You won’t find us complaining.
When you’re a company like Lexus, and you’ve hit a goldmine with the gorgeous LS limousine, the next logical step is to then apply those design principles to a more popular model and then reap the rewards, right? Even if you disagree, that’s what Lexus has done, having shrunk the LS into a smaller package to take the form of the Lexus ES.
A sole leaked image of a heavily LS-inspired front-end has found its way online from China, being published on ‘Al Muraba.’
The latest generation ES will likely continue to share underpinnings with the large Toyota Avalon saloon, meaning the use of Toyota New Global Architecture. With the Avalon, the US-market model is offered with a 3.5-litre V6 or a 2.5-litre petrol-electric hybrid, and we’re likely to see similar setups for the ES saloon.
*Current-generation Lexus ES
The ES might be similar in size to something like a BMW 5-Series, but price- and positioning-wise, it’s more of a 3-Series competitor. As such, it sits alongside the smaller Lexus IS saloon, which outsold it nearly six-fold through last year on our shores. However, it fares far better in North America, where the ES was responsible for something like 17% of total sales for Lexus.
There’s reason to believe that while it’s positioned as an ‘inferior’ version of the Lexus GS, the narrowed gap in appeal between the ES and the GS means that the ES may go on to replace the GS in this generation, though that remains as mere speculation at the time of writing.
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