1990 Lexus LS400 Rewind Review: Driving the Groundbreaking Luxury Car Today

A large swath of American drivers today have always known Lexus as an established power player. But when Lexus unveiled its first car, the LS, at the Detroit auto show in January 1989, America had a lot to learn about Toyota's upstart luxury brand as it set out to divert wealthy car shoppers from the obvious BMW or Mercedes.

Toyota's idea? To build cars as luxurious and gratifying as the Germans while delivering what those cars didn't: commuter-car reliability. That brief generated the 1990 LS400 sedan, which was launched alongside a business plan to undercut the traditional brands' prices while giving customers a highly attentive dealership experience. It worked. The cars and eventual SUVs lived up to the hype, and the dealers' free breakfasts and loungelike waiting rooms became benchmarks. By the dawn of the millennium, Lexus managed to build itself a chair and pull it up to the big boys' table.

We can't go back in time and scarf down the free croissants, but we can explore the significance of Lexus' launch by driving an original LS at Toyota's U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas. Toyota acquired this creampuff sedan via donation back in 2006 with a mere 16,766 miles on its odometer, and fewer than 1,000 more have clicked off since. Short of finding one with the plastic wrap still on the seats, this is the closest thing to driving a brand-new first-year LS400.

For how much of a splash it made, little about the LS400 is particularly groundbreaking, even for the time. Its styling is clean, albeit unrecognizable as a Lexus amid the yowling grilles of the brand's current vehicles.

The interior is equally stark, and among its most decadent features is a power adjustment for the seat belt anchor height and the still-sharp electroluminescent "floating" gauges. Features like the tiny shade above the rearview mirror that flips down and can be tilted to help block that last sliver of sun not caught by the primary sunshades are charmingly analog, as is the row of tiny yet clearly marked equalizer knobs on the center stack. Their settings are always visible—no on-screen menus to dig through—and adjustments are as simple as giving them a twist.

We pull away from Toyota HQ and onto Plano's wide boulevards, noting how adeptly the LS400 seems to simply absorb all external noise. Everything inside the car works, and the stereo even sounds decent. The V-8 never raises its voice. With 250 hp, it can't and doesn't whip the LS around, and the four-speed automatic transmission prefers second-gear starts and wafting the stately four-door up to highway speeds. The "ECT" rocker switch alongside the shift lever has settings for "PWR" and "NORM," and we detect no difference when selecting either one, though the switch offers a tangible link to today's drive-mode-crazed cars.

The ride is placid, with just the slightest bob from the nose and tail when coming to a stop or sluicing over a speed hump. Bigger than expected inputs at the wheel are required to elicit a response; the steering ratio is slow, and the tall-sidewall 15-inch tires take a beat or two to translate lock into cornering attitude.

In short, the LS400 behaves like a better period S-Class. But consider this: The Lexus cost a little more than half as much as its German bogey in 1989. It must have been absolutely staggering to customers test driving both cars that Lexus could deliver the same king-of-the-road presence, the same sense of being over-engineered, all for so little money.

Of course, some perspective is required. The LS400 caught the W126-generation S-Class near the end of a long life cycle that spanned the entirety of the 1980s and then some, from 1979 to 1991. That Benz's formal chrome grille, hood ornament, and narrow body seem at least a generation removed from the LS400's more modern riff on luxury sedan themes.

Wait, you thought Lexus copied Benz's styling, too? This common misconception isn't supported by the timeline. The Mercedes that people think Lexus copied, the W140-generation S-Class, arrived two years after the LS400 launched. The two couldn't be more different philosophically, either.

The German represented engineering run amok, deploying overly complex solutions to simple problems. The older W126 had pneumatic door locks (chosen for being quieter than electric solenoids) and a vascular hydraulic suspension setup for ride quality and height control, and the W140 doubled down and only somewhat modernized the same ideas, adding electrically operated soft-close doors and a new solenoid-controlled adaptive damper system to join the hydraulics for even finer ride control.

Where Stuttgart loosed its engineers on the S-Class with guidance to innovate at any expense, Toyota filtered at least some of the Lexus' engineering through a prism of reason and cost efficiency. And that's where the real cleverness is found. Benz loaded its limos with magnificently complicated widgets to deliver a luxurious drive, but the LS400 matched that experience using basic parts like coil springs and ordinary shocks, stuff sure to last tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of miles with far simpler maintenance.

We inadvertently popped the hood on the Lexus reliability mythos, too. After an unspecified length of time stored away in a Texas warehouse, the temperature gauge never budged as the car dutifully trundled around Dallas/Fort Worth and idled at length on an 85-degree day. (This was no endurance test—the battery was dead, so we kept the engine spinning the alternator, lest the car not restart.)

The LS400 thus reset luxury buyers' expectations. Here was an upscale isolation chamber so reliable Lexus needed to offer food and pampering to beckon customers to dealers' service bays. Consider how the information economy boomed throughout the '90s. Attention was spread ever thinner. Executives didn't have time for sagging hydraulic suspensions or sneezing electronics. Round-the-clock communication reaching into every corner of every day left precious little cover for limping your overheating Jaguar to a service bay.

Like everyone else, what the bustling wealthy needed was a Toyota Camry. What they wanted was something that could be parked shamelessly alongside BMWs, Benzes, and the like. The original LS400 was both. Today, when any new car is expected to just work all the time, the LS' achievement has been muted. But with no screens or sensors beeping—and, yes, we shut off our phone—a quiet, comfortable drive in the LS feels decadently disconnected. Indulgent, even. All these years later, the Lexus is still giving back time.

Photos By Cavan Bennigson