1992 Lexus SC400 Marked a Main Departure

From the June 1991 difficulty of Automobile and Driver.

The brand new Lexus SC400 coupe is as rounded and slippery and slick as a caplet of Further-Energy Tylenol. The large dif­ference is, this child will trigger complications.

Think about that your home funds and your youngsters’ new sneakers rely in a roundabout way on gross sales of Mercedes-Benz or BMW or Cadillac or Lincoln cars. The Lexus model has already skimmed your gravy with the LS400, a four-door that lures away your prospects like a reduction Hope Dia­mond. However that is solely the four-door market. You have nonetheless bought your coupe prospects. They’d no extra be seen in a four-door than they’d in a leisure swimsuit. However, amazingly, you possibly can present them an artificial coupe—what quantities to a sedan with half the variety of doorways—and so they write the examine. Fairly nifty gambit so long as it really works.

When you’re counting on artificial coupes to maintain the youngsters in Keds, then the migraine throb will kick in as quickly as your customized­ers see this actual coupe from Lexus, the model that may do no improper within the four-­door market. As a result of this isn’t a made­-over sedan. It is a new automobile, with a wholly new look, a brand new suspension, and a brand new persona. About all of the SC400 coupe shares with the LS400 sedan is the extravagantly clean and highly effective 4­-cam, 32-valve V-8, which all people loves already.

Beginning to fear concerning the repo man coming for the Sony, leaving the youngsters with out Sesame Road? Effectively, this subsequent bit of stories will not assist. Lexus boss J. Da­vis Illingworth says, “We will value this automobile the place we expect the customized­ers are.” In plain English, meaning a window sticker low sufficient to maneuver the iron. The synthetic-coupe makers typi­cally take two doorways away from their se­dans and make up for it by elevating the worth. Lexus has baked a contemporary new recipe and can undercut the sedan’s $40,285 base value.

How can different manufacturers compete? First, they’d should be as severe about busi­ness as Toyota is. The world’s third-larg­est automaker is decided to seize a giant hunk of the market’s sirloin. Two years in the past—again when Lexus was only a title, not a automobile—there have been doubts {that a} Japa­nese sedan may ever sit on the head ta­ble with Mercedes and BMW. Toyota shouldered its method into status territory the old style method—with a greater product. The LS400 has high quality, consolation, and efficiency; the sellers care for the purchasers; and the worth is correct. It is so simple as that. And amaz­ingly, the bystanders are as charmed because the consumers. Even taxi drivers hacking alongside of their drained Caprices communicate admir­ingly of Lexus.

For the rivals, this SC400 coupe quantities to piling on. It is a energy play. The coupe shouldn’t be held again by a must share elements with the sedan. The coupe is constructed to do what a coupe ought to do: be fashionable to the attention, be energetic to the contact, be spectacular to the Sharper Im­age set. This quantities to the creation of a brand new automobile, and few carmakers are severe sufficient concerning the coupe enterprise to go to all that bother. Toyota, maybe alone on the earth now, is that severe. That is why the SC400 will trigger so many head­aches for the opposite fancy labels.

The variations between coupe and sedan are all over the place. The coupe—offered in Japan because the Soarer—is about six inch­es shorter general on a five-inch-shorter wheelbase. Monitor is about 1.5 inches nar­rower, and weight about 180 kilos lighter. Each use the identical V-8 to drive the rear wheels (an inline-six can be­come accessible in autumn, with an op­tional five-speed guide transmission).

The mechanical variations encompass­ing the V-8 are many: The coupe has a shorter first gear within the four-speed auto­matic and a shorter last drive for higher acceleration, bigger disc brakes throughout, sixteen-inch wheels as a substitute of the sedan’s fifteens, a wholly completely different suspension for improved dynamics, and some radical improvements to astound the Widespread Science reader. Topmost on this record is the radiator fan powered by a hy­draulic motor. When requested why he used this strategy, chief engineer Seihachi Takahashi pale into Japanese inscruta­bility. “As a result of it is the easiest way,” he stated. “Quieter.”

Some behind-the-scenes probing re­vealed the supply of the quietness. The same old thermostatically managed electrical fan is both off, wherein case it is com­pletely silent, or it’s on and due to this fact producing a substantial air-rush sound. The hydraulic fan is a variable­-speed association, so, in some modes, it might be on however at such low speeds you will not discover.

When the LS400 sedan was previewed within the press practically two years in the past, it typically obtained excessive reward for its engi­neering and condescension for its styl­ing. “Kind of like a Mercedes,” folks stated. “Acquired a giant grille in entrance.” Japanese automobiles are created by groups which are typical­ly organized fairly otherwise from the best way the remainder of the world does it. In Ja­pan, the physique designers report back to the chief engineer, who has veto energy over something he does not like.

Detroit designers would reasonably stroll picket traces than work underneath an engineer. They suppose that an engineer would divert them towards stern and boring automobiles. Possibly. However that is not what occurred within the case of the SC400. Chief engineer Takahashi is understood to have fallen in love with the primary clay proposal despatched to Japan from Toyota’s Calty Design Analysis, Inc., in Newport Seashore, California. Takahashi now calls the automobile an “authentic American design.” He appreciated the early form a lot that he would not surrender on it, regardless that it was, on the time, unbuildable by all identified strategies.

Principal designers on the challenge have been two California males: Dennis Camp­bell, who had stints at Ford and Chrysler earlier than becoming a member of Calty in 1980, and Erwin Lui, whose profession started at Calty in 1982. Lui now speaks of the SC400 as a “de­signer’s dream come true,” and he cred­its the engineers. There have been instances when he too was prepared to surrender and chill out the design to one thing extra typical so it might be constructed, however Takahashi would not let him. Takahashi was decided about this coupe, and he was backed by an equally decided entrance workplace. Collectively they went the additional kilo­meter to discover a solution to construct a sensible automobile within the designers’ form.

The issues all stemmed from the rounded nature of the SC400’s design, significantly the nostril, which seems semicircular as you look down on it from above. All that roundness eliminates the corners. After all! However then the place do you place all the mandatory parts which are usually pushed out into the corners? When you look underneath the hood of the LS400, there is not any empty house. So how may the engineers presumably match the identical tools into even tighter quarters?

Think about the headlights. Entrance cor­ners are excellent for headlights. However while you spherical off the entrance corners, and roll again the vertical face above the bumper in order that it shortly blends into the sloping hood, the traditional headlight house is gone. The headlights find yourself again in opposition to the radiator bulkhead the place you’d should do a significant teardown simply to vary a bulb. What to do? Initially, the entire lighting was supposed to suit right into a single clean module in every nook. However that wasn’t doable. The projector high-beam a part of the module required an excessive amount of depth. The ultimate answer sepa­rated the excessive beams from the module and positioned them inboard, the place depth behind was higher, with their very own ovoid lenses, and on the similar time creat­ed what is going to certainly turn into one of many SC400’s most talked-about particulars.

As soon as the design was authorized by Toyota, Lui went to Japan to see it by way of the transition to a manufacturing form. With the designer available, Toyota thought, the true essence of the unique would extra seemingly be preserved within the last automobile. Once more, extra proof of Toyota’s dedication. Lui remembers confronting the “laborious factors” for the primary time. Onerous factors symbolize equip­ment that needs to be within the automobile, corresponding to the highest of the consumption manifold and the bat­tery. The engineers got here to the clay mannequin and drove pegs into it to the depth of the laborious factors. A variety of pegs poked outdoors the rounded form. Some surfaces have been moved to accommodate them, however Lui says that Takahashi did ev­erything he may to relocate and re­form inside parts. The coupe’s air cleaner, for instance, is a wholly dif­ferent form than the sedan’s. We discover additionally that the coupe’s entrance suspension positions its higher wishbones a lot decrease within the automobile, which might enable more room within the engine compartment.

The unique design had a fair smaller grille opening in entrance, too small to chill the engine, Takahashi stated. So the opening was enlarged. To maintain it as small as doable, nonetheless, the engineers reached for a way generally used on racing automobiles however uncommon on the highway—they constructed a duct that channels the entire incoming air by way of the radiator.

Further engineering is clear in two different areas too, areas that may certainly make the coupe friendlier to passengers. The doorways swing on complicated four-bar hinges that transfer the entrance and the highest of the doorways farther out of the opening than regular hinges would. Again-seat passen­gers will even recognize the facility fea­ture of the passenger-side entrance seat that slides it ahead on its observe when the backrest is folded. Each of those options repay in simpler entry and exit.

We have pushed solely preproduction sam­ples of the SC400 at this level, so we’ll maintain the driving impressions basic. This automobile shares the inside temper of the sedan—superbly sculptured shapes coated in superb textures and pastel col­ors. Leather-based is commonplace tools, as is fowl’s-eye maple sprint and door trim. The devices, as on the sedan, are self-illuminated at any time when they’re oper­ating, which makes for an exceptionally legible show. The windshield slopes steeply, nevertheless it’s positioned effectively ahead, thereby minimizing the solar-cooker ef­fect on the occupant’s laps.

We have significantly admired the four-door for the best way wherein it combines a silent, plush journey with trusty dealing with. The coupe’s persona is sort of completely different. The physique is quiet, however the engine talks. Toyota thought a coupe must be sporty. The shorter gearing will get the V-8 up within the revs faster. The retuned in­take and exhaust acoustics now flip the engine sound right into a scream while you tip into it, albeit a refined scream. And the whipped cream has been eradicated from the journey. The coupe’s motions are extremely damped. You positively really feel the contours of the highway now, though a lot of the harshness is filtered out.

This automobile is superbly executed, very a lot a designer piece each in and out. In our view, the plush silence of the LS400 appears a loftier accomplishment, but the SC400 has the sporting angle that is solely lacking from the sedan. Clearly, these two automobiles are supposed for various consumers.

And that, in flip, means complications for a brand new group of sellers. The artificial­-coupe enterprise won’t ever be the identical.