Lexus has a bold and sprawling vision of the future that includes off-grid houses and every possible way to get you there—from hexacopters to autonomous luxury catamarans, to chauffeured luxury vans, to sports cars with high-speed drones that deploy to give you real-time information about the road ahead. At this year’s Japan Mobility Show, I got to see that vision in person.
I stepped out of a charter bus at a modern wedding venue in the heart of Tokyo, then wandered up the driveway and across a koi pond in gardens that were towered over by skyscrapers. It was the night before the big reveal—the concepts that would present Lexus’ vision for the future. We were less than 24 hours from the lifting of the press embargo, but Lexus wasn’t taking any chances.
One by one, all media had to take out our cell phones and cameras and put them into sealed envelopes, to be collected by claim check after the presentation. Then we filed into a dark room filled with chairs and watched a teaser for what we’d be seeing the next day. Some of it was familiar—a sexy sports car here, a sporty crossover there—while other concepts like the autonomous catamaran yacht, the off-grid house, a six-wheeled van, and a micro-mobility box were more science fiction than showroom.
“What we envision is 360-degrees of mobility,” said Ian Cartabiano, President of CALTY Design Research in Newport, California, which led development on the house and micro concept. What all these concepts point to is a vision of the future in which luxury alone is not enough. Lexus is instead focusing on the luxury of time and how you use your personal space to protect it. “We believe that true luxury will shift from material wants and needs into more of an enriching state of mind,” said Lexus International President Takashi Watanabe, “Where how you use your time—and how you use the space that you’re in—is more important.”
The next day at the Japan Mobility Show, at a giant convention hall called Tokyo Big Sight, I got to see that philosophy brought to life.
The Catamaran
Shown in model form only—and in a video of a wealthy owner sitting on the deck painting a canvas while his autonomous yacht takes him across the ocean—the Lexus Catamaran Concept offered a tempting glimpse of a future where you could go anywhere in the world without the need for a crew. Where would you go? Well, Lexus has an answer for that, too.
The Off-Grid House
“The house is designed to be off grid, and the roof is actually a solar panel,” said Cartabiano. He knows it may seem far-fetched to some that Lexus would even be flirting with a house concept, but if you knew what all Toyota actually makes in Japan, it would seem far more within reach. “People say, ‘Wait, are you guys making homes and boats?’ says Cartabiano, “And I say, ‘Well, Toyota has been building homes in Japan for over 30 years, and Toyota Marine has been around forever, so we can do all this stuff.’”
The Micro Mobility Box
One of the most out-of-the-box things on display was literally a box—the Micro Mobility Box designed by Cartabiano and his team at CALTY in Newport Beach, California. The idea behind the design is that if you shrink down something that looks like a car, it ends up looking like a toy. But if you use other design language––this was inspired by architecture—and shrink that down, it looks like its own thing. “Personally, I love the micro concept,” said Cartabiano, whose vision was to “make something small and personal and reflective of its urban environment, but also premium in a nontraditional way.”
The Air Taxi
Towering over the exhibit like the T-Rex in the lobby of the American Museum of Natural History, the Lexus x Joby Air Taxi looks like a human-sized drone and is the result of a partnership with Joby, in which Toyota is heavily invested.
Three For The Road
The more recognizable road-bound vehicles; a sports car, a very sporty crossover, and a chauffeured luxury van, emerged as a result of the fact that Lexus is discontinuing the iconic LS sedan and LC Coupe. These three new concepts offer an answer as to what may replace them. The fact that Toyota’s new ultra-luxury brand, Century, will now carry the torch for the top of Toyota’s luxury market gives Lexus a new degree of creative freedom. “By Century moving up to that stratum, it takes a little pressure off of Lexus,” said Cartabiano. “That’s why there’s a six-wheeled van and a crazy micro-mobility box. But there’s also a sexy lifted coupe and a hyper sportscar that look a little more ready.”
The Sports Concept
For sheer beauty, the Sports Concept dazzled me more than any other vehicle on display. This is entirely predictable for an American response, and Lexus knows exactly what we like. “Everyone loves cars in America,” said Watanabe, who told me he envisioned this as the most popular for the US audience. “A pure sports car,” said Lexus Chief Designer Koichi Suga, “Weekday for business, weekend for emotion.”
The aerodynamic elements of the sportscar were designed in collaboration with Lexus’s air racing team partner. The dimpled back of the car mimics the dimples in a golf ball for aerodynamics. The spoiler is integrated into the body itself rather than tacked on. Inside, the steering wheel and cockpit belong in a spaceship. It’s “very new but also realistic,” said Suga. “This is very important to me, to create the future but with a realistic feeling and an emotional factor.” Based on the reactions I saw in the crowd, the emotional factor with the Sports Concept is high.
The LS Coupe
With the LS Sedan going away, the answer to what could replace it is not so straightforward. One half of that answer is a lifted coupe (I never heard the word crossover used) called the LS Coupe Concept. It looks like something you could see in a showroom now. Minimalist but also luxurious, with bamboo and cedar wood interior trim. One touch of the futuristic is that, like the Sports Concept, it has a high-speed drone that deploys and lands autonomously in a magnetic charging port above the rear window. And this isn’t just to get cool footage of yourself driving, but a new level of driver awareness.
“When you limit yourself only to the cameras and sensors on the vehicle itself,” said Watanabe, “you cannot get the information from far ahead.” He said they see the drone as a way to give you information about the road ahead and the terrain around you with ease in real time. You could be driving and get the drone warning, “road flooded ahead” while you’re still well outside of danger.
The New LS
The LS has been a centerpiece of the Lexus lineup since 1989. In some ways it defined the brand in its early years. But sedans are no longer as popular as they once were, and with the LS being discontinued, the question became how to create a worthy successor. It stood for Luxury Sedan, but now they’re shifting that meaning to “Luxury Space.”
Enter the six-wheeled luxury van designed around the idea of space as power. In Japan there is a concept called “Kamiza,” which establishes a hierarchy of seats in a room or in a vehicle. Known as the Top Seat, or the safest and most comfortable seat, there is always a VIP spot wherever seating is involved. In any chauffeured van, that seat is in the third row. The problem is that no one has ever designed a van that didn’t force the VIP passenger to climb behind the second row to get there, which throws off the Kamiza. The LS was designed to solve this problem.
Chief Designer Suga told me a story of having to take a bus at night after work dinners, and he noticed that the seat over the front tire was always vacant because it’s the least comfortable seat on the bus. “That got me thinking,” he said, “That idea influenced the design of smaller wheels in the back.”
By using four smaller tires in the back instead of two larger tires, they were able to open up the back so the VIP can get in easily. But doing that is a lot more complicated than it sounds. “Now we have six tires, so when you turn, it drags,” said Watanabe. This means that all four rear tires now need to have steering capabilities, so now you have six wheel steering. “Nobody had done that,” said Watanabe.
Watanabe said that this also created new benefits, because the new middle set suppresses the typical vertical movement during acceleration. “If you accelerate very hard, usually the front lifts, but because we added one more set of wheels, it eliminates the lift,” he said. “So, you can accelerate very fast and it’s a very unique feeling—something you haven’t felt with your body before.”
“There is so much thought and expertise crammed into this concept,” said Suga, “I got goosebumps when I saw the door opening at the show.”
Final Thoughts
In 2023, the Tokyo Motor Show was rebranded as the Japan Mobility Show. Two things that this name change did were to make the show about more than just Tokyo, and to make it about more than just cars. And my takeaway from this year’s show is that mobility isn’t what it used to be. Forget everything you know about getting around, because it’s likely to change even more in the future than it already has over the past few years. And the brands we thought we knew are changing with it in surprising ways. As Watanabe put it to me, “We don’t need to continue on as an extension of what we’ve been before.”