2018 Lexus LS 500 F Sport AWD Review: Jurassic Answer

The 1993 blockbuster hit Jurassic Park answered a question posed by Jeff Goldblum’s character early in the film most emphatically: NO! The scientists should NOT have recovered dinosaur DNA, patched it with frog bits, inserted it into egg embryos, and revived extinct monsters! That question resonated with me during a week spent driving the range-topping 2018 Lexus LS 500 F Sport AWD—a similarly unnatural monster of a performance sedan.

We’ve reported on how this latest generation of LS seems to have reinvented itself as a hard-edged sport sedan of the sort that BMW seems to be veering away from. We might be partly to blame for this. After years of incessantly tarring Lexus with a beige-and-boring brush, the company busted out its most in-your-face, un-beige design ethic ever—the spindle grille. Perhaps F-Sport variants of everything, involving starchier suspension tuning, race-inspired instrumentation and seats, and aesthetic enhancements, is deemed necessary to justify the facial aggression.

But without any historic connection to an AMG, Quattro, Alpina, or M Sport brand and the racing history they represent—not to mention the institutional memory held by their motorsport engineers—the F Sport idea comes off as forced and a touch inauthentic on this large sedan. It’s worth pointing out that even before BMW’s detour away from driving-machine ultimacy, it refused to apply the full M treatment to the 7 Series range, and that Alpina’s B7 is far more of a GT than a track-day toy. That means the LS 500 F Sport is mostly tilting at the Jag XJR ($123,395), BMW Alpina B7 ($139,795), Mercedes-AMG S63 ($148,495), and the forthcoming as yet unpriced Cadillac CT6 V-Sport.

OK, at $85,215 to start and with only $3,503 worth of available factory and dealer accessories to add on, the LS 500 F Sport doesn’t compete with those cars at all on price. A rumored Lexus LS F might one day do so, but for now prospective LS F Sport buyers need to understand that they are not getting one of those aforementioned super sedans at a $38,180–$63,680 discount. The best explanation for the Lexus’ low price lies under the hood. The F-Sport makes do with a 416-hp, 442-lb-ft twin-turbo V-6—crucially, an unchanged version of the mill powering all non-hybrid LS 500 models—while the pricier sport limos all get upgraded from six-cylinders to blown V-8s. Performance is as expected: The Lexus needs 5.2 seconds to reach 60 mph, the others just 3.4–4.3, and a lap of our figure-eight takes 25.7 seconds at 0.73 g average in the Lexus, as much as 1.4 seconds and 0.10 g behind the class leaders.

More disappointing than these extreme performance numbers was the LS F Sport’s demeanor just tooling around town, when gently rolling onto the throttle sometimes reveals the nonlinearity of turbo lag. The 10-speed automatic was also exceptionally lazy about engaging drive after reversing out of the driveway. Dialing up the Sport+ drive mode sharpened the throttle response and the transmission’s eagerness to drop a cog when accelerating moderately, but the car never defaults to the sport modes when restarting, so get used to twisting that knob every time you drive the car. (Normal and Comfort modes are remembered upon restart.)

My other problem with this LS 500 F Sport AWD is with its coil-sprung variable-damping suspension. The damping system seems to hark to a little lamented bygone era when the top tuning priority seemed to be ensuring that occupants were able to instantly detect the switch between modes: “Check out my Sport mode! … [brief kidney trauma] … There, now see how smooth it is again?” Modern best practices support ultimate ride smoothness at all times in between cornering, braking, or acceleration events, during which sport tuning resists body motion more athletically. These Lexus suspenders sweat the small stuff much too sharply in Sport+ mode. This strategy might play in an LC sports coupe, but it doesn’t fly in a luxury sedan. Rear-drive F-Sports can be had with a $1,500 adaptive variable air suspension that very well may address these shortcomings, but this AWD model’s ride quality seemed to prove that Lexus’ heart is in tuning cars for continuous creamy smoothness, not occasional athleticism.

I ended up leaving the LS in Comfort mode for most of the week, asking myself, “I know I could pay $6,000 extra for an F-Sport LS, but should I?”

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