Last Place, Every Time

There is an old expression about calm surfaces and frantic paddling underneath. It describes this car almost perfectly, and I am not going to use it, because nobody has ever wanted to be told that their 416-horsepower V8 sedan resembles a waterfowl.

But the idea is right, and it is the whole car. From ten feet away an IS F is a mid-size Lexus sedan with slightly angry eyebrows. Inside, at idle, it is quieter than most of its rivals. The seats are the best in the class, the switchgear works with that particular Lexus damping where everything moves like it is traveling through honey, and your passenger has no idea anything unusual is happening.

Then you use it, and a naturally aspirated five-liter V8 with cylinder heads designed by Yamaha climbs to 6,800 rpm making a noise that has no business coming out of a car with this badge on it. The eight-speed automatic — the first eight-speed anybody had put in a car like this — drops two gears in two tenths of a second and blips the throttle on the way down without being asked. The rear tires ask a question. The whole thing happens without the car ever once looking like it is trying.

Lexus built this in 2008. Nobody believed it.

Here is what makes the IS F worth half an hour of your time, and it is not that it was misunderstood. It is that the verdict on it split cleanly in two, and both halves are still true.

The magazines lined it up against the BMW M3, the Mercedes C63 AMG and the Audi RS4, and it finished behind them every time. Six group tests spread over eighteen years and two continents, and I cannot find a single one it won. Evo ran the four of them again in July of this year and put the Lexus fourth of four, with the line: “there’s nothing the IS F excels at that makes it compelling.”

Which, as we will get to, is not quite true. It beat all three of them on several measurable things — just never on the ones that decide a comparison test.

And meanwhile the people who actually bought them have been quietly having the best decade of anyone in that group, because the Lexus is the only one of the four you can own without a plan.

The critics never changed their minds. The market, the owners and the repair bills changed theirs.

First, the company that fixed everybody else

To understand why nobody saw this coming, you have to understand what Lexus was for the nineteen years before it happened.

In August 1983, Toyota chairman Eiji Toyoda asked his engineers whether they could build the best car in the world. The answer became Project F1 — F for flagship, 1 for first, nothing to do with racing. What Toyota then spent on it gets quoted so often it sounds apocryphal, and almost all of it is documented: sixty designers, 1,400 engineers across twenty-four teams, 2,300 technicians, roughly 450 prototypes, 1.7 million miles of testing and more than a billion dollars.

The LS 400 landed in September 1989 at $35,000 with 250 horsepower and a drag coefficient of 0.29. A Mercedes 560 SEL was $74,050. Team One’s television commercial stacked a pyramid of champagne glasses on the hood while the car ran on a dynamometer at the equivalent of 145 mph and nothing spilled — an ad so implausible that consumer advocate David Horowitz publicly accused Lexus of faking it, and Lexus answered with verification footage and a live demonstration.

Then in December 1989, three months in, Lexus recalled all 8,000 cars it had built over a sticking cruise-control actuator, a brake light housing that could melt and some alternator wiring. Four owners had complained. Nobody had been hurt. And rather than mail out letters, Lexus sent technicians to collect the cars from owners personally, fixed them free, washed them, filled the tanks and brought them back — renting garage space and flying staff out to owners in remote places. The whole operation took about twenty days.

That is the moment the industry changed. Not the car. The recall.

Lexus was not alone, and that mattered. Acura had opened the door in March 1986 with the Legend and the Integra, the first Japanese luxury division in America. Infiniti arrived two months after Lexus with the Q45, a 278-horsepower V8 sedan at $38,000 and a famous advertising campaign that declined to show the car. And in late 1990 Honda dropped the NSX into the American market, which did to the supercar what the LS 400 had done to the luxury sedan.

“The moment I drove the ‘little’ NSX, all the benchmark cars — Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini — I had been using as references in the development of my car vanished from my mind.”

Gordon Murray, on developing the McLaren F1

The Germans felt it immediately. BMW’s US sales fell from 96,759 in 1986 to 53,343 in 1991. Vic Doolan, then running BMW’s American sales and marketing, later put it plainly: “What was clear was that our model range simply did not live up to ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine,’” and “our dealer network was demotivated and unprofitable.” BMW accelerated its first V8s in two decades, rebuilt its dealer training and launched BMW Financial Services. Mercedes moved to cut costs so it could lower prices.

Nobody at Mercedes or BMW ever stood up and said “we did this because of Lexus.” They just did it. The evidence is in the behavior.

And then Lexus got type-cast

Here is the trouble with being the company that never disappoints anyone.

Through the nineties and two-thousands Lexus made genuinely excellent cars. Everything exactly where it was supposed to be. Nothing rattled. Nothing broke. No drama. Boring — and boring is good, because boring is predictable, and predictable is what most people actually want out of the second most expensive thing they own. J.D. Power has ranked Lexus highest in its Vehicle Dependability Study in nine of the ten years to 2021 and in every year from 2023 through 2026.

They invented a segment along the way. The RX 300 arrived for 1999, a car-platform crossover built off the Camry, and it did over 370,000 units in its first generation. It was not the first crossover — the AMC Eagle, the RAV4, the CR-V and the Outback all got there earlier — but it was the first luxury one that caught on, and it has been the best-selling luxury SUV in America ever since.

They were selling cars, making money, and everybody knew exactly what they were. And that was the problem.

Lexus had become the network procedural. Same recipe, every episode, whatever the plot: a problem, a conflict, a resolution, roll credits. Audiences love those shows. The ratings are excellent. But once you have seen one you have seen all of them, and nobody has ever walked out of one arguing about it in the parking lot.

Meanwhile there was one market Lexus could not touch, and the Germans did not merely dominate it, they owned the deed. Every category has one car that all the others get measured against — the 911 in sports cars, the Range Rover in luxury off-roaders. In sports sedans it was the BMW M3, and it was not close.

The skunkworks

The IS itself had arrived by an unusual route. The first-generation car was developed in Japan as the Toyota Altezza and launched there in October 1998, reaching America as the Lexus IS 300 for the 2001 model year. That is genuinely different from how the LS 400 was made — the LS was conceived from the outset as a Lexus for export, while the IS was a Toyota that got a new badge on the boat. It was a smart, thrifty piece of product planning, and it worked. The second-generation car arrived in 2005 and was well received everywhere.

What happened next was not product planning at all.

Yukihiko Yaguchi joined Toyota in 1977 and worked on all four generations of the Supra, the first SC, the Chaser and the LS 400. By the early 2000s he was in Lexus’s planning division, and by Lexus’s own account — this is from Lexus’s own magazine, not from a forum — he “organised a skunk works team” to build a high-performance version of the second-generation IS, “boldly rejecting traditional corporation procedure” to do it. Approval came in 2003.

He wanted, in his own framing, cars he would personally want to own. His model was the Toyota Chaser, the fast four-door he had worked on years earlier. And he had one complaint about the performance-car business that tells you everything about what the IS F was for: it is a pity that most sports cars have two seats instead of four.

The F, incidentally, is for Fuji Speedway, where the car was developed. Lexus has said so directly. The commonly repeated “flagship” gloss is a later addition that Lexus has never officially confirmed. And the shape of the F badge itself was drawn from the arc of Fuji’s first corner — which is the kind of detail that tells you the people doing this were not phoning it in.

The car broke cover at the Detroit auto show on January 8, 2007. Lexus filed for the F trademark in late 2006 and aimed it explicitly at AMG and M. Monthly production target in Japan: forty cars.

What they actually built

The engine is a 2UR-GSE, 4,969 cc, 416 horsepower at 6,600 rpm and 371 lb-ft at 5,200, redlined at 6,800. Those numbers never changed across seven model years.

It is not a warmed-over sedan engine. The cylinder heads were designed by Yamaha — wider valve angle, high-flow ports, larger valve faces, more lift, forged cam lobes, and fixed-pivot roller rockers with no hydraulic lifters. The intake valves are titanium; the exhaust valves are a nickel-rich heat-resistant steel. The crankshaft is forged and its journals polished to a mirror finish. Fuel arrives through D-4S, which gives every cylinder two injectors — one spraying directly into the chamber at 130 bar, one into the port — and switches between four operating modes depending on load and temperature. The intake manifold has two stages and opens its second passage above 3,600 rpm.

And the detail I like most, because it tells you what they expected people to do with it: there is a scavenge pump that pulls oil out of the cylinder heads and returns it to the pan, so the engine keeps its oil pickup fed through corners exceeding one g. Lexus engineered a wet-sump V8 for sustained cornering loads that most owners will never see. That is not a marketing department decision.

The transmission is an eight-speed automatic, and in 2008 that was startling. Lexus claimed upshifts in one tenth of a second in manual mode, with automatic throttle blips on downshifts to match revs, and the torque converter locks up in gears two through eight — which is why it feels like a twin-clutch under load rather than a slushbox.

The chassis got the full treatment. Ride height dropped an inch. Spring and damper rates went up, on monotube gas dampers with larger-diameter rods and multi-leaf linear control valves. Larger anti-roll bars. The rear subframe was tied into the body shell through added reinforcements. Brembos: six-piston aluminum calipers on 14.2-inch drilled rotors up front, two-piston on 13.6-inch at the rear, with cooling ducts beside the fog lamps. Nineteen-inch forged BBS wheels, staggered 225/40 front and 255/35 rear, on tires Michelin and Bridgestone each developed specifically for 170-mph capability.

Two corrections while we are here, because both circulate constantly. The top speed is 170 mph, not 172 — the same limiter Europe quotes as 270 km/h. And that quarter-mile trap speed is 113.4 mph; the 119 figure you will find in comment sections does not come from anywhere.

The third correction is the one that will annoy people. Those stacked quad exhaust outlets are not four pipes. Read Lexus’s own wording carefully and they never once call them tailpipes: it is a “low-restriction dual-exhaust system” terminating in “four vertically stacked exhaust diffusers, two per side.” It is a genuine dual exhaust wearing four openings. Jeremy Clarkson started the fake-exhaust row and the most-circulated photographic “proof” traces back to a pre-production show car whose tips were not connected at all. Which specific housing each real pipe terminates in, I could not establish from any source, and neither can the internet, loudly, for eighteen years.

Inside

The cabin is where the whole calm-surface idea does its best work. It is a Lexus IS interior, which in 2008 meant tight tolerances, soft-touch surfaces, and switchgear that moved with unusual precision — and then it is dressed for a fight. Heavily bolstered sport seats trimmed in perforated leather with contrast stitching, F-embossed headrests, a thicker steering wheel with fixed aluminum paddles behind it, aluminum pedals, and dark trim in place of the standard car’s wood.

The instrument binnacle is the tell. There is a tachometer that changes what it displays depending on how hard you are driving, and a gear indicator that means something because the transmission actually holds gears when asked. It is restrained rather than theatrical — nobody stitched a Nürburgring outline into anything — and eighteen years on, that restraint is why it has aged so much better than the cabins of cars that were trying harder.

Two honest complaints, both period-accurate. The dashboard top was not up to the price: Road & Track in 2008 found “its contours are doughy, its surface texture indifferent and a gap was starting to appear between it and the top of the center-stack plastic.” And the rear seat is tight, with a fixed backrest that does not fold, which makes the trunk the trunk and that is the end of the negotiation.

What it does

Motor Trend measured 0–60 in 4.3 seconds, the quarter in 12.7 at 113.4 mph, 0.95 g on the skidpad and 108 feet from 60 mph. In 2008 that was quick enough that Car and Driver called it “Porsche 911 territory.”

Lexus also kept working on it, which almost nobody noticed. The Torsen limited-slip differential became standard for 2010 — it was not available at all on 2008 and 2009 cars — and Lexus’s own engineers found two seconds a lap at Fuji with it. Then for 2011 the front and rear spring rates, the damping, the rear bushings and the rear camber were all revised, along with the steering calibration. Car and Driver took an IS F round Virginia International Raceway for Lightning Lap in 2008 and again in 2011: the time went from 3:14.0 to 3:05.4, and the later car finished second in its class behind a Shelby GT500.

Nearly nine seconds a lap, from a mid-life fettle nobody wrote a cover story about. That is a company that cared long after the press had stopped watching.

Now the part where it loses

Every time. To everyone.

I want to be fair about what those results actually say, because “lost” covers a great deal of ground. The Car and Driver defeat was 219 points to the M3’s 233 — a narrow loss to the best sports sedan ever built, from a company on its first attempt, and the same test contains some of the most enthusiastic writing anyone has ever produced about an automatic gearbox.

And a comparison test is not a stopwatch. It is a vote, and votes are about the last five percent. So before we go on, the obvious question deserves a straight answer.

Did it beat them at anything?

Yes. Quite a lot of things, actually — just not the ones magazines hand out trophies for.

Here is the cleanest apples-to-apples data that exists. Edmunds tested the IS F against the RS4 on one day in October 2007, and the M3 against the C63 on one day in March 2008 — same outfit, same procedure, same instruments, five months apart. Within each pair the numbers are strictly comparable; across the pairs they are close enough to be honest about.

One housekeeping note, because you will notice it. The figures in the table below are lower than the ones in the specification panel earlier, and both are real. Motor Trend got 4.3 seconds, 108 feet and 0.95 g out of an IS F; Edmunds got 4.8 seconds, 112 feet and 0.93 g. That half-second spread is ordinary — different surfaces, different air, different launch technique, different tires with different miles on them — and it is exactly why mixing magazines is how you end up with nonsense. So the table uses Edmunds throughout, for all four cars, and nothing else.

Best in class. All figures from Edmunds instrumented comparison tests, October 25, 2007 (IS F and RS4) and March 26, 2008 (M3 and C63). Base prices from Edmunds and cars.com. The two Audi figures carry published conflicts elsewhere — some sources give the RS4 at 13/20 EPA and $68,820 — so treat that column as the softest.

Read down the Lexus column and the pattern is unmistakable. It tied the M3 for grip at 0.93 g and beat the Mercedes and the Audi outright. It out-braked the C63 and the RS4, though not the M3, which stopped a genuinely startling eight feet shorter. It was lighter than the C63 by more than 200 pounds and lighter than the RS4, giving up weight only to the BMW. It made more power than the M3 — by two horsepower, which is a rounding error, but it also made seventy-six more pound-feet of torque, which is not.

And then the unglamorous columns, which are the ones that turned out to matter. The IS F returned 16 city and 23 highway against 14/20, 14/21 and 12/19 — it was not close. It cost the least of the four as tested, because it needed the fewest options to be complete. And Lexus covered the powertrain for six years and 70,000 miles while all three Germans stopped at four years and 50,000. Nobody in 2008 thought a warranty column was interesting. Eighteen years later it is arguably the most predictive number in the entire table.

Two more things it had alone. It was the only car in the class with eight forward gears — one more than the C63’s automatic, two more than the manual M3 and RS4, and one more than the seven-speed twin-clutch BMW began offering on the M3 in April 2008. And it consistently recorded higher trap speeds than its elapsed times suggested it should: Motor Trend clocked it at 113.4 mph through the quarter, Car and Driver at 114, both higher than either magazine recorded for the M3 sedan. It lost off the line and made it back at the far end — the signature of an engine that keeps pulling when the others have stopped.

Read those together and a picture forms that is more interesting than the finishing order. Everybody liked it. Nobody picked it. The complaints were about the styling, the ride quality and a dashboard, which are matters of taste and calibration — and about the last five percent of chassis polish, which is real and which BMW had spent thirty years acquiring.

The one criticism that has followed the car around and that I could not verify from any period source is track brake fade. Evo actually listed the brakes as a strength. If you have seen it said, ask where.

Eighteen years later, and the split

Here is where the received wisdom about this car goes wrong, including in most of the sympathetic pieces written about it.

The story usually told is that critics have come around. They have not. Evo assembled the same four cars in July 2026 and put the Lexus last again, writing that the three Germans “leave the Lexus trailing in their wake” and that “in the end, there’s nothing the IS F excels at that makes it compelling.” Even a BMW enthusiast site that concedes the Lexus has held value better and proven far more reliable finishes with: “the M3 would be the only one that lives in my garage.”

So no, the buff books did not change their minds. Something else did.

“Still a fabulous super saloon from an unrepeatable era of charismatic naturally aspirated engines.”

Evo, June 2026 — six weeks before ranking it last again

What changed is the context. In 2008 the IS F was competing against three cars that were all, at that moment, brand new, warrantied and beautifully behaved. In 2026 it is competing against those same three cars at eighteen years old, and that is a completely different contest — one the magazines do not run, because you cannot stage it in a weekend.

Jalopnik made the case in 2017 and it has aged well: the understated body looks better every year that new cars get angrier; everybody has an M3 and a C63, so “an IS F could easily pass you by and you’d be none the wiser”; and on the naturally aspirated V8 against the turbocharged ones that followed, “damn do they sound better.”

And a thing almost nobody said in 2008, said out loud in a used-car review in April 2013:

“Of all of the serious performance saloons, the Lexus IS F is the one you should turn to first if you’re at all worried about reliability.”

RAC used car review, April 26, 2013

The thought experiment

Try this. Line up a 2008 M3, a 2008 C63 AMG, a 2008 RS4 and a 2008 IS F in a parking lot. All four keys are on a table. All four cars are free. The only catch is that from the moment you pick up a key, every repair bill is yours.

Now watch which key people fight over.

RepairPal puts the average annual repair cost across the Lexus brand at $551 and the BMW M3 at $1,161, against a luxury-midsize average of $739. The gap in the averages is bad enough. The gap in the tails is worse: RepairPal rates the probability that any given repair turns out to be a severe one at 8 percent for Lexus and 21 percent for the M3.

That is the real argument, and it is not about averages. It is about what the bad day looks like.

The E90 M3’s S65 V8 has rod bearings that most specialists want replaced preventively before 70,000 miles, a consequence of tight tolerances and BMW’s specified 10W-60 oil. A UK shop quotes from £1,500 all in; American independents commonly ask more. The C63’s M156 has head bolts that fail, and RepairPal estimates cylinder head replacement on a 2008 C63 at $9,329 to $9,967. That is not a repair. That is a decision about whether you still own the car.

Which is the point. Owning an eighteen-year-old German V8 super sedan means one of three things: you are a mechanic, you have a trust fund, or you have made peace with browsing the darker corners of the internet for someone willing to buy a kidney.

Now — and this is important, because an argument that runs unchallenged is not an argument — the IS F is not free either.

Set the two lists side by side and the shape is obvious. The Lexus asks for a water pump. The Mercedes asks for a decision.

What it costs now

Now the correction I owe you, because the enthusiast internet has this backwards and it has become received wisdom: the IS F is not worth more than an E90 M3. Recorded transactions put the IS F averaging around $28,500 against roughly $32,300 for a manual M3 sedan. A blog claiming IS Fs consistently trade at $40,000 to $45,000 and at double M3 money is simply not describing the same market the auction results describe.

What is true is more interesting. The IS F cost $56,000 in 2008, fell to the low twenties, and then stopped. It found a floor and has been firming ever since — low-mileage cars now clearing $38,000, ordinary hundred-thousand-mile drivers holding in the mid-twenties, and even a 156,000-mile example bringing $16,000 in April. Cars with that mileage on them are still trading rather than being scrapped, which is its own kind of verdict.

And nobody made very many. Lexus never published production figures — a fact worth sitting with for a moment — but VIN sequences compiled by owners point to somewhere around 11,000 to 12,000 cars worldwide across all seven years. Lexus had targeted five to six thousand a year in America alone. Across seven years it missed that by a factor of three, and the miss is now the ownership case.

And what came after

There was only ever one IS F. When production ended at Tahara in July 2014, that was the end of it.

Lexus did eventually put the V8 back in an IS: the IS 500 F Sport Performance, from 2022, with a revised version of the same 2UR-GSE making 472 horsepower and 395 lb-ft, breathing through 12.3:1 compression and 180-bar injection, spinning to 7,300 rpm. On paper it is comprehensively the better car. Fifty-six more horsepower. Twenty-four more lb-ft.

It is also slower.

Edmunds ran a 2024 IS 500 to 13.2 seconds at 108.2 mph in the quarter mile. Motor Trend’s 2008 IS F did 12.7 at 113.4. The IS 500 carries about 190 more pounds, gears for refinement, and is built on a fundamentally different premise — and the people who have driven it say so on the record. Gear Patrol’s review is headlined with the observation that it is not an IS F 2.0, and notes that “the ride is tuned more for luxury than sportiness” and the steering is “low on feedback, even numb.” Motor1 called it “basically an IS 350 with a V8.”

The hardware backs them up. The IS 500 wears smaller brakes than the IS F did — 14.0-inch fronts against 14.2 — cast Enkei wheels rather than forged BBS, and makes its Torsen differential an option rather than standard. The IS F got a one-inch ride height drop, a reinforced rear subframe and bespoke Brembos.

One is a V8 dropped into a good sport sedan. The other was a sport sedan re-engineered around a V8. That is the whole difference, and it is why the newer, more powerful, more expensive car is the one nobody argues about.

The verdict

The IS F was Lexus’s first swing at a pitch it had spent nineteen years refusing to take, and it connected. Not for a home run — the M3 was better to drive in 2008 and is still better to drive now, and pretending otherwise insults everyone. But it connected, hard, and it did something none of the others managed.

It made a genuine sports sedan that does not require a relationship with a specialist mechanic.

That sounded like a consolation prize in 2008, when all four cars were new and nothing had broken yet. It does not sound like one now. A naturally aspirated five-liter V8 revving to 6,800 rpm is a thing the industry has stopped making and is never going to make again, and the IS F is the only one of these you can own and drive and not lie awake about. It is quick enough. It is rare enough. It sounds extraordinary. And the worst thing likely to happen to you is a water pump.

The company that rewrote the book on quality, that made everybody else improve or lose, that got so good at being reliable it became a synonym for beige — that company built one properly wild car, put it up against the best in the world, never once finished first, and turned out to have been right about the thing that mattered longest.

Calm on the surface. Absolutely not calm underneath.