Never Boring

dbfore GT Zagatto coupe in English Racing Green. I would seriously trade all of my earthly possessions for nineteen sixty two Aston Martin dbfour GT Zagato coupe in English Racing Green anyway, and the winner is the nineteen thirty four wasn't owned by Peter Maland it's the concourse the Elegance of twenty eleven, and Lexus wants to give the gearheads a sneak peek at their twenty thirteen Lexus GS three fifty.

They're all new sports Sedan. The CEO of Toyota, Akio Toyota, is on hand Akiosan, by the way, is a serious race car driver competes all the time. Just last year, he snuck into the twenty four hour Induro at the famed German Nurburgring as part of the Toyota team under an assumed name mister Marizo. I mean, how great is that? It's kind of like if the CEO of Nike had a side gig as an Olympic marathoner. The GS is as the symbol of the new generation of the Lexus.

This vehicle has the spindle, unique grill and that we all pay much attention for elevating the big pahomas that driving signature. That's Koji Sato, who everyone calls Satosan, president of Lexus International. So we all the team member is so proud that because we could create a new generation Lexus appealing to the market. So the announcement on the introduction is success rita well received. We could we could get a big up rose. Oh it's beautiful, it's a

nice car. Then Akio Toyota meets with the trade journalists and what he's expecting is a coronation. The GS is a hit. Lexus is remaking its image. They've just had a wave of applause. So akia Son asks the gathered auto writers the Carnets, for their impressions of Lexus. Please feel free to say to me so he said. The one of the generalists told to Akio, oh, thank you, so that I know the Lexus a long time. So Lexus is a nice car, but I'm sorry it's boring,

he said, boring. A journalist tells the CEO of Toyota on the sacred ground of Pebble Beach that the Lexus brand is boring. It's a really shocked for us. So we believe that we could create a bit of nice car in a luxurical segment. So our business landing was landing so good at that moment. So but one of the generalists still us, it's boring. It's really shocked to us why they think the Lexus is as boring From Pushkin Industries and Lexus. This is go and see our

podcast about the many obsessions of Lexus. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This episode, in fact, the next three episodes are about what you do if you are Akio Toyota and someone calls your car is boring. Now, in defense of that unnamed journalist, he wasn't being snarky. He was just stating a fact in the public mind. The signature Lexus will always be the first one that came to America in nineteen eighty nine, the LS four hundred, which was a simple, unadorned,

elegant sedan a jewel box last forever. One of my neighbors has an original LS four hundred. He's been parking it on the streets of Manhattan for god knows how many years. The thing looks like it just rolled off the lot. It's an incredible car, but it is not exciting. It was not supposed to be exciting. It was supposed to be an object lesson in understated hardcore engineering brilliance. The phrase Sutosan used was left brain. Lexus was all

left brain. And after the journalists rebuke, Satosan comes back and says, we need to be a little more right brain. And so when he came back, he said to all of these guys here, I don't ever want to hear that again. That's Paul Williamson, who was our guide when we were in Japan. Everyone at Lexus knows the Pebble Beach story. Kill Taylors, never boring, never boring. Okay, so imagine that you're Lexis. You don't want to be boring anymore. Where do you start? The obvious answer is that you

make a sports car. All of Lexus's competitors have a serious sports car in their lineup, because sports cars are where you struct your stuff. Calvin Klein has an underwear line, and he has a tour line. In the car world, boxy four cylinder economy Sadan are underwear. Insanely fast sports cars are coutur. All the Germans have a coatur line. How he has the A eight, BMW has the I eight. Mercedes has esl ladies and gentlemen interducing the all new Lexus Elsie five. The LC five hundred is more than

a new luxury bottel. It's a new flagship sports coupe for a new Lexus. So, just over four years after Pebble Beach at the Detroit Auto Show, Lexus introduces the LC. If you don't know what an ELC looks like, stop everything. Google it now if you don't want to, I'm just going to read to you what my friend Dan wrote me after I asked him about the LC. Understand that Dan is the most serious car guy I have ever met. He is a garage full of every single car you

would ever want. Nine to eleven's Clarence Ferrari's Chevy SS, which is like the insider's inside a car and a car that I want very badly. Anyway, Dan writes me, I think the LC is the best Japanese design car in decades. Stunning hate the sound system controls, but nearly perfect. Otherwise Porsche would charge twenty five k more for that level interior. The only thing that Dan Dan can find wrong with the LC is the sound system controls. Now, what do people like Dan like about the LC? It's

hard to pick one thing. The car is low slung, has an impossibly long hood, accent notes behind the doors, tear drop rear lights. Oh my, but a beautiful car is only half the battle against the fatal accusation of boring. For years, Lexus made a coup called the sc which was on the Car and Driver ten Best Cars list for a long stretch in the nineteen nine The sc was beautiful, but no one ever took the sc Out on winding, rolling back roads early on a Sunday morning

to test its limits. So what happens when Lexus intentionally sets out to do exciting the Lexus way, which is to say, with the same kind of obsessive dedication that leads to car windows that close like Nigeri Gucci doors. Over the next three episodes, I'm going to try and answer that question, but it starts with this. When I stought I was the chief engineer with the LC, so when when I start development of LC, I'm going around in the United States, the many praise Sato Son Again.

He's talking about a longstanding practice at Lexus. Lexus began in the late nineteen eighties as a brand sold only the North American market. Toyota conceived of it as a Japanese luxury car for Americans. For years, Lexus would send teams of people to the US, particularly southern California, to immerse themselves in American car culture. We say, go and see the genji game is a very important thing for us. What the what's the word, what's the Japanese word? Gain

chi game? But gain chi means go you should go there. Yeah, you should see something by yourself. This is a very important thing for us to create something new. I met many of the car guys in the United States sometimes going to kas and the coffee. So the older praise that people tell in tearing me, how they love to call, how they feel I'm proud of their engine noise that sometimes they appeal into me. Oh, hey you please hear my engine sound? Wow? How you write it? Yeah, This

kind of emotional things as very mortumate me. Oh, this is the culture. This is the car culture for the car guys. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the world of automobile obsessives, cars and coffee is an essential ritual. We're on Sunday or Saturday morning all across the world, all the Porsche nine eleven people, or the Corvette people or the Mustang people gather in parking lots to talk about their cars and obsess about their cars, and drive

their cars and drink coffee. I once spent a guy on an airplane who met up with all of his Ferrari friends every Sunday morning to roam the back roads of rural New Jersey. He invited me to join them.

I lost his number. I will never live that down anyway. Satosan, a senior guy one of the world's biggest car manufacturers, starts showing up at random cars and coffee meetups, which is like if you went to your local pickup game and there was Lebron James crazy And what does Satosan learn at Alexis he'd spent years obsessing over engine refinement because we always think thet DNA is the kind of the quietness is one of the strong points of the

Alexis broun because of that, all the chief engineer believes quite the it's bitter who is but no one was talking about quiet refined engines at cars and Coffee. But I'm really surprised that many car guys love the noisy engines, but they smile, make a peak smile. So his first thought when he flew back to Japan to build a more exciting Lexus was what should our beautiful sports car sound like? Okay, let's go very deep into the world of engines and sound, and trust me, it is a

world first question. If what you are thinking about is excitement, do you or don't you turbo charge your engine? Turbo Charging is a way of boosting the power of an engine. It works by recirculating waste energy back into the combustion process super efficient. But it means and forgive me, because this is a gross simplification that you extracted energy from the exhaust pipes. Imagine the biggest pipes of a pipe organ they're played by the organist's feet to sustain the

low notes. If a child plays those keys with less force, they're not going to sound the same. That's what happens when you turbo charge. Just listen. Here's a portion of nine eleven without a turbo, what's called naturally aspirated. Here's a portion of nine eleven turbo. Here. The difference here the wine or the turbo spooling up. Now, reasonable minds may differ on this, and there are lots of people who love that turbo sound, but purists not so much.

My other favorite car obsessive, my cousin Jeremy, equates a turbocharger on an engine to eating sushi with a fork. It works, but something's not right, So you want naturally aspirated, not turbocharged. Next question, what sounds best a four cylinder engine, six cylinder or eight cylinder. Now, this question, of course is rhetorical because the answer has to be eight, because nothing sounds like an eight cylinder. It's like Pavarotti for yours.

One of the world's greatest tenors. Pavarotti was not some skinny dude like me. Short skinny dudes do not sing with power and authority. Big guys do. This is what four cylinders sounds like. This, on the other hand, is what a naturally aspirated V eight sounds like. No contest, so you want a naturally aspirated V eight, But we're not done. A V eight is two sets of four cylinders arrayed in a V shape, firing up and down one at a time in order to spin around a

long shaft sitting at the base of the engine. That shaft is the crankshaft, and it's the spinning of the crankshaft that makes the wheels go round. V eights, though, can have very different kinds of crank chafts. One is called a flat plane. Flat plane crank chafts are light, They spin incredibly fast. The pistons fire evenly left, right, left, right. What you get is a higher, seamless silk wine, almost like a turbine. The V eights in Italian supercars are

often flat planes. Race cars have flat planes. The new Ford Mustang GT. Three fifty has a flat plane. Just listen. The ever kind is cross plane it's much heavier, spins more slowly. The pistons that drive it are far enough apart that all the noise of all those little explosions inside the engine are distinct. You can hear one, then another, boom, boom, boom. The pistons fire unevenly one, eight, four, three, six, five, seven, two, left, right, right, left, right, left,

left right, burbling, bubbling, like a pot beginning to boil. Listen, this is a Ford Mustang g T five hundred, the cross plane sibling to the GT three fifty. That rumble, there's no mistaking it. That's a cross plane. V ad Now what's better. It's a matter of taste, of course, But serious car guys, serious ones go for the burble and the bubble of the cross plane. It's not some perfect, seamless jet engine. It's a human engine, complex, unpredictable, emotional.

So where does Lexus start with its LCI engine naturally aspirated cross plane va Okay, next step. The sound coming out of an engine is a function of a lot more than the number of cylinders and the type of crankshaft. That sound is buffeted and altered and distorted by a thousand other factors as the sound ways twist their way to the pipes and tubes of the engine. If you look at the acoustic signature of an engine in its natural state, it would be jagged, lots of discordant notes

mixed in with that marvelous undertone of rumble. So the job of the carmaker is then to tune that sound like a conductor brings together all the very different sounds of an orchestra. Now there's an easy way to do this. You could simply create an engine note with a synthesizer and pump it into the cabin through a speaker. Lots

of carmakers do this. My daily driver, which I love, by the way, except for the thing I'm about to tell you, has a turbo four cylinder engine that tries to make up for its acoustic shortcomings by piping fake engine noise into the cabin through a little German gizmo called a sound ductor. Sound ductor sounds like sound dictator, drives me crazy. That's totally cheating. Who wants to spend thousands and thousands on a car only to have it lip sync its way from zero to sixty? You have

to keep it real noise shot. Yeah, there's basically a lot of variance and frequencies, so there's a lot of noise in between those frequencies. Yea, And you do you want us you want to smooth that out? Is that it? That's subtleus on again the head of lexus. Yeah, basically, but too much sumooz is not hits your heart. Yeah. You need some noise, Yeah, some sudden point. That's the point. So if it's too smooth, no exciting, you start with the underlying engine note, then we tune a little bit

so and then create some harmony. It's like a piano or trumpet or something like. If you ride in an LC at high speeds and trust me, we'll get to that, you feel like you're in a concert hall. The sound starts at the front as the car first gets underway. Then that you push the slow through. Then you get the g force. Then gradually the engine sound of the intake and the exhaust is switched. It's kind of a

move moves from the front to front and back. And how do you get this instrument to sound just right? There's no formula. You just do endless trial and error. You make the intake hose a little longer or a little shorter. You vary the angle of the valves and the exhaust pipes and repeat. I forgot how many times we tried? Many times, Many times we create a pro type parts and the hearing, hear the engine sound, and then check and then on a rise and the tune again.

Many times we do. But how many can you m not the hundred more, two hundred, three hundred more over what period of time whole the totally that we spend a five years, five years, five years to create one car? Yeah, five years on the engine sound. That's a lot, but it's not all. On the next episode, I'll Go and See a little dive into music theory and why we respond to sounds, even mechanical sounds, the way we do. Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily

Rostek and Carl Migliari, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg had a fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in our recordings. Go and See is a production of Lexus and Pushkin industries. I'm Mountain Rappo.