Toyota Spent $1 Billion on a Single Car: The Lexus LS400 Story

Fifteen champagne glasses, stacked on the hood of a sedan running at 240 km/h. Not a single one moved. The company that built that engine made Corollas. This is the story of the Lexus LS400 and Ichiro Suzuki, the engineer who refused to compromise on anything, and built a car so perfect it forced Mercedes to fire its chief engineer and BMW to accuse Toyota of cheating. In this Lexus LS400 documentary: How Toyota's secret "Circle-F" project spent over $1 billion to build the world's best luxury car from scratch. How Suzuki sat in his colleague's office and refused to leave until he agreed to build the engine. The 1UZ-FE V8 so mechanically perfect the FAA later certified a version of it to fly aircraft. The Arizona desert test that left Mercedes and BMW benchmarks cracked while the LS400 looked new. The shoebox full of keys that ended an argument no one could win. The $35,000 price that triggered a German bloodbath Mercedes delayed the W140 by 18 months, fired chief engineer Wolfgang Peter, and BMW formally accused Lexus of dumping. The dark side every mechanic knows: the buried starter motor, the alternator-killing leak, and the ECU capacitors that rotted from the inside. And the 1996 LS400 that crossed one million miles on its original engine block never opened. In 2026, after 36 years, Lexus is retiring the LS. This is the story of how it began and why the Germans never forgot it. #lexusls400 #lexus #toyota