Lexus LFA V 10

Here’s the first sports car under the Lexus marque. F1 fans will love its cabin noise

What’s so great about this car, given that Porsche and Ferrari already own the ‘sports car’ spot in the global motorist’s mind? First, this is the first sports car from Toyota under Lexus, the Japanese car-maker’s luxury marque.  This means it has nothing short of the best of Toyota’s tech-specs. Its top horsepower is 552, top speed 325 kmph, and it zooms from 0 to 100 kmph in under 4 seconds. It is fast not just because of its 4.8 litre V10 engine (as light as a V6), but because Toyota’s engineers have been working on this car for nine years.

They gave this car a carbon fibre reinforced plastic cabin—to achieve lightweight construction. Its six speed transmission is manual, controlled by steering mounted pedals. It has four driving modes—or presets for things like suspension, power versus fuel efficiency trade-offs and four-wheel drive ratios—auto, sport, normal and wet. The hooded instrument panel is a multilayer LCD screen that shows you car performance metrics. This screen has a hi-tech 3D feel to it. Even otherwise, the attention to detail and ride comfort are humbling. The quirks too: its washer wiper bottle is in the middle of the car, not under the hood. It has all the bells and whistles common to luxury sports cars: surround sound, hi-tech navigation system… the works. And the leather seats can be customised with a vast array of ergonomic adjustments.

But this is a sports car, and it wants you to feel every bit of the vroom. So it has special sound channels that fill its cabin with turbocharged intake and exhaust sounds. This noise, claim its makers,  is tuned to recreate a Formula 1 experience in the cabin.

Before you start arranging money to buy this car, please note that $375,000 is just the base tag. This is a limited edition (only 500 for sale), custom-built car. After you add all the trims to make it look more than just a stock car, it’ll cost a lot more.

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Gagandeep Singh Sapra