By Michael Booth
Specifications
Would suit:
Suleiman the Magnificent.
Price:
£81 000 (about R1.1-million).
Performance:
250km/h, 0-100km/h in 6.3sec.
Combined fuel consumption: 9.3 litres/100km.
Due for SA release in late 2009 or early 2010.
For a good portion of 2007 I was travelling the length of Japan with my family, researching my next book but one*.
Being, at heart, a smug, mean-spirited, condescending sort of person, I was afforded a great deal of pleasure by the Japanese's often erratic use of the English language - not in conversation, but on signs, menus, T-shirts and shop names, the most perplexing example being the word "Boobs" in 3m-high letters on the side of a shopping mall outside Yokohama.
I was reminded of this sitting in the back of the new Lexus hybrid, the LS 600h, essentially the flagship of the world's biggest car company, Toyota. Fiddling with the thousands of buttons arrayed there I found one labelled "Ottoman".
It made the rear seats recline, something I had only ever seen before in a Maybach or Maserati. That was lovely, but an ottoman (which is a low, stuffed seat without a back) it was not.
It revealed the tiniest chink, however immaterial, in the otherwise impenetrable armour of this amazing car, a sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it was built by humans and not an anally retentive higher life form from a distant galaxy.
The LS 600h bristles with clever toys and planet-saving technology - most notably, the 165kW electric motor which is mated to a five-litre V8 and the best continuously variable transmission system I've ever tried and thrusts more than two ton of Japanese cleverness to 100km/h in little more than six seconds.
Never mind that it probably generated more pollution to manufacture all the batteries and their computer systems than they will ever save in exhaust fumes, Leo DiCaprio is going to look a whole lot better turning up at the red carpet in one of these than he did in his Prius.
The LS 600h is fast, big, complicated, magnificent and not a little intimidating. Lift off the accelerator at 140km/h and there's an eerie silence as the batteries take over and the rev needle drops to zero.
The only noise is the gentle rustle of your own nose-hair in the breeze from the air-conditioning.
Obliterating the opposition
I began to suspect that the Lexus was probably a good deal cleverer than me and could at any minute do a HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and take control of my life - not necessarily a bad thing, just embarrassing.
The LS 600h obliterates the opposition - the Audi A8, Merc S-Class and BMW 7 Series - in performance, value for money and quality and, in a first for the brand, it doesn't look like it was styled by the same hyperactive nerds who sorted out the oily bits.
In fact, I can think of just one true rival to this car, and that's the Lexus GS 450h, which is half the price, faster and cleaner. Admittedly, it doesn't have an ottoman, but then, neither does the LS 600h. - The Independent, London
* Sorry, you're going to have to contain your excitement for that one. In the meantime, you can gird your loins for "Sacré Cordon Bleu" (Jonathan Cape), out in February, 2008.