Lexus LC 500

Having cut my Lexus teeth on a succession of effortlessly effective LS saloons -smearing blithely o’er hill and dale with the editor of the Telegraph motoring section as a combination of Frank Zappa and a sublime Mark Levinson sound system socked the very wax from our ears- I cannot begin to describe the depths of brand devaluation plumbed for me by the arrival of that Prius with added preen, the horrid little CT 200h.

Mercifully, with its feeble hybrid powertrain and biltong-tough ride, it is no more. And what better way to rinse those last dregs of distaste from the mouth than with a large dose of luxurious Gran Tourismo that is everything the CT never could be, and a singular return to form for the larger Lexus….

For starters, this is a deeply pretty coupe, absolutely arresting from every angle. I’m no fan of outsized grilles, but the LC carries this spindle form with reasonable grace. Besides, it’s nice to think of it as an angular hour glass reflecting the sands of time fast running out for the glorious 5.0 litre naturally aspirated V8 shoehorned under the bonnet.

Best bit? Well, with the glasshouse tapering strongly astern, the perceived aircraft carrier acreage of flattened deck revealed at the car’s rear haunches suggests the rear track to be significantly wider than the front. Nope. Actually just five millimetres. Clever, that.

The cabin is beautifully put together, giving the impression that everything you see and touch has been painstakingly wrought to combine optimum form and function with outstanding ergonomics and delicious tactility. The driving position’s first class but, alas, delve a tad deeper and one or two unfortunate glitches surface.

For instance, Lexus used to have the best, most intuitive touch screen in the business; nothing was more than one press of an adjacent button and two taps of the screen away. Nothing.

Then, what was billed as a desire to keep the driver’s eyes on the road for an extra millisecond but smacks rather more of bored engineers saw the screen migrate out of fingertip reach, and the commensurate attachment of an increasingly poor selection of infotainment control interfaces, culminating in the current track pad.

Which is dreadful. Especially for those of us who are not ambihandstrous and struggle with the last word in left hand dexterity required to achieve any meaningful input when the car is stationary, let alone on the move. The cursor’s behaviour is nothing short of frenetic; no amount of care preventing it from ricocheting around the screen like a rubber bullet fired into a squash court.

Truth is, the only workable control system which does not dramatically increase the risk of a sorely distracted driver giving the car in front a swift punt up the luggage is the turn-and-press knob which Audi perfected so beautifully before pointlessly throwing it away in favour of an equally woeful finger pad.

Moreover, when it comes to ecstasies of fumbling, mustard gas may have topped the bill for war poet Wilfred Owen, but selecting manual with an LC gear lever runs it a very close second. How we miss Randle’s handle.

Once you do finally persuade the flappy paddles to take over, it must be said they don’t feel very nice to the touch, and their action is far from the last word in click ‘n’ collect positivity.

And as for adjusting the head-up display -the visible percentage of which, on delivery, was akin to the bits of a crocodile above water when it’s swimming… It’s all very well having a real, non-digital tachometer ring which slides artful aside to reveal a selection of multi-information screen menus, but after 20 minutes fruitless fiddling (and that after a YouTube-sponsored lesson) I was no nearer finding the vertical control, so simply switched the thing off.

All of which grizzling rapidly fades to grey when you fire up 5.0 litres of glorious, naturally aspirated V8. It sounds fabulous; smooth, mellifluous and angry all at th4e same time, like a swarm of hornets. The engine doesn’t exactly deliver gouts of torque, though, and Lexus has compensated for the narrow band in which it deigns to put in an appearance by mating the unit to a 10-speed automatic transmission.

With the drive mode controller in default Normal mode, those 10 speeds hardly constitute an asset, however. Changes are smooth indeed, but any hint of properly deliberate throttle results in a deal of hunting for the right ratio, and the car never really feels awake to demands for instant power.

However, switch driving mode to Sport or, in the case of the car I drove, Sport+ (wherein £9300 buys you a limited-slip differential, four-wheel steering, 21” alloys and a carbon fibre roof) and the powertrain comes alive. And that’s largely because the gearbox not only shifts more quickly, but also ignores the ratios at the top end of the range, bringing a deal more focus to the selection process.

Then toggle in Manual, and the LC really wakes up. For a big, heavy machine (that carbon fibre roof may lower the centre of gravity but still leaves the car weighing nearly two tonnes) it proves astonishingly agile and well balanced. The four-wheel steering and active variable-ratio steering rack gang up to facilitate a chuckability that’s as engaging as it is impressive.

More fun to fling than any large GT has a right to be, the LC still stays quite large around you, and is more in its element smearing along wider A roads with unseemly poise, and haste, than on the most sinuous of B roads.

That’s also because poorly surfaced B roads highlight the one area of driving dynamics with which one might take issue – ride quality. And that, bizarrely, goes hand-in-hand with the one facet of the LC’s packaging entirely unsuited to a long-haul GT – loadspace.

Now, a scant 197 litres is hardly sufficient to swallow the more serious popsy’s seven day shoe selection, let alone the attendant outfits. Yet when you lift the floor of the unfeasibly shallow boot expecting to find a space-hogging spare tyre, you’re greeted by… the battery.

Clearly that svelte exterior couture stretched taut and low over engineering hard points has dictated a compromise or two, the worst of which, by far, is run-flat tyres.

Acting in combination with a sufficiently firmly sprung suspension system to have you switching the adaptive dampers to Comfort mode somewhat more often than you might wish, the tyres’ unfeasibly stiff sidewalls merely add another layer of niggle and fidget to a ride that simply fails to cosset in the manner appropriate to a GT with continent-crushing aspirations.

A fabulous car, then, but ultimately more satisfying as a surprisingly sporting proposition than a loping, lounge lizard grand tourer. If you can live with the ride, you’ll love the LC.