World Exclusive! 2012 Lexus LFA Tested - Short Take Road Test
Ferrari-like Lexus hits 60 in 3.7 seconds. In other words, the LFA is PDQ.
BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO AND TIM ANDREW
March 2010
Finally, the yammering and chin-pulling is over. It’s time to see if Lexus’s long-time-coming LFA supercar makes supercar numbers. We’ve strapped on the gear, we’ve burned the gas, and we’ve sorted the data. And, as far as we know, we’re the first to have done so.
Proving that it still has plenty of budget, Lexus parent Toyota jetted one of the prototypes of the $375,000 carbon-fiber LFA across the Pacific, put it solo into an enormous truck with enough empty space to hold another six or eight LFA’s, and hauled it to Arizona for us. Toyota’s own Phoenix-area proving ground being closed to visitors and especially closed to media, we went over to the Nissan Technical Center North America’s 3050-acre facility in Stanfield, Arizona, about 40 minutes south of Phoenix, where Nissan happily rents track time to anyone who’s paying.
There it was, white as an angel’s underwear, the glossy carbon-fiber dash and steering wheel reflecting our curious faces like funhouse mirrors. Many of the 200 or so employees at Nissan, busy getting their new full-size work van ready for market, just stopped and stared.
“What’s . . . that . . . doing . . . here?”
It’s here to prove it has the Right Stuff.
Ducts, Scoops, and Flares? Check
One may argue the details, but the LFA has seductive shape—wide, low, wind-swept, and perforated with important-looking vents and ducts. Flush panels hidden in the duct cutouts that form the top of the doors grant access to the cabin. The cockpit swallows you up like a hot dog in a leather and carbon-fiber bun. The dash, upswept center console, and door sills are high, the glass as minimal as possible.
Exotics often are characterized by their odd controls, and the LFA’s meet the test. The stalks controlling the single front wiper and the high beams/turn indicators are as thin as cocktail straws. You select reverse by reaching forward to find an obscure button on the left side of the instrument binnacle. The switch for the very important electric parking brake is down by your right shin. Every one of the exposed cheese-head fasteners in the dash (and there are quite a few) has “Lexus” engraved on it—certainly, for $375,000, you should expect something different, not Toyota parts-bin kit. Even the tires were exotic. They were marked Bridgestone but had no model name or DOT certification stamp. We couldn’t find anything on the LFA that looks like it came off a Camry or even an LS460, except the plastic hood release.
Twist the key to on—the key is the only old-fashioned thing about the LFA—and thumb the steering-wheel-mounted start button. The 553-hp, 4.8-liter V-10 lights with a burst of authority, a throat-clearing mini-explosion up to 2000 rpm or so, just as the engines do in Ferraris and Lamborghinis. As does a Lambo Gallardo, which also has a V-10, the LFA has a deeper, huskier, coarser voice than a Ferrari.
Computer animators went to work on the all-digital displays, apparently, after an all-nighter watching Transformers movies. The tach needle doesn’t just appear at startup, it organically grows out of the center like a mutant beanstalk. Put the car in Sport mode and the displays do a quickie switch-o, change-o to a sportier-looking dial—at least, a high-res pixilated digital one. Information screens slide out from behind each other and the centered tach slides left or right as needed. It’s all fluid and weirdly organic, and very cool.
Wham, Slam, Thank You, Ma’am
It was a steep learning curve, out there on the mile-long straightaway of Nissan’s big oval. The LFA didn’t come with an owner’s manual, so we needed some time to plumb its strange controls.
The single-clutch six-speed automated manual has four modes: Automatic and Wet, where shifting is done for you, Normal, where shifting can also be done manually, and Sport, where shifts are manual-only. In addition to the various modes, you can vary the shift speed and shock using a knob on the right side of the cluster. Lexus advised us to try both Automatic and Sport modes; unsurprisingly, we found the car quickest in the manual Sport mode with the shift speed on its fastest setting. But you don’t get full transmission control. Even in full-manual mode, the transmission upshifts for you at around 9200 rpm, 200 higher than redline.
At the moment, there’s no launch control on the rear-drive LFA, so we ran a few acceleration runs just by stomping on the throttle. It hit 60 mph in about 4.4 seconds, about as quickly as a stock BMW M3 and not terribly impressive. So we tried an old trick from our high-school days: the neutral slam.
The neutral slam was a way to launch automatic transmission cars before the advent of the brake-operated shift lock (before Audi’s brush with unintended acceleration, in other words). The technique was simple: borrow your parent’s car, go out on a quiet street, wind it up in neutral, and slam it into drive. Mayhem ensued.
The computers of most modern cars prevent you from doing that, but the LFA allows it. It took a few tries to get the technique perfected, but by holding the V-10 at about 3800 rpm and selecting first, and taking care not to go wide-open throttle and melt the run in wheelspin, we got a very clean, repeatable launch that dropped the 60-mph sprint time to 3.7 seconds, right on Lexus’s claim, and the quarter-mile to 11.8 seconds at 124 mph.
Any car that runs to 60 in the three-second range is pretty thrilling. The LFA does it with its V-10 wailing loud enough from its twin intakes and out of its three pipes to disturb moon dust. This is a spinning engine, not a twisting engine, and it spins with hyperactive quickness all the way to redline. The power peak is at a lofty 8700 rpm, the torque peak at 6800. In the mid-range it feels mild, making more sound than fury. Once the needle passes 6000, things really start to happen. We ran out of room just as the speedo swept to 155 mph.
Standing Shoulder-to-Shoulder with Giants
We’ve seen the Ferrari 599 make the 60-mph mark in 3.3 seconds, a number we found suspicious given its weight and claimed horsepower. But that car does have launch control in Europe and an active differential to help put the power down. The Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 can pull it off in 3.2, but it has weight balance to its favor and the traction advantage of all-wheel drive. With launch control, the Lexus would undoubtedly shave a couple of tenths off its 60-mph runs.
Compared to the 4000-pound, $320,000 Ferrari, the 3583-pound Lexus is light, but that’s still a good payload to haul. The LFA’s weight distribution is almost even—49.8 percent on the front, 50.2 on the rear. The carbon-ceramic brakes supplied repeated stops without fade, performing the 70-to-0-mph pulldown in a supercar-standard 156 feet. Out on the skidpad, the LFA pulled an even 1.00 g, above average for its size and weight.
We wrapped up with some hot laps on Nissan’s winding “marketability” track, not really a handling track as such, but a real-world simulator with enough curves, camber changes, straights, and pavement choppiness to simulate a back-road flog. Some magazines have already criticized the LFA for having artificial-feeling controls, but the example delivered to us showed the chassis sophistication of the European masters.
The steering is lubricated, the speed of the turn-in quick but not twitchy. The body is amazingly tied down for a machine that has no fancy shock-absorber trickery. There’s no disconcerting side-to-side motion or porpoising over the undulations. Because the torque is thinner in the mid-range, you can steam at full throttle out of corners with no fear of its breaking loose at the back. When it does start to slip, the release is so gentle and progressive that you quickly become comfortable with it. Within a very few minutes we were probing the car’s limits in corners, the surest sign of expert chassis development.
Even given its long gestation, the LFA does not drive like a car from a company new to the genre and eager to impress. It drives like a car from a company that has done this type of car many times and isn’t worried that customers won’t be pleased. Like Ferrari, in other words. If Toyota can do this on its first go with the LFA, just think what it could do to the Corolla or the Camry if the urge ever strikes. We hope it will someday.
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Ferrari-like Lexus hits 60 in 3.7 seconds. In other words, the LFA is PDQ.
BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO AND TIM ANDREW
March 2010
Finally, the yammering and chin-pulling is over. It’s time to see if Lexus’s long-time-coming LFA supercar makes supercar numbers. We’ve strapped on the gear, we’ve burned the gas, and we’ve sorted the data. And, as far as we know, we’re the first to have done so.
Proving that it still has plenty of budget, Lexus parent Toyota jetted one of the prototypes of the $375,000 carbon-fiber LFA across the Pacific, put it solo into an enormous truck with enough empty space to hold another six or eight LFA’s, and hauled it to Arizona for us. Toyota’s own Phoenix-area proving ground being closed to visitors and especially closed to media, we went over to the Nissan Technical Center North America’s 3050-acre facility in Stanfield, Arizona, about 40 minutes south of Phoenix, where Nissan happily rents track time to anyone who’s paying.
There it was, white as an angel’s underwear, the glossy carbon-fiber dash and steering wheel reflecting our curious faces like funhouse mirrors. Many of the 200 or so employees at Nissan, busy getting their new full-size work van ready for market, just stopped and stared.
“What’s . . . that . . . doing . . . here?”
It’s here to prove it has the Right Stuff.
Ducts, Scoops, and Flares? Check
One may argue the details, but the LFA has seductive shape—wide, low, wind-swept, and perforated with important-looking vents and ducts. Flush panels hidden in the duct cutouts that form the top of the doors grant access to the cabin. The cockpit swallows you up like a hot dog in a leather and carbon-fiber bun. The dash, upswept center console, and door sills are high, the glass as minimal as possible.
Exotics often are characterized by their odd controls, and the LFA’s meet the test. The stalks controlling the single front wiper and the high beams/turn indicators are as thin as cocktail straws. You select reverse by reaching forward to find an obscure button on the left side of the instrument binnacle. The switch for the very important electric parking brake is down by your right shin. Every one of the exposed cheese-head fasteners in the dash (and there are quite a few) has “Lexus” engraved on it—certainly, for $375,000, you should expect something different, not Toyota parts-bin kit. Even the tires were exotic. They were marked Bridgestone but had no model name or DOT certification stamp. We couldn’t find anything on the LFA that looks like it came off a Camry or even an LS460, except the plastic hood release.
Twist the key to on—the key is the only old-fashioned thing about the LFA—and thumb the steering-wheel-mounted start button. The 553-hp, 4.8-liter V-10 lights with a burst of authority, a throat-clearing mini-explosion up to 2000 rpm or so, just as the engines do in Ferraris and Lamborghinis. As does a Lambo Gallardo, which also has a V-10, the LFA has a deeper, huskier, coarser voice than a Ferrari.
Computer animators went to work on the all-digital displays, apparently, after an all-nighter watching Transformers movies. The tach needle doesn’t just appear at startup, it organically grows out of the center like a mutant beanstalk. Put the car in Sport mode and the displays do a quickie switch-o, change-o to a sportier-looking dial—at least, a high-res pixilated digital one. Information screens slide out from behind each other and the centered tach slides left or right as needed. It’s all fluid and weirdly organic, and very cool.
Wham, Slam, Thank You, Ma’am
It was a steep learning curve, out there on the mile-long straightaway of Nissan’s big oval. The LFA didn’t come with an owner’s manual, so we needed some time to plumb its strange controls.
The single-clutch six-speed automated manual has four modes: Automatic and Wet, where shifting is done for you, Normal, where shifting can also be done manually, and Sport, where shifts are manual-only. In addition to the various modes, you can vary the shift speed and shock using a knob on the right side of the cluster. Lexus advised us to try both Automatic and Sport modes; unsurprisingly, we found the car quickest in the manual Sport mode with the shift speed on its fastest setting. But you don’t get full transmission control. Even in full-manual mode, the transmission upshifts for you at around 9200 rpm, 200 higher than redline.
At the moment, there’s no launch control on the rear-drive LFA, so we ran a few acceleration runs just by stomping on the throttle. It hit 60 mph in about 4.4 seconds, about as quickly as a stock BMW M3 and not terribly impressive. So we tried an old trick from our high-school days: the neutral slam.
The neutral slam was a way to launch automatic transmission cars before the advent of the brake-operated shift lock (before Audi’s brush with unintended acceleration, in other words). The technique was simple: borrow your parent’s car, go out on a quiet street, wind it up in neutral, and slam it into drive. Mayhem ensued.
The computers of most modern cars prevent you from doing that, but the LFA allows it. It took a few tries to get the technique perfected, but by holding the V-10 at about 3800 rpm and selecting first, and taking care not to go wide-open throttle and melt the run in wheelspin, we got a very clean, repeatable launch that dropped the 60-mph sprint time to 3.7 seconds, right on Lexus’s claim, and the quarter-mile to 11.8 seconds at 124 mph.
Any car that runs to 60 in the three-second range is pretty thrilling. The LFA does it with its V-10 wailing loud enough from its twin intakes and out of its three pipes to disturb moon dust. This is a spinning engine, not a twisting engine, and it spins with hyperactive quickness all the way to redline. The power peak is at a lofty 8700 rpm, the torque peak at 6800. In the mid-range it feels mild, making more sound than fury. Once the needle passes 6000, things really start to happen. We ran out of room just as the speedo swept to 155 mph.
Standing Shoulder-to-Shoulder with Giants
We’ve seen the Ferrari 599 make the 60-mph mark in 3.3 seconds, a number we found suspicious given its weight and claimed horsepower. But that car does have launch control in Europe and an active differential to help put the power down. The Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 can pull it off in 3.2, but it has weight balance to its favor and the traction advantage of all-wheel drive. With launch control, the Lexus would undoubtedly shave a couple of tenths off its 60-mph runs.
Compared to the 4000-pound, $320,000 Ferrari, the 3583-pound Lexus is light, but that’s still a good payload to haul. The LFA’s weight distribution is almost even—49.8 percent on the front, 50.2 on the rear. The carbon-ceramic brakes supplied repeated stops without fade, performing the 70-to-0-mph pulldown in a supercar-standard 156 feet. Out on the skidpad, the LFA pulled an even 1.00 g, above average for its size and weight.
We wrapped up with some hot laps on Nissan’s winding “marketability” track, not really a handling track as such, but a real-world simulator with enough curves, camber changes, straights, and pavement choppiness to simulate a back-road flog. Some magazines have already criticized the LFA for having artificial-feeling controls, but the example delivered to us showed the chassis sophistication of the European masters.
The steering is lubricated, the speed of the turn-in quick but not twitchy. The body is amazingly tied down for a machine that has no fancy shock-absorber trickery. There’s no disconcerting side-to-side motion or porpoising over the undulations. Because the torque is thinner in the mid-range, you can steam at full throttle out of corners with no fear of its breaking loose at the back. When it does start to slip, the release is so gentle and progressive that you quickly become comfortable with it. Within a very few minutes we were probing the car’s limits in corners, the surest sign of expert chassis development.
Even given its long gestation, the LFA does not drive like a car from a company new to the genre and eager to impress. It drives like a car from a company that has done this type of car many times and isn’t worried that customers won’t be pleased. Like Ferrari, in other words. If Toyota can do this on its first go with the LFA, just think what it could do to the Corolla or the Camry if the urge ever strikes. We hope it will someday.
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