Character goes beyond each individual car

Earlier this year I spent almost 1,000 miles in one Lexus LC 500 Coupe visiting on a road trip my old university town. It was a fantastic road trip companion, a car I could have spent days in, but it had something more to offer: familiarity. Somehow, this $111,550 car is something I’ve never been able to look at Outside of a loan or a press event, I felt like an old friend.

After a few hundred miles or so I figured out exactly how it works. By the way, it wasn’t as if Lexus designed the LC 500 to make you immediately feel at home The Acura Integra doesbut instead, the Lexus’ character brought to mind something from my own past: the Scion FR-S that I owned when I rode the streets of Rochester every day. For all the comfort, performance and refinement, the LC 500 retains some of its little brother’s sports car spirit.

Full disclosure: Lexus loaned me an LC 500 for a 1,000-mile road trip, making it the most expensive car I’ve ever parked on the street in Brooklyn.

The LC 500 is a completely different car than my old FR-S in almost every way imaginable. They’re both front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, four-seat coupes designed by Toyota, but that’s about all they have in common. The Lexus is an expensive example of comfort and luxury, while the Scion cost me $14,000 when I traded it in new at a dealer in central New York. The Lexus has a 471-horsepower V8 engine mated to a sluggish automatic transmission, while the Scion has a fantastic manual transmission bolted to some kind of small four-cylinder tractor engine. The Lexus comes from Toyota City, the Scion comes from a Subaru factory in Gunma. Logically, they shouldn’t feel the same way.

But despite everyone well-known laws of aviation Sense, they do. The Lexus’ suspension is softer, more compliant over bumps and softer in traffic, but when thrown into a corner it communicates through the steering wheel like the stiffer Scion. The LC is bigger, heavier and more powerful, but never feels cumbersome or built only for straight-line speed compared to the smaller, lighter and slower FR-S.

This doesn’t mean that the two cars feel the same, but rather that they speak the same language to their driver. Just as C-3PO speaks to Owen Lars’ moisture evaporators, all vehicles have their own little subtleties in the way they communicate, their own dialects. The LC 500 and FR-S, which belong to opposite ends of the Toyota sports car spectrum, communicate in exactly the same way. Learn to get along with one and the other will come just as naturally to you.

The LC 500 is bigger, faster, smoother and more comfortable than a small Scion FR-S, but a blindfolded driver might be able to tell from behind the wheel that the two have family ties. Their character is not only the result of the way they were designed and assembled, but also the result of hundreds of thousands of small decisions throughout their development – decisions that, in both cases, were made by Toyota. They are brothers with their own little secret language.