Gear Patrol

The suburbs of Austin, Texas are hilly, colorful and vast, and look especially pretty when seen out the windshield of the latest, all-new sports sedan. They’re even better looking when reduced to a racetrack blur. The 2014 Lexus IS F Sport has been redesigned to look sexier, feel more solid and drive harder, and recently gave us the distinct pleasure of melting scenery around the track at Driveway Austin while testing out its sporting mettle.

The wraps have just come off the 2014 Lexus IS before its official unveiling at the Detroit Auto Show, and the redesign effort has definitely not been wasted. More sculpted and aggressive than the car it replaces, the new IS sports the trademark spindle grille currently found on the LS, GS and ES. The fat…

Lexus, once the darling of middle-aged Asian-American women everywhere, is focusing more nowadays on driving experience as opposed to driving you to boredom. Lexus has also revised their design language to be more edgy, adventurous and sporty in appearance — relatively speaking, of course. What they’ve wrought is more than just a new brand-identifiable spindle grille, and it’s a change in the right direction. We’ve been tracking Lexus all year and even got in some track time in their new GS sporty sedan earlier this year; we came away impressed.

Lexus has teased a new LF-CC two-door hybrid concept ahead of this year’s Paris Motor Show that continues the dose of driving excitement originally injected into the brand by the LFA. Though similar in execution to last year’s LF-LC Concept, the new whip sports a bold spindle grille that looks massive enough to inhale small…

Gone, more or less, is the somewhat tepid and conservative design, replaced by the huge spindle grille (a la Audi Union style) and more sculpted sheet metal to carry forward the slightly more aggressive design language for the Lexus line. The old nomenclature will stay to include the base LS 460, the LS 460 L…

We approach track time like a fluffy white cat to Fancy Feast. That is, we lick our chops… which is exactly what happened in sunny Las Vegas on Superbowl weekend in the all-new 2013 Lexus GS and LFA supercar. With a bevy of Lexus staff and race car driver extraordinaire, Scott Pruett, we availed ourselves…

Things don’t always come together but you try to make the most of it and sometimes, if you’re lucky, it works out for the better. Case in point. Not too long ago, we moseyed ourselves up to New York’s Monticello Motor Club for some lap time in the rip-roaring Lexus LFA. Unfortunately, Mother Nature and…

The newly introduced Lexus LF-Gh Concept stands apart from the myriad anemically designed hybrids we’ve seen (sans the Bugatti 16C Galibier). But what makes this car so important is not its expected fuel efficiency but rather the bolder design direction it will take Lexus. Note the spindle-shaped grille, large and quite original, that seems to…

Earlier this week, Lexus invited Gear Patrol to get behind the wheel of the new 2011 Lexus CT 200h a few months ahead of its North American release this March. The punishing streets of New York aren’t what we’d call a typical test track, but the CT 200h is not your typical car, let alone…

Ages ago, I remember driving my family’s white 1992 Lexus ES300. My excitement for simply driving as a Tennessee permit holder masked the car’s utter blandness and miserable driving dynamics. I soon realized the car was a sleeper… literally, it just slept. This summer, Lexus is unveiling a decidedly ‘cheaper’ hybrid. Dubbed the Lexus HS250h,…