea is the same.
It always helps because one hand washes the other. If Lexus had better leasing programs that would alleviate a lot of it. There are a lot of people in this segment that enjoy setting cash on fire. Also a large contingent of lexus owners are a different sort of beast. Go on cargurus and you'll find a bunch of Lexus sedans of various generations with 120K+ on the clock with only one owner being listed. A lot of us buy these cars so we can run them a long time. Finding certain cars in some cases is actually difficult- because people hang onto them. In a way this is another challenge they created for themselves; Lexus has somewhat saturated its own market of buyers. Getting new buyers to the brand is a lot more challenging and a whole other ballgame.
Lol well you could say this about any sedan, but the whole reason most of us here are buying coupes and sedans is we don't want some clunky, slow, soulless crapmobile like everyone else is driving. Those vehicles have their place but sedan buyers largely aren't going to ditch a GS, BMW, MB, sedan/coupe, for a "truck". The GS never targeted those people to begin with, and it's the whole reason why Lexus has a whole other product line for the (mostly) "mediocritautomaton" crowd that wants an SUV like thing so they can "ride high off the road" blah blah (insert other lame excuses here).
Most of the people buying a GS (or for that matter any of the german competitors) care very little about resale value. Hell most of the low mileage people are leasing cars in this category, which is basically setting cash on fire.
Also you keep making it sound like there's some kind of mutual exclusion based on a limitation of resources going on here for Toyota. If they thought that producing less popular cars actually hurt their ability to sell more of everything else, they would have stopped making them a long time ago.
If you're talking about things like Ford dumping cars, that's not much of a shock. I'm honestly surprised that GM still makes any of them too, outside of the Corvette. Most of the mainstream american sedans and coupes are pretty much junk and don't have much allure left. There is literally nothing that 75% of american cars do at this point that can't be done better by an import mark. Chevy can't even make trashboxes anymore that people want to buy. Most of that market has moved to Toyota/Hyundai and others.
As far as SUV thingys, Lexus just added another one, IIRC, and I think they'll add more in the future as well or change the LX and GX, etc. That has little or nothing to do with whether the GS should exist or not.
The only time the GS/LS/ES etc would ever be a liability to Lexus/Toyota is if the cars started costing them more money to manufacture than they make... about the
only solid argument that could be made there is that with cars like the GS they have lost potential buyers to BMW/Audi/MB because of the lack of juice under the hood and potentially things like infotainment, etc, and potentially brand vanity issues as stated earlier. (and that's a complex thing to hack, frankly).
Toyota doesn't have much problem with revenue or to do R&D. Not to mention all the AFV/battery/eco **** crap right now is in a huge, turmoil driven state of transition, the transitory junk being peddled now by Tesla et al will likely be unrecognizable in 10 years from whatever tech emerges as being actually viable. The devil is in the details of course. Toyota invests in all that crap as well as stuff like the Mirai, etc, and they probably have a lot of other ***** in the air as well. The key is viability.
They don't have to kill off the GS, just reroll it and potentially make it competitive again. It needs a refresh, a new powerplant (to bring the 0-60s into the Sub 5 range, for one, even WoWo makes a polestar XC60 that will do Sub 5 in a much heavier car) and a much better infotainment system that isn't quite as dated, but without the mistakes a lot of other vendors have made.
-Mike
Other than these two major points—we may agree:
1. “snore fest” assumption. We have some fun cars that aren’t daily drivers.
2. “Toyota has the revenue.” Any mainstream car maker—if they can shift capacity to a far more profitable, high volume model, they will. Lexus is a mainstream manufacturer. GS may reincarnate—hope it does very much different than the incremental changes.
NOTE: While our kids were young, we trusted the Toyota/Lexus brand for reliability. safety, and style—not performance.
That perception is a gold for daily drivers.
Last edited by KAH; 01-01-19 at 01:56 PM.
01-02-19, 06:14 AM
#460
Lexus Test Driver
i will never accept the death of the GS even though ive never owned one, i know them very well and have spent A LOT of seat time in them as i work at a dealership. im an LS guy through and through, but of everything lexus lexus has to offer right now, the GS is in my opinion, is the most well rounded, solid, and fun to drive sedan. its never been better the 4GS really is awesome, and it will be an absolute tragedy to see it go. is the 4GS long in the tooth? dear god yes and it needs a redesign, but not a death. btw the rumors of the end of the GS are not confirmed by anyone. only rumors, but there is absolutley nothing on the radar out there about a 5GS sadly. gotta remember, Lexus is VERY GOOD at keeping secrets and who knows? they may come out of the blue with a killer new GS for 2020 or 2021. look what they did with the 3GS. maybe history will repeat itself?
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01-02-19, 06:48 AM
#461
i will never accept the death of the GS even though ive never owned one, i know them very well and have spent A LOT of seat time in them as i work at a dealership. im an LS guy through and through, but of everything lexus lexus has to offer right now, the GS is in my opinion, is the most well rounded, solid, and fun to drive sedan. its never been better the 4GS really is awesome, and it will be an absolute tragedy to see it go. is the 4GS long in the tooth? dear god yes and it needs a redesign, but not a death. btw the rumors of the end of the GS are not confirmed by anyone. only rumors, but there is absolutley nothing on the radar out there about a 5GS sadly. gotta remember, Lexus is VERY GOOD at keeping secrets and who knows? they may come out of the blue with a killer new GS for 2020 or 2021. look what they did with the 3GS. maybe history will repeat itself?
01-02-19, 08:54 AM
#462
i will never accept the death of the GS even though ive never owned one, i know them very well and have spent A LOT of seat time in them as i work at a dealership. im an LS guy through and through, but of everything lexus lexus has to offer right now, the GS is in my opinion, is the most well rounded, solid, and fun to drive sedan. its never been better the 4GS really is awesome, and it will be an absolute tragedy to see it go. is the 4GS long in the tooth? dear god yes and it needs a redesign, but not a death. btw the rumors of the end of the GS are not confirmed by anyone. only rumors, but there is absolutley nothing on the radar out there about a 5GS sadly. gotta remember, Lexus is VERY GOOD at keeping secrets and who knows? they may come out of the blue with a killer new GS for 2020 or 2021. look what they did with the 3GS. maybe history will repeat itself?
01-02-19, 09:07 AM
#463
Lexus Fanatic
On top of all that, I don't want touchscreen for everything like opening the glove box... seriously? Too much digitization would make me insane. I like tactile response of physical buttons over screen presses. The fact that Lexus left out the A/C button option but included it in the software bugs me but that's a whole another thread. LOL.
01-02-19, 09:11 AM
#464
Totally agree, one of the things that infuriate me about my GS is the lack of physical buttons for some common functions, one AC, other the vent mode selection, and the radio presets. I just keep asking myself why did they get rid of those buttons, what did it accomplish? It did not make anything easier, it did not improve anything, having to go through the mouse/screen to access or use these functions is only more difficult, requires me to take my eyes/attention off the road much more then a simple button I can quickly press one time. Why are automakers doing this? It really just boils down to its cheaper to put functions in screens over doing buttons, maybe somewhat understandable on econo cars but not on luxury cars.
01-02-19, 09:50 AM
#465
Racer
Totally agree, one of the things that infuriate me about my GS is the lack of physical buttons for some common functions, one AC, other the vent mode selection, and the radio presets. I just keep asking myself why did they get rid of those buttons, what did it accomplish? It did not make anything easier, it did not improve anything, having to go through the mouse/screen to access or use these functions is only more difficult, requires me to take my eyes/attention off the road much more then a simple button I can quickly press one time. Why are automakers doing this? It really just boils down to its cheaper to put functions in screens over doing buttons, maybe somewhat understandable on econo cars but not on luxury cars.
Choosing not to adapt to and embrace the wonderful technology that very talented engineers likely agonized over and gave us is not Lexus making your life more difficult or contributing to distracted driving. It's the user's fault.