Lexus LC 500 2023 UK first drive

The demise of the V8-engined luxury GT coupé has been reported prematurely in a lot of quarters of the media. Counting up the number of Jaguars, BMWs, Aston Martins, Mercedes, Bentleys and Ferraris there are left with woofling V8 motors up front and two-door cabins behind actually remains a heartening exercise if, like me, you dread the day when a car market of so much mechanical variety will be a dim and distant memory.

And yet there’s something about the Lexus LC 500 that suggests it’ll be the very last car of its kind, having been one of the very last to arrive. The LC is a survivor. And its ability to cling onto its place in the Lexus model catalogue, in spite of its various flaws and an annual sales presence that probably barely extends into three figures as far as the UK market is concerned, suggests it’ll keep right on surviving until the very end of days.

There has been a light update of the car’s mechanical specification for the latest model year, although not as much as there was for the 2021 version. In a bid to enhance both the car’s touring and sporting credentials, Lexus has tweaked the LC’s coil spring rates and recalibrated its AVS adaptive dampers, once again.

It has a new more “deeply hung” (Lexus’s choice of words, not mine) front seat design and a new shift lock function for its 10-speed automatic gearbox. And there are a couple of new special editions of the car (Hokkaido Edition, Black Inspiration) that are based around particular colour combinations and material themes.

If you want the most sporting specification this car comes in (four-wheel steering, Torsen slippy diff), you’ll want the LC 500 Sport + Coupé – a car whose main draw, in spite of all that, remains the atmo 5.0-litre V8 under the long bonnet. 

It’s not especially torquey, needing a good 4500rpm on the tacho before it really starts to pull. But it revs from there on out with creamy smoothness and genuine ferocity; it responds to your right foot with beautiful crispness and proportion; and it sounds delicious in doing so - particularly with one of Lexus’s naughtier driving modes governing the active exhaust system.