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Toyota Motor Company launched their luxury car brand 'Lexus' in 1989. They formed a separate sales channel to deliver the kind of sales and service experience to impress the most particular of customers.
Their first car, the XF10 LS400 launched that year was a further testimony to the dedicated focus of the team in delivering excellence. The basic specification was impressive enough - 4.0 L V8 DOHC TwinCam, producing 190 kW. The magic was in the attention to detail of every part and function. The car was near silent, smooth and refined. Everything worked perfectly, consistently and with finesse.
Their were many early critics of both the brand experiment and the car. When the vehicle was disassembled by competitors, they found exactly what was stated - near perfect execution of every detail.
Further models were added to the lineup over time - each with the same ethos, if not the near perfection of the top-line LS. The 'experiment' did, however, force all other competitors to lift their game.
Nissan followed suit with their own luxury brand 'Infiniti', Honda with 'Acura' and Mazda was to follow with 'Amati' - the Asian financial recession arrived before that plan could be executed.
Lexus was by far the most successful, and still sets quality benchmarks for its products. This can be seen in the US JD Power quality surveys.
Urgh.. where to start?
I'm going to skip to the interesting stuff. So, I was out running errands last Tuesday when I was stopped at a light at Oakdale/Briggsmore in the left turn lane when everything shut down. I couldn't restart the car. So, here I was stuck in the middle of rush hour traffic in what I figure is the third busiest place in Modesto (it's a 'town' of 250k people). Me, in my skirt and high heels push my car back so I can get out of traffic. People were great, they flipped me off and cussed me out the whole time I did this. Thanks guys for helping me out.
After I get it pushed back far enough, I'm sitting there trying to figure out how the hell am I going to get it across three lanes of opposing traffic without getting myself killed into the parking lot of Carl's Jr. Finally after all this time these high school boys stop at Carl's and see me. They run out into the road and help me push it across the lanes of traffic and up the incline into the parking lot. They weren't able to stay, but I was just grateful that they helped me with that part.
After awhile, I get a jump from my dad and was able to make it home (kinda). Well, it took two jumps to make it home. So the next day my dad and I take a look at the car and decide it's the alternator. That brings us to this pic here. The new one from Auto Zone is put in and all is happy.....