Speaker 1: Pushkin. In August of twenty eleven, Lexus held a special
Speaker 1: event at the Concours de Elegance in Pebble Beach, California.
Speaker 1: The Concours de Elegance is maybe the most important vintage
Speaker 1: car show in the world, ground zero for the most
Speaker 1: serious car enthusiasts. To give you a sense, here are
Speaker 1: the most recent Best in Show nominees. A nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: eight Talbot Logo, Teardrop cabriolet, a nineteen thirty six Mercedes
Speaker 1: five forty K and in nineteen sixty two Aston Martin
Speaker 1: dbfore GT Zagatto coupe in English Racing Green. I would
Speaker 1: seriously trade all of my earthly possessions for nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: two Aston Martin dbfour GT Zagato coupe in English Racing
Speaker 1: Green anyway, and the winner is the nineteen thirty four
Speaker 1: wasn't owned by Peter Maland it's the concourse the Elegance
Speaker 1: of twenty eleven, and Lexus wants to give the gearheads
Speaker 1: a sneak peek at their twenty thirteen Lexus GS three fifty.
Speaker 1: They're all new sports Sedan. The CEO of Toyota, Akio Toyota,
Speaker 1: is on hand Akiosan, by the way, is a serious
Speaker 1: race car driver competes all the time. Just last year,
Speaker 1: he snuck into the twenty four hour Induro at the
Speaker 1: famed German Nurburgring as part of the Toyota team under
Speaker 1: an assumed name mister Marizo. I mean, how great is that?
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if the CEO of Nike had
Speaker 1: a side gig as an Olympic marathoner. The GS is
Speaker 1: as the symbol of the new generation of the Lexus.
Speaker 1: This vehicle has the spindle, unique grill and that we
Speaker 1: all pay much attention for elevating the big pahomas that
Speaker 1: driving signature. That's Koji Sato, who everyone calls Satosan, president
Speaker 1: of Lexus International. So we all the team member is
Speaker 1: so proud that because we could create a new generation
Speaker 1: Lexus appealing to the market. So the announcement on the
Speaker 1: introduction is success rita well received. We could we could
Speaker 1: get a big up rose. Oh it's beautiful, it's a
Speaker 1: nice car. Then Akio Toyota meets with the trade journalists
Speaker 1: and what he's expecting is a coronation. The GS is
Speaker 1: a hit. Lexus is remaking its image. They've just had
Speaker 1: a wave of applause. So akia Son asks the gathered
Speaker 1: auto writers the Carnets, for their impressions of Lexus. Please
Speaker 1: feel free to say to me so he said. The
Speaker 1: one of the generalists told to Akio, oh, thank you,
Speaker 1: so that I know the Lexus a long time. So
Speaker 1: Lexus is a nice car, but I'm sorry it's boring,
Speaker 1: he said, boring. A journalist tells the CEO of Toyota
Speaker 1: on the sacred ground of Pebble Beach that the Lexus
Speaker 1: brand is boring. It's a really shocked for us. So
Speaker 1: we believe that we could create a bit of nice
Speaker 1: car in a luxurical segment. So our business landing was
Speaker 1: landing so good at that moment. So but one of
Speaker 1: the generalists still us, it's boring. It's really shocked to
Speaker 1: us why they think the Lexus is as boring From
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and Lexus. This is go and see our
Speaker 1: podcast about the many obsessions of Lexus. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: This episode, in fact, the next three episodes are about
Speaker 1: what you do if you are Akio Toyota and someone
Speaker 1: calls your car is boring. Now, in defense of that
Speaker 1: unnamed journalist, he wasn't being snarky. He was just stating
Speaker 1: a fact in the public mind. The signature Lexus will
Speaker 1: always be the first one that came to America in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, the LS four hundred, which was a simple, unadorned,
Speaker 1: elegant sedan a jewel box last forever. One of my
Speaker 1: neighbors has an original LS four hundred. He's been parking
Speaker 1: it on the streets of Manhattan for god knows how
Speaker 1: many years. The thing looks like it just rolled off
Speaker 1: the lot. It's an incredible car, but it is not exciting.
Speaker 1: It was not supposed to be exciting. It was supposed
Speaker 1: to be an object lesson in understated hardcore engineering brilliance.
Speaker 1: The phrase Sutosan used was left brain. Lexus was all
Speaker 1: left brain. And after the journalists rebuke, Satosan comes back
Speaker 1: and says, we need to be a little more right brain.
Speaker 1: And so when he came back, he said to all
Speaker 1: of these guys here, I don't ever want to hear
Speaker 1: that again. That's Paul Williamson, who was our guide when
Speaker 1: we were in Japan. Everyone at Lexus knows the Pebble
Speaker 1: Beach story. Kill Taylors, never boring, never boring. Okay, so
Speaker 1: imagine that you're Lexis. You don't want to be boring anymore.
Speaker 1: Where do you start? The obvious answer is that you
Speaker 1: make a sports car. All of Lexus's competitors have a
Speaker 1: serious sports car in their lineup, because sports cars are
Speaker 1: where you struct your stuff. Calvin Klein has an underwear line,
Speaker 1: and he has a tour line. In the car world,
Speaker 1: boxy four cylinder economy Sadan are underwear. Insanely fast sports
Speaker 1: cars are coutur. All the Germans have a coatur line.
Speaker 1: How he has the A eight, BMW has the I eight.
Speaker 1: Mercedes has esl ladies and gentlemen interducing the all new
Speaker 1: Lexus Elsie five. The LC five hundred is more than
Speaker 1: a new luxury bottel. It's a new flagship sports coupe
Speaker 1: for a new Lexus. So, just over four years after
Speaker 1: Pebble Beach at the Detroit Auto Show, Lexus introduces the LC.
Speaker 1: If you don't know what an ELC looks like, stop everything.
Speaker 1: Google it now if you don't want to, I'm just
Speaker 1: going to read to you what my friend Dan wrote
Speaker 1: me after I asked him about the LC. Understand that
Speaker 1: Dan is the most serious car guy I have ever met.
Speaker 1: He is a garage full of every single car you
Speaker 1: would ever want. Nine to eleven's Clarence Ferrari's Chevy SS,
Speaker 1: which is like the insider's inside a car and a
Speaker 1: car that I want very badly. Anyway, Dan writes me,
Speaker 1: I think the LC is the best Japanese design car
Speaker 1: in decades. Stunning hate the sound system controls, but nearly perfect.
Speaker 1: Otherwise Porsche would charge twenty five k more for that
Speaker 1: level interior. The only thing that Dan Dan can find
Speaker 1: wrong with the LC is the sound system controls. Now,
Speaker 1: what do people like Dan like about the LC? It's
Speaker 1: hard to pick one thing. The car is low slung,
Speaker 1: has an impossibly long hood, accent notes behind the doors,
Speaker 1: tear drop rear lights. Oh my, but a beautiful car
Speaker 1: is only half the battle against the fatal accusation of boring.
Speaker 1: For years, Lexus made a coup called the sc which
Speaker 1: was on the Car and Driver ten Best Cars list
Speaker 1: for a long stretch in the nineteen nine The sc
Speaker 1: was beautiful, but no one ever took the sc Out
Speaker 1: on winding, rolling back roads early on a Sunday morning
Speaker 1: to test its limits. So what happens when Lexus intentionally
Speaker 1: sets out to do exciting the Lexus way, which is
Speaker 1: to say, with the same kind of obsessive dedication that
Speaker 1: leads to car windows that close like Nigeri Gucci doors.
Speaker 1: Over the next three episodes, I'm going to try and
Speaker 1: answer that question, but it starts with this. When I
Speaker 1: stought I was the chief engineer with the LC, so
Speaker 1: when when I start development of LC, I'm going around
Speaker 1: in the United States, the many praise Sato Son Again.
Speaker 1: He's talking about a longstanding practice at Lexus. Lexus began
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen eighties as a brand sold only
Speaker 1: the North American market. Toyota conceived of it as a
Speaker 1: Japanese luxury car for Americans. For years, Lexus would send
Speaker 1: teams of people to the US, particularly southern California, to
Speaker 1: immerse themselves in American car culture. We say, go and
Speaker 1: see the genji game is a very important thing for us.
Speaker 1: What the what's the word, what's the Japanese word? Gain
Speaker 1: chi game? But gain chi means go you should go there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you should see something by yourself. This is a very
Speaker 1: important thing for us to create something new. I met
Speaker 1: many of the car guys in the United States sometimes
Speaker 1: going to kas and the coffee. So the older praise
Speaker 1: that people tell in tearing me, how they love to call,
Speaker 1: how they feel I'm proud of their engine noise that
Speaker 1: sometimes they appeal into me. Oh, hey you please hear
Speaker 1: my engine sound? Wow? How you write it? Yeah, This
Speaker 1: kind of emotional things as very mortumate me. Oh, this
Speaker 1: is the culture. This is the car culture for the
Speaker 1: car guys. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the
Speaker 1: world of automobile obsessives, cars and coffee is an essential ritual.
Speaker 1: We're on Sunday or Saturday morning all across the world,
Speaker 1: all the Porsche nine eleven people, or the Corvette people
Speaker 1: or the Mustang people gather in parking lots to talk
Speaker 1: about their cars and obsess about their cars, and drive
Speaker 1: their cars and drink coffee. I once spent a guy
Speaker 1: on an airplane who met up with all of his
Speaker 1: Ferrari friends every Sunday morning to roam the back roads
Speaker 1: of rural New Jersey. He invited me to join them.
Speaker 1: I lost his number. I will never live that down anyway. Satosan,
Speaker 1: a senior guy one of the world's biggest car manufacturers,
Speaker 1: starts showing up at random cars and coffee meetups, which
Speaker 1: is like if you went to your local pickup game
Speaker 1: and there was Lebron James crazy And what does Satosan
Speaker 1: learn at Alexis he'd spent years obsessing over engine refinement
Speaker 1: because we always think thet DNA is the kind of
Speaker 1: the quietness is one of the strong points of the
Speaker 1: Alexis broun because of that, all the chief engineer believes
Speaker 1: quite the it's bitter who is but no one was
Speaker 1: talking about quiet refined engines at cars and Coffee. But
Speaker 1: I'm really surprised that many car guys love the noisy engines,
Speaker 1: but they smile, make a peak smile. So his first
Speaker 1: thought when he flew back to Japan to build a
Speaker 1: more exciting Lexus was what should our beautiful sports car
Speaker 1: sound like? Okay, let's go very deep into the world
Speaker 1: of engines and sound, and trust me, it is a
Speaker 1: world first question. If what you are thinking about is excitement,
Speaker 1: do you or don't you turbo charge your engine? Turbo
Speaker 1: Charging is a way of boosting the power of an engine.
Speaker 1: It works by recirculating waste energy back into the combustion
Speaker 1: process super efficient. But it means and forgive me, because
Speaker 1: this is a gross simplification that you extracted energy from
Speaker 1: the exhaust pipes. Imagine the biggest pipes of a pipe
Speaker 1: organ they're played by the organist's feet to sustain the
Speaker 1: low notes. If a child plays those keys with less force,
Speaker 1: they're not going to sound the same. That's what happens
Speaker 1: when you turbo charge. Just listen. Here's a portion of
Speaker 1: nine eleven without a turbo, what's called naturally aspirated. Here's
Speaker 1: a portion of nine eleven turbo. Here. The difference here
Speaker 1: the wine or the turbo spooling up. Now, reasonable minds
Speaker 1: may differ on this, and there are lots of people
Speaker 1: who love that turbo sound, but purists not so much.
Speaker 1: My other favorite car obsessive, my cousin Jeremy, equates a
Speaker 1: turbocharger on an engine to eating sushi with a fork.
Speaker 1: It works, but something's not right, So you want naturally aspirated,
Speaker 1: not turbocharged. Next question, what sounds best a four cylinder engine,
Speaker 1: six cylinder or eight cylinder. Now, this question, of course
Speaker 1: is rhetorical because the answer has to be eight, because
Speaker 1: nothing sounds like an eight cylinder. It's like Pavarotti for yours.
Speaker 1: One of the world's greatest tenors. Pavarotti was not some
Speaker 1: skinny dude like me. Short skinny dudes do not sing
Speaker 1: with power and authority. Big guys do. This is what
Speaker 1: four cylinders sounds like. This, on the other hand, is
Speaker 1: what a naturally aspirated V eight sounds like. No contest,
Speaker 1: so you want a naturally aspirated V eight, But we're
Speaker 1: not done. A V eight is two sets of four
Speaker 1: cylinders arrayed in a V shape, firing up and down
Speaker 1: one at a time in order to spin around a
Speaker 1: long shaft sitting at the base of the engine. That
Speaker 1: shaft is the crankshaft, and it's the spinning of the
Speaker 1: crankshaft that makes the wheels go round. V eights, though,
Speaker 1: can have very different kinds of crank chafts. One is
Speaker 1: called a flat plane. Flat plane crank chafts are light,
Speaker 1: They spin incredibly fast. The pistons fire evenly left, right, left, right.
Speaker 1: What you get is a higher, seamless silk wine, almost
Speaker 1: like a turbine. The V eights in Italian supercars are
Speaker 1: often flat planes. Race cars have flat planes. The new
Speaker 1: Ford Mustang GT. Three fifty has a flat plane. Just listen.
Speaker 1: The ever kind is cross plane it's much heavier, spins
Speaker 1: more slowly. The pistons that drive it are far enough
Speaker 1: apart that all the noise of all those little explosions
Speaker 1: inside the engine are distinct. You can hear one, then another, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 1: The pistons fire unevenly one, eight, four, three, six, five, seven, two, left, right, right, left, right, left,
Speaker 1: left right, burbling, bubbling, like a pot beginning to boil. Listen,
Speaker 1: this is a Ford Mustang g T five hundred, the
Speaker 1: cross plane sibling to the GT three fifty. That rumble,
Speaker 1: there's no mistaking it. That's a cross plane. V ad
Speaker 1: Now what's better. It's a matter of taste, of course,
Speaker 1: But serious car guys, serious ones go for the burble
Speaker 1: and the bubble of the cross plane. It's not some perfect,
Speaker 1: seamless jet engine. It's a human engine, complex, unpredictable, emotional.
Speaker 1: So where does Lexus start with its LCI engine naturally
Speaker 1: aspirated cross plane va Okay, next step. The sound coming
Speaker 1: out of an engine is a function of a lot
Speaker 1: more than the number of cylinders and the type of crankshaft.
Speaker 1: That sound is buffeted and altered and distorted by a
Speaker 1: thousand other factors as the sound ways twist their way
Speaker 1: to the pipes and tubes of the engine. If you
Speaker 1: look at the acoustic signature of an engine in its
Speaker 1: natural state, it would be jagged, lots of discordant notes
Speaker 1: mixed in with that marvelous undertone of rumble. So the
Speaker 1: job of the carmaker is then to tune that sound
Speaker 1: like a conductor brings together all the very different sounds
Speaker 1: of an orchestra. Now there's an easy way to do this.
Speaker 1: You could simply create an engine note with a synthesizer
Speaker 1: and pump it into the cabin through a speaker. Lots
Speaker 1: of carmakers do this. My daily driver, which I love,
Speaker 1: by the way, except for the thing I'm about to
Speaker 1: tell you, has a turbo four cylinder engine that tries
Speaker 1: to make up for its acoustic shortcomings by piping fake
Speaker 1: engine noise into the cabin through a little German gizmo
Speaker 1: called a sound ductor. Sound ductor sounds like sound dictator,
Speaker 1: drives me crazy. That's totally cheating. Who wants to spend
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands on a car only to have it
Speaker 1: lip sync its way from zero to sixty? You have
Speaker 1: to keep it real noise shot. Yeah, there's basically a
Speaker 1: lot of variance and frequencies, so there's a lot of
Speaker 1: noise in between those frequencies. Yea, And you do you
Speaker 1: want us you want to smooth that out? Is that it?
Speaker 1: That's subtleus on again the head of lexus. Yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: but too much sumooz is not hits your heart. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You need some noise, Yeah, some sudden point. That's the point.
Speaker 1: So if it's too smooth, no exciting, you start with
Speaker 1: the underlying engine note, then we tune a little bit
Speaker 1: so and then create some harmony. It's like a piano
Speaker 1: or trumpet or something like. If you ride in an
Speaker 1: LC at high speeds and trust me, we'll get to that,
Speaker 1: you feel like you're in a concert hall. The sound
Speaker 1: starts at the front as the car first gets underway.
Speaker 1: Then that you push the slow through. Then you get
Speaker 1: the g force. Then gradually the engine sound of the
Speaker 1: intake and the exhaust is switched. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: move moves from the front to front and back. And
Speaker 1: how do you get this instrument to sound just right?
Speaker 1: There's no formula. You just do endless trial and error.
Speaker 1: You make the intake hose a little longer or a
Speaker 1: little shorter. You vary the angle of the valves and
Speaker 1: the exhaust pipes and repeat. I forgot how many times
Speaker 1: we tried? Many times, Many times we create a pro
Speaker 1: type parts and the hearing, hear the engine sound, and
Speaker 1: then check and then on a rise and the tune again.
Speaker 1: Many times we do. But how many can you m
Speaker 1: not the hundred more, two hundred, three hundred more over
Speaker 1: what period of time whole the totally that we spend
Speaker 1: a five years, five years, five years to create one car? Yeah,
Speaker 1: five years on the engine sound. That's a lot, but
Speaker 1: it's not all. On the next episode, I'll Go and
Speaker 1: See a little dive into music theory and why we
Speaker 1: respond to sounds, even mechanical sounds, the way we do.
Speaker 1: Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily
Speaker 1: Rostek and Carl Migliari, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola
Speaker 1: composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes
Speaker 1: special thanks to Jacob Weisberg had a fame, Paul Williamson,
Speaker 1: the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers
Speaker 1: and designers who participated in our recordings. Go and See
Speaker 1: is a production of Lexus and Pushkin industries. I'm Mountain Rappo.