Lexus LS500 _ Great But Needs V8

**The Lexus LS 500: A Luxury Sedan with Refined Rides and Advanced Features**

I feel like this would be way better for it so you're kind of stuck with this and it is a smooth engine it makes just enough power for most of the people are going to drive it it is smooth the 10-speed operation is been kind of reworked again to make it even better to drive so there's very little complaints with the twin turbo unit. The thing is after talking to a master tech who's worked on all these cars for over 15 years he said this is one of the most complicated engines he's ever had to work on doing an engine out and doing repair is nothing like the previous v6s and of course the naturally aspirated v8. So you have to keep that in mind if you're going to drive this out of warranty but the big complaint I had was broken pavement on the 2019 I drove and this affected the LC 500 and they made improvements to both the LC and the LS and I said well they did something with dampers or spring rates or bushings and that might have been what they needed to change. And that's exactly what they changed, they changed sway bars, they changed the hydraulic bushings, and they revalved the shocks increased the oil flow size so now when you get over bad pavement like this it is an absolute non-issue.

Now I don't want to save this as a couch on wheels but it's kind of turned into that in comfort mode. This is amazing and that's why you buy a luxury sedan combined with the air ride it does give you more ground clearance if you need to get into some trails or whatever, but on normal pavement god i love driving this car and I think anybody that gets into this would be completely spoiled. When you look at kind of the entry level price of 76,000 for the rear wheel drive option with this being almost maxed out at about $3,000 with the executive pack, um I feel like you know the price is somewhat justified for what you get here now.

The question is what else does it do well? The seat massagers in the front. The way that you have so much room and visibility in here. And the audio system. All the things that you expect from a luxury car experience add up to absolute stress-free driving. I would say that that's why you would look at this, of course, the interior space is completely unique to Lexus. There, really nobody else has an interior like this which is what makes it a bit more special feeling.

But all the other things that I talked about in the original LS video carry over here, it's just every edge has been a little bit more refined and smoothed out. And man, I could get used to this. I would love to own a car like this to drive every day.

**Final Thoughts on the Lexus LS 500**

Everything in terms of ride quality that I complained about in my previous video has been addressed. It is now softer it transmits less frequency in harsh pavement to the driver over really bad pavement so it's amazing in that part, this is a true luxury barge. The one thing that they've also improved is noise isolation. This is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get in and I'm going to tell you if you have OCD and this thing gets some age on it or a ton of miles and you develop any creeks or rattles or you have a paper clip rolling around on the passenger floor mat, you're going to hear it in here and it's going to drive you absolutely crazy. That's the side effect of having a quiet car.

But the other benefit of having this ultra-quiet cabin is it's one of the best audio systems we've ever tested so if you're somebody that loves that it's a joy.

The interior space and design is completely unique to any other brand, that said their technology is not good. We're talking about rear view cameras. We're talking about infotainment. It just seems like they're way behind other brands specifically compared to Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and even the new Genesis products so Lexus is behind there.

The fact that they've had to kind of half-ass the infotainment screen to make it a touch screen to make up for the fact that everybody complains about the touchpad. You lose some of the great dashboard character design I've loved driving this car as much as I don't like the V6, I've talked about that during the drive.

I mean this to me we'll see how it does over time. If you're looking for it on the used market check it out because luxury cars like this are not selling as much. You can get such a great deal on a used one like in the 50,000, 60,000-dollar range so keep that in mind if you're looking at the LS.

Thanks for watching I'll see you next time

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enluxury barges like the lexus ls have gotten far less popular over time because most of the money and buying public have moved to suvs if you do not care about hauling capacity and you want one of the most interesting and intricate interior spaces in the segment the ls has you covered now this car has the executive package which has every single option you could possibly imagine aside from the handcrafted glass and the doors and this puts this around a hundred thousand dollars now the thing with the glass package is you are stuck with the black interior so if you want browns or you want this white then you have to basically uncheck the glass if you want to see what that looks like check out the straight pipes video on their ls500 with the pleated door fabric it just looks amazing but regardless if you're choosing a white interior you know what you're getting into you're stuck with business attire or driving in it naked because you do not want to trash these seats or the white on the door it looks pristine you have options in terms of the doorwood with laser etching or just regular wood you have your choice of different materials like with the executive package you get this microfiber or alcantara headliner the big thing with the executive package is the reclining rear seats and the massaging function in the back now i've had multiple 20 year old women in here i took them to their appointments for plastic surgery and they complained and every single woman i've had in here has complained that the massaging function is not hard enough and in the back it's even weaker so they give you five levels and this needs about 20. if you're a male like me who likes it dainty i feel like the massage function at least in the front seats is one of the better options in the segment as well it's just firm enough it does have some variation in how it goes up and down your back and your legs it's a great feature in a luxury car the other thing is diversity of materials there is a great use of leathers alloys plastics there's almost no piano black except around the vents which you can't you never touch and then of course you have little subtleties like the cd player in here which most lexus still carry over the negative part about this space compared to the last video i did was the technology implementation has caused them a huge grievance before the infotainment like on the lc 500 and the ls was embedded in the dashboard it was not a touch screen so it had this great flow to it it looked integrated and now the only way they could fix this is to put a touch screen which means moving it closer to you which destroys the entire smooth lines of the dashboard they once had so if you're somebody that doesn't care about infotainment you're just going to buy the previous generation model just to have the clean look to it the other thing that the ls doesn't do particularly well and this is a problem on the es and the lc is the door pockets are tiny for how big the doors are i can't fit a bottle in there which is super annoying the other problem with the ls is the center console area while you do have two cup holder spots you don't have the configurability of the es where you have a phone slot you can fit more things in the center console and the armrest is pretty small for how big the actual surface area is and i think that's the biggest negative part about the ls interior is they took the style the unique look and all of that and some of the daily usability factors aren't here as much and it just carries over like i said into the lc 500 as well now you still have everything is almost identical to the previous car i looked at we did test the mark lovinson upgraded audio system which is about two grand and it's one of the top five cars that we've tested in terms of audio the frequency response aside from a pretty major dip around 1200 hertz is very very good and controlled and since there's no q factor adjustment in the eq you could probably tune some of that out with the basic eq but we didn't have enough time to play with that the harmonic distortion if you keep it below 80 decibels is well under one percent across the board from low frequency to high frequency when you turn on the 3d audio you do get this slight reverberation it sounds like there's a delay in it so i turn it all off and this has a really good sound stage even compared to the lc 500 it just sounds wider it's a bigger cabin and the isolation in here this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get into and that's also beneficial to designing an audio system also last thing about the audio system is it was designed right from the get-go when they were designing this interior it wasn't slapped on after the fact which is also why it performed so well the last thing to talk about is the reclining rear seat since this does have the executive pack you can push this front seat all the way to the front the headrests fold down to give you even more space and if you are under six foot you should be able to fully recline in the back and turn on the massage function you have heated and cooled seats all the way around this is just an amazing cabin space minus of course some of the technology implementation that lexus and toyota continue to lag behind pretty much every competitor of theirs let's get in the shop and i'll talk about the mechanical changes to this car underneath the updated 2021 lexus ls 500 this is on their gal architecture or global architecture luxury this is shared with the lc500 and their new hydrogen vehicle it is a large platform with rear wheel drive in mind and the ability to add all-wheel drive to it like this ls 500 has now in terms of all-wheel drive performance it will go into a 60 40 split or thereabout to the rear wheels first and then 40 to the front in slippery conditions it can almost go 50 50 split the center differential here or towards the middle has a torson standard the other things they've changed here or the updates to this are different sway bars front and rear and they've changed their hydraulic bushings they are softer they've made some changes to the dampers there is larger oil paths in the dampers and their re-tuning of the adaptive dampers have also changed it's just an algorithm to essentially give the shocks more stroke to make them feel softer and that is the entire change to the ls they wanted it to be quieter more comfortable and an overall more plush ride and something that they're doing now that they built their own test track facility upwards of a billion dollars or more they're taking all their vehicles toyota and lexus and they're trying to make improvements or have this contiguous feel to all of them so all the lexus products maintain a similar feel and handling characteristic across the lineup so when you get into a lexus car you know there's certain attributes to those from transmission tuning to engine programming and mostly chassis setup so with the ls they they want it to be like a couch on wheels while still giving you comfortable handling and of course the quiet ride so the thing is when you look at this you have a lower uh price to entry right at 76 grand it's not as much as the mercedes equivalents they're higher end products the audi products and of course the bmw like 7 series but what you lose here unlike the lc 500 where you see all aluminum suspension in the front and a much different double wishbone or multi-link front end this relies on a lot of steel your subframes are steel front and rear and i'm assuming this was due to cost constraints of this car it's possible that they don't sell as many of these so that investment there isn't necessitated as much but when you look at it compared to like a five or seven series it doesn't look as fancy underneath there's a ton of sound insulation isolation in terms of frequency isolators and all of that across the board you would never know when you're in the inside of the cabin and i think that's where they focused a lot of that attention that feel of quality on the inside and some of this is just not going to be all that important and it's not all that tangible to the driving experience so let's get this thing out on the road and really see how it feels i'm back in the lexus ls 500. my original video on this car i had a few complaints so we're gonna see if this updated setup makes any difference so i didn't talk much about the engine in the shop it still carries over the twin turbo v6 that they had in the ls there's no other option except for the hybrid version and i feel like that's the biggest efficiency of this if they would have put the v8 and some of the tuning that they had in the lc which i'm not quite sure why they didn't do that here other than to separate the products i feel like this would be way better for it so you're you're kind of stuck with this and it is a smooth engine it makes just enough power for most of the people are going to drive it it is smooth the 10-speed operation is been kind of reworked again to make it even better to drive so there's very little complaints with the twin turbo unit the thing is after talking to a master tech who's worked on all these cars for over 15 years he said this is one of the most complicated engines he's ever had to work on doing an engine out and doing repair is nothing like the previous v6s and of course the naturally aspirated v8 so you have to keep that in mind if you're going to drive this out of warranty but the big complaint i had was broken pavement on the 2019 i drove and this affected the lc 500 and they made improvements to both the lc and the ls and i said well they did something with dampers or spring rates or bushings and that might have been what they needed to change and that's exactly what they changed they changed sway bars they changed the hydraulic bushings and they revalved the shocks increased the oil flow size so now when you get over bad pavement like this it is an absolute non-issue now i don't want to save this as a couch on wheels but it's kind of turned into that in comfort mode this is amazing and that's why you buy a luxury sedan combined with the air ride it does give you more ground clearance if you need to get into some trails or whatever but on normal pavement god i love driving this car and i think anybody that gets into this would be completely spoiled and when you look at kind of the entry level price of 76 000 for the rear wheel drive option with this being almost maxed out at about and three thousand with the executive pack um i i feel like you know the price is somewhat justified for what you get here now the question is what else does it do well the seat massagers in the front the way that you have so much room and visibility in here and the audio system all the things that you expect from a luxury car experience add up to absolute stress-free driving and i would say that that's that's why you would look at this and then of course the interior space is completely unique to lexus there there really nobody else has an interior like this which is what makes it a bit more special feeling but all the other things that i talked about in the original ls video carry over here it's just every edge has been a little bit more refined and smoothed out and man i could get used to this i would love to own a car like this to drive every day let's head into the final thoughts and talk about all the pros and the cons final thoughts on the lexus ls500 everything in terms of ride quality that i complained about in my previous video has been addressed it is now softer it transmits less frequency in harsh pavement to the driver over really bad pavement so it's amazing in that part this is a true luxury barge the one thing that they've also improved is noise isolation this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get in and i'm going to tell you if you have ocd and this thing gets some age on it or a ton of miles and you develop any creeks or rattles or you have a paper clip rolling around on the passenger floor mat you're going to hear it in here and it's going to drive you absolutely crazy that's the side effect of having a quiet car but the other benefit of having this ultra quiet cabin is it's one of the best audio systems we've ever tested so if you're somebody that loves that it's a joy the interior space and design is completely unique to any other brand that said their technology is not good we're talking about rear view cameras we're talking about infotainment it just seems like they're way behind other brands specifically compared to mercedes bmw and even the new genesis products so lexus is behind there and the fact that they've had to kind of half-ass the infotainment screen to make it a touch screen to make up for the fact that everybody complains about the touchpad you lose some of the great dashboard character design i've loved driving this car as much as i don't like the v6 i've talked about that during the drive i mean this to me we'll see how it does over time if you're looking for it on the used market check it out because luxury cars like this are not selling as much the you can get such a great deal on a used one like in the fifty thousand sixty thousand dollar range so keep that in mind if you're looking at the ls thanks for watching i'll see you next time youluxury barges like the lexus ls have gotten far less popular over time because most of the money and buying public have moved to suvs if you do not care about hauling capacity and you want one of the most interesting and intricate interior spaces in the segment the ls has you covered now this car has the executive package which has every single option you could possibly imagine aside from the handcrafted glass and the doors and this puts this around a hundred thousand dollars now the thing with the glass package is you are stuck with the black interior so if you want browns or you want this white then you have to basically uncheck the glass if you want to see what that looks like check out the straight pipes video on their ls500 with the pleated door fabric it just looks amazing but regardless if you're choosing a white interior you know what you're getting into you're stuck with business attire or driving in it naked because you do not want to trash these seats or the white on the door it looks pristine you have options in terms of the doorwood with laser etching or just regular wood you have your choice of different materials like with the executive package you get this microfiber or alcantara headliner the big thing with the executive package is the reclining rear seats and the massaging function in the back now i've had multiple 20 year old women in here i took them to their appointments for plastic surgery and they complained and every single woman i've had in here has complained that the massaging function is not hard enough and in the back it's even weaker so they give you five levels and this needs about 20. if you're a male like me who likes it dainty i feel like the massage function at least in the front seats is one of the better options in the segment as well it's just firm enough it does have some variation in how it goes up and down your back and your legs it's a great feature in a luxury car the other thing is diversity of materials there is a great use of leathers alloys plastics there's almost no piano black except around the vents which you can't you never touch and then of course you have little subtleties like the cd player in here which most lexus still carry over the negative part about this space compared to the last video i did was the technology implementation has caused them a huge grievance before the infotainment like on the lc 500 and the ls was embedded in the dashboard it was not a touch screen so it had this great flow to it it looked integrated and now the only way they could fix this is to put a touch screen which means moving it closer to you which destroys the entire smooth lines of the dashboard they once had so if you're somebody that doesn't care about infotainment you're just going to buy the previous generation model just to have the clean look to it the other thing that the ls doesn't do particularly well and this is a problem on the es and the lc is the door pockets are tiny for how big the doors are i can't fit a bottle in there which is super annoying the other problem with the ls is the center console area while you do have two cup holder spots you don't have the configurability of the es where you have a phone slot you can fit more things in the center console and the armrest is pretty small for how big the actual surface area is and i think that's the biggest negative part about the ls interior is they took the style the unique look and all of that and some of the daily usability factors aren't here as much and it just carries over like i said into the lc 500 as well now you still have everything is almost identical to the previous car i looked at we did test the mark lovinson upgraded audio system which is about two grand and it's one of the top five cars that we've tested in terms of audio the frequency response aside from a pretty major dip around 1200 hertz is very very good and controlled and since there's no q factor adjustment in the eq you could probably tune some of that out with the basic eq but we didn't have enough time to play with that the harmonic distortion if you keep it below 80 decibels is well under one percent across the board from low frequency to high frequency when you turn on the 3d audio you do get this slight reverberation it sounds like there's a delay in it so i turn it all off and this has a really good sound stage even compared to the lc 500 it just sounds wider it's a bigger cabin and the isolation in here this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get into and that's also beneficial to designing an audio system also last thing about the audio system is it was designed right from the get-go when they were designing this interior it wasn't slapped on after the fact which is also why it performed so well the last thing to talk about is the reclining rear seat since this does have the executive pack you can push this front seat all the way to the front the headrests fold down to give you even more space and if you are under six foot you should be able to fully recline in the back and turn on the massage function you have heated and cooled seats all the way around this is just an amazing cabin space minus of course some of the technology implementation that lexus and toyota continue to lag behind pretty much every competitor of theirs let's get in the shop and i'll talk about the mechanical changes to this car underneath the updated 2021 lexus ls 500 this is on their gal architecture or global architecture luxury this is shared with the lc500 and their new hydrogen vehicle it is a large platform with rear wheel drive in mind and the ability to add all-wheel drive to it like this ls 500 has now in terms of all-wheel drive performance it will go into a 60 40 split or thereabout to the rear wheels first and then 40 to the front in slippery conditions it can almost go 50 50 split the center differential here or towards the middle has a torson standard the other things they've changed here or the updates to this are different sway bars front and rear and they've changed their hydraulic bushings they are softer they've made some changes to the dampers there is larger oil paths in the dampers and their re-tuning of the adaptive dampers have also changed it's just an algorithm to essentially give the shocks more stroke to make them feel softer and that is the entire change to the ls they wanted it to be quieter more comfortable and an overall more plush ride and something that they're doing now that they built their own test track facility upwards of a billion dollars or more they're taking all their vehicles toyota and lexus and they're trying to make improvements or have this contiguous feel to all of them so all the lexus products maintain a similar feel and handling characteristic across the lineup so when you get into a lexus car you know there's certain attributes to those from transmission tuning to engine programming and mostly chassis setup so with the ls they they want it to be like a couch on wheels while still giving you comfortable handling and of course the quiet ride so the thing is when you look at this you have a lower uh price to entry right at 76 grand it's not as much as the mercedes equivalents they're higher end products the audi products and of course the bmw like 7 series but what you lose here unlike the lc 500 where you see all aluminum suspension in the front and a much different double wishbone or multi-link front end this relies on a lot of steel your subframes are steel front and rear and i'm assuming this was due to cost constraints of this car it's possible that they don't sell as many of these so that investment there isn't necessitated as much but when you look at it compared to like a five or seven series it doesn't look as fancy underneath there's a ton of sound insulation isolation in terms of frequency isolators and all of that across the board you would never know when you're in the inside of the cabin and i think that's where they focused a lot of that attention that feel of quality on the inside and some of this is just not going to be all that important and it's not all that tangible to the driving experience so let's get this thing out on the road and really see how it feels i'm back in the lexus ls 500. my original video on this car i had a few complaints so we're gonna see if this updated setup makes any difference so i didn't talk much about the engine in the shop it still carries over the twin turbo v6 that they had in the ls there's no other option except for the hybrid version and i feel like that's the biggest efficiency of this if they would have put the v8 and some of the tuning that they had in the lc which i'm not quite sure why they didn't do that here other than to separate the products i feel like this would be way better for it so you're you're kind of stuck with this and it is a smooth engine it makes just enough power for most of the people are going to drive it it is smooth the 10-speed operation is been kind of reworked again to make it even better to drive so there's very little complaints with the twin turbo unit the thing is after talking to a master tech who's worked on all these cars for over 15 years he said this is one of the most complicated engines he's ever had to work on doing an engine out and doing repair is nothing like the previous v6s and of course the naturally aspirated v8 so you have to keep that in mind if you're going to drive this out of warranty but the big complaint i had was broken pavement on the 2019 i drove and this affected the lc 500 and they made improvements to both the lc and the ls and i said well they did something with dampers or spring rates or bushings and that might have been what they needed to change and that's exactly what they changed they changed sway bars they changed the hydraulic bushings and they revalved the shocks increased the oil flow size so now when you get over bad pavement like this it is an absolute non-issue now i don't want to save this as a couch on wheels but it's kind of turned into that in comfort mode this is amazing and that's why you buy a luxury sedan combined with the air ride it does give you more ground clearance if you need to get into some trails or whatever but on normal pavement god i love driving this car and i think anybody that gets into this would be completely spoiled and when you look at kind of the entry level price of 76 000 for the rear wheel drive option with this being almost maxed out at about and three thousand with the executive pack um i i feel like you know the price is somewhat justified for what you get here now the question is what else does it do well the seat massagers in the front the way that you have so much room and visibility in here and the audio system all the things that you expect from a luxury car experience add up to absolute stress-free driving and i would say that that's that's why you would look at this and then of course the interior space is completely unique to lexus there there really nobody else has an interior like this which is what makes it a bit more special feeling but all the other things that i talked about in the original ls video carry over here it's just every edge has been a little bit more refined and smoothed out and man i could get used to this i would love to own a car like this to drive every day let's head into the final thoughts and talk about all the pros and the cons final thoughts on the lexus ls500 everything in terms of ride quality that i complained about in my previous video has been addressed it is now softer it transmits less frequency in harsh pavement to the driver over really bad pavement so it's amazing in that part this is a true luxury barge the one thing that they've also improved is noise isolation this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get in and i'm going to tell you if you have ocd and this thing gets some age on it or a ton of miles and you develop any creeks or rattles or you have a paper clip rolling around on the passenger floor mat you're going to hear it in here and it's going to drive you absolutely crazy that's the side effect of having a quiet car but the other benefit of having this ultra quiet cabin is it's one of the best audio systems we've ever tested so if you're somebody that loves that it's a joy the interior space and design is completely unique to any other brand that said their technology is not good we're talking about rear view cameras we're talking about infotainment it just seems like they're way behind other brands specifically compared to mercedes bmw and even the new genesis products so lexus is behind there and the fact that they've had to kind of half-ass the infotainment screen to make it a touch screen to make up for the fact that everybody complains about the touchpad you lose some of the great dashboard character design i've loved driving this car as much as i don't like the v6 i've talked about that during the drive i mean this to me we'll see how it does over time if you're looking for it on the used market check it out because luxury cars like this are not selling as much the you can get such a great deal on a used one like in the fifty thousand sixty thousand dollar range so keep that in mind if you're looking at the ls thanks for watching i'll see you next time youluxury barges like the lexus ls have gotten far less popular over time because most of the money and buying public have moved to suvs if you do not care about hauling capacity and you want one of the most interesting and intricate interior spaces in the segment the ls has you covered now this car has the executive package which has every single option you could possibly imagine aside from the handcrafted glass and the doors and this puts this around a hundred thousand dollars now the thing with the glass package is you are stuck with the black interior so if you want browns or you want this white then you have to basically uncheck the glass if you want to see what that looks like check out the straight pipes video on their ls500 with the pleated door fabric it just looks amazing but regardless if you're choosing a white interior you know what you're getting into you're stuck with business attire or driving in it naked because you do not want to trash these seats or the white on the door it looks pristine you have options in terms of the doorwood with laser etching or just regular wood you have your choice of different materials like with the executive package you get this microfiber or alcantara headliner the big thing with the executive package is the reclining rear seats and the massaging function in the back now i've had multiple 20 year old women in here i took them to their appointments for plastic surgery and they complained and every single woman i've had in here has complained that the massaging function is not hard enough and in the back it's even weaker so they give you five levels and this needs about 20. if you're a male like me who likes it dainty i feel like the massage function at least in the front seats is one of the better options in the segment as well it's just firm enough it does have some variation in how it goes up and down your back and your legs it's a great feature in a luxury car the other thing is diversity of materials there is a great use of leathers alloys plastics there's almost no piano black except around the vents which you can't you never touch and then of course you have little subtleties like the cd player in here which most lexus still carry over the negative part about this space compared to the last video i did was the technology implementation has caused them a huge grievance before the infotainment like on the lc 500 and the ls was embedded in the dashboard it was not a touch screen so it had this great flow to it it looked integrated and now the only way they could fix this is to put a touch screen which means moving it closer to you which destroys the entire smooth lines of the dashboard they once had so if you're somebody that doesn't care about infotainment you're just going to buy the previous generation model just to have the clean look to it the other thing that the ls doesn't do particularly well and this is a problem on the es and the lc is the door pockets are tiny for how big the doors are i can't fit a bottle in there which is super annoying the other problem with the ls is the center console area while you do have two cup holder spots you don't have the configurability of the es where you have a phone slot you can fit more things in the center console and the armrest is pretty small for how big the actual surface area is and i think that's the biggest negative part about the ls interior is they took the style the unique look and all of that and some of the daily usability factors aren't here as much and it just carries over like i said into the lc 500 as well now you still have everything is almost identical to the previous car i looked at we did test the mark lovinson upgraded audio system which is about two grand and it's one of the top five cars that we've tested in terms of audio the frequency response aside from a pretty major dip around 1200 hertz is very very good and controlled and since there's no q factor adjustment in the eq you could probably tune some of that out with the basic eq but we didn't have enough time to play with that the harmonic distortion if you keep it below 80 decibels is well under one percent across the board from low frequency to high frequency when you turn on the 3d audio you do get this slight reverberation it sounds like there's a delay in it so i turn it all off and this has a really good sound stage even compared to the lc 500 it just sounds wider it's a bigger cabin and the isolation in here this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get into and that's also beneficial to designing an audio system also last thing about the audio system is it was designed right from the get-go when they were designing this interior it wasn't slapped on after the fact which is also why it performed so well the last thing to talk about is the reclining rear seat since this does have the executive pack you can push this front seat all the way to the front the headrests fold down to give you even more space and if you are under six foot you should be able to fully recline in the back and turn on the massage function you have heated and cooled seats all the way around this is just an amazing cabin space minus of course some of the technology implementation that lexus and toyota continue to lag behind pretty much every competitor of theirs let's get in the shop and i'll talk about the mechanical changes to this car underneath the updated 2021 lexus ls 500 this is on their gal architecture or global architecture luxury this is shared with the lc500 and their new hydrogen vehicle it is a large platform with rear wheel drive in mind and the ability to add all-wheel drive to it like this ls 500 has now in terms of all-wheel drive performance it will go into a 60 40 split or thereabout to the rear wheels first and then 40 to the front in slippery conditions it can almost go 50 50 split the center differential here or towards the middle has a torson standard the other things they've changed here or the updates to this are different sway bars front and rear and they've changed their hydraulic bushings they are softer they've made some changes to the dampers there is larger oil paths in the dampers and their re-tuning of the adaptive dampers have also changed it's just an algorithm to essentially give the shocks more stroke to make them feel softer and that is the entire change to the ls they wanted it to be quieter more comfortable and an overall more plush ride and something that they're doing now that they built their own test track facility upwards of a billion dollars or more they're taking all their vehicles toyota and lexus and they're trying to make improvements or have this contiguous feel to all of them so all the lexus products maintain a similar feel and handling characteristic across the lineup so when you get into a lexus car you know there's certain attributes to those from transmission tuning to engine programming and mostly chassis setup so with the ls they they want it to be like a couch on wheels while still giving you comfortable handling and of course the quiet ride so the thing is when you look at this you have a lower uh price to entry right at 76 grand it's not as much as the mercedes equivalents they're higher end products the audi products and of course the bmw like 7 series but what you lose here unlike the lc 500 where you see all aluminum suspension in the front and a much different double wishbone or multi-link front end this relies on a lot of steel your subframes are steel front and rear and i'm assuming this was due to cost constraints of this car it's possible that they don't sell as many of these so that investment there isn't necessitated as much but when you look at it compared to like a five or seven series it doesn't look as fancy underneath there's a ton of sound insulation isolation in terms of frequency isolators and all of that across the board you would never know when you're in the inside of the cabin and i think that's where they focused a lot of that attention that feel of quality on the inside and some of this is just not going to be all that important and it's not all that tangible to the driving experience so let's get this thing out on the road and really see how it feels i'm back in the lexus ls 500. my original video on this car i had a few complaints so we're gonna see if this updated setup makes any difference so i didn't talk much about the engine in the shop it still carries over the twin turbo v6 that they had in the ls there's no other option except for the hybrid version and i feel like that's the biggest efficiency of this if they would have put the v8 and some of the tuning that they had in the lc which i'm not quite sure why they didn't do that here other than to separate the products i feel like this would be way better for it so you're you're kind of stuck with this and it is a smooth engine it makes just enough power for most of the people are going to drive it it is smooth the 10-speed operation is been kind of reworked again to make it even better to drive so there's very little complaints with the twin turbo unit the thing is after talking to a master tech who's worked on all these cars for over 15 years he said this is one of the most complicated engines he's ever had to work on doing an engine out and doing repair is nothing like the previous v6s and of course the naturally aspirated v8 so you have to keep that in mind if you're going to drive this out of warranty but the big complaint i had was broken pavement on the 2019 i drove and this affected the lc 500 and they made improvements to both the lc and the ls and i said well they did something with dampers or spring rates or bushings and that might have been what they needed to change and that's exactly what they changed they changed sway bars they changed the hydraulic bushings and they revalved the shocks increased the oil flow size so now when you get over bad pavement like this it is an absolute non-issue now i don't want to save this as a couch on wheels but it's kind of turned into that in comfort mode this is amazing and that's why you buy a luxury sedan combined with the air ride it does give you more ground clearance if you need to get into some trails or whatever but on normal pavement god i love driving this car and i think anybody that gets into this would be completely spoiled and when you look at kind of the entry level price of 76 000 for the rear wheel drive option with this being almost maxed out at about and three thousand with the executive pack um i i feel like you know the price is somewhat justified for what you get here now the question is what else does it do well the seat massagers in the front the way that you have so much room and visibility in here and the audio system all the things that you expect from a luxury car experience add up to absolute stress-free driving and i would say that that's that's why you would look at this and then of course the interior space is completely unique to lexus there there really nobody else has an interior like this which is what makes it a bit more special feeling but all the other things that i talked about in the original ls video carry over here it's just every edge has been a little bit more refined and smoothed out and man i could get used to this i would love to own a car like this to drive every day let's head into the final thoughts and talk about all the pros and the cons final thoughts on the lexus ls500 everything in terms of ride quality that i complained about in my previous video has been addressed it is now softer it transmits less frequency in harsh pavement to the driver over really bad pavement so it's amazing in that part this is a true luxury barge the one thing that they've also improved is noise isolation this is one of the quietest cars you're ever going to get in and i'm going to tell you if you have ocd and this thing gets some age on it or a ton of miles and you develop any creeks or rattles or you have a paper clip rolling around on the passenger floor mat you're going to hear it in here and it's going to drive you absolutely crazy that's the side effect of having a quiet car but the other benefit of having this ultra quiet cabin is it's one of the best audio systems we've ever tested so if you're somebody that loves that it's a joy the interior space and design is completely unique to any other brand that said their technology is not good we're talking about rear view cameras we're talking about infotainment it just seems like they're way behind other brands specifically compared to mercedes bmw and even the new genesis products so lexus is behind there and the fact that they've had to kind of half-ass the infotainment screen to make it a touch screen to make up for the fact that everybody complains about the touchpad you lose some of the great dashboard character design i've loved driving this car as much as i don't like the v6 i've talked about that during the drive i mean this to me we'll see how it does over time if you're looking for it on the used market check it out because luxury cars like this are not selling as much the you can get such a great deal on a used one like in the fifty thousand sixty thousand dollar range so keep that in mind if you're looking at the ls thanks for watching i'll see you next time you\n"