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The 2022 Lexus IS500 features a naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V-8 with 472 horsepower.
Lexus calls it an F Sport Performance model rather than a full F like its RC F coupe sibling.
The 2022 IS500 will go on sale in the U.S. this fall.
Lexus’s familiar 5.0-liter V-8 engine has returned to the IS sports sedan, this time in the form of the new 2022 IS500 F Sport Performance model. Although the company is not calling it a full F model this time around, the IS500 reminds us of the original IS F. That car, which first appeared in 2008, had this same naturally aspirated V-8, bulging hood, and overall stance.

Tested: 2008 Lexus IS F

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This time around, the V-8 produces 472 horsepower and 395 pound-feet of torque, the same as in the RC F coupe. Rear-wheel drive and an eight-speed automatic transmission are standard. The IS500 has the same limited-slip differential and adaptive dampers that are optional on the V-6–powered IS350 F Sport. The IS500’s brakes are slightly larger, and the 19-inch wheels are exclusive to this model and claim to be lighter than the IS350 F Sport’s wheels. Overall curb weight is up by a claimed 143 pounds over the V-6 car.

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Lexus

Lexus says that the IS500 will get to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds, which we think is conservative even if it’s significantly quicker than the 5.6-second run we achieved in a 2021 IS350 F Sport. The V-8 sings its distinctive song through quad exhaust tips, and drivers should be prepared to rev it out given that peak power doesn’t arrive until 7100 rpm.
The IS500 looks meaner than the standard car thanks to its hood bulge that sits two inches higher, and the front bumper and fenders are reshaped as well. Out back there’s a lip spoiler and different diffuser. Other details include dark window trim and black F Sport badges. There are various F badges inside as well, along with different pedals and a special animation for the digital gauge cluster.

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Lexus

Given that Lexus refers to this model as an F Sport Performance rather than an IS F, we’re curious how it will be positioned in the sports-sedan segment. Its power output places it close to the BMW M3s and Mercedes-AMG C63s of the world, but it’s possible that Lexus will price it more like the lesser M340i and AMG C43 models given its badging. The RC F starts at $67,000, and we’d guess that the IS500 will be several thousand less than that. At the right sticker price, the Is500 could be an attractive proposition. It may be the last compact sports sedan with a V-8 engine, now that we know that the next-generation C63 will be a hybrid with a four-cylinder gasoline engine.
We’ll have to wait for more details on price, as Lexus says that it will release more info on the the IS500 closer to its on-sale date this fall.
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COVID-19 forced many cancellations in Formula 1, from the season-opening Australian Grand Prix to almost every event on the calendar outside of Europe when the season actually began. It did not, however, cancel production of the Netflix documentary series Drive to Survive, which was able to film throughout the shortened, rescheduled season. Netflix will debut the third season of the documentary series on its platform on March 19.

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A quick teaser posted on the official F1 Twitter account hints at a season focused on the challenge of keeping a globe-trotting championship together in a year defined by new concerns and roadblocks. The in-weekend cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix, the day cars were set to take to the track in competition for the first time all season, will surely be a significant storyline early in the season, as will the race to get the championship back online on relatively short notice before the Austrian Grand Prix in July.
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In addition to COVID concerns, other major storylines for the season are likely to include AlphaTauri’s miraculous win at Monza, the massive fireball at Bahrain that injured Haas F1’s Romain Grosjean, and the lasting impact of a year of racing headlined by Lewis Hamilton, who spent 2020 fighting for justice and cementing his résumé as the greatest ever to race. Given how past seasons of Drive to Survive have gone, the hard-fought battle for third place in the championship—ultimately contested between McLaren, Racing Point, and Renault—should also be a major talking point.

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If you’ve ever thought there should really be a way to enjoy #VanLife in an RV-based Transformer, look no further than the SAIC Maxus Life Home V90 Villa Edition.
With a luxury bar and living space, an elevator, and an upstairs Zen tea room, the V90 Villa would certainly draw attention at the campsite, even though it looks relatively normal when it’s driving down the road.
Unfortunately, this RV is meant for the China market, where it will sell for a little over $413,000.
When thinking of way to make an RV larger, most people think longer. Some imagine a wider motorhome. But the Chinese engineers behind the SAIC Maxus Life Home V90 Villa Edition had a different idea: why not extend upward? They didn’t imagine just a simple pop-up roof, either, but a full-fledged upper level with a walk-out deck.

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The two-story RV is full of surprises. When it’s in driving mode, the V90 Villa Edition looks like a fairly standard RV. But when it opens up, Transformers style, at the spot where you’re planning to spend the night, it becomes more than a tiny home on wheels. First, you can extend the V90 Villa’s pop-out sides, which give the main floor a total size of 215 square feet. This space includes the living room, kitchen, “luxury bar,” and bathroom.

SAIC

SAIC

Upstairs, which you reach via elevator, you’ll find the second-level extension gives you another 133 square feet that can be used as an “open, sunlight room,” a Zen tea room, or a study, Maxus said, with windows that can transition from clear to opaque depending on your privacy needs. You can’t store large furniture up there, so the company website shows the space with lots of low tables and pillows.

SAIC

The V90 Villa Edition uses LED lighting in the taillights, as accent lights on the outside of the RV, and as a way to create a gentle atmosphere while you’re out on the upper deck. The interior living spaces can be outfitted with any number of convenience and luxury items, such as a JBL sound system, washing machine, kitchenette and air conditioner. There’s an app-driven infotainment screen in the dashboard with navigation. There’s also a pull-out cooking area behind the RV’s rear passenger-side wheel that can turn your campsite into a kitchen with an even better view.

SAIC

We will note here that the company website doesn’t feature any actual pictures of the V90 Villa Edition, just renderings, including one of a Level 4 autonomous drive lidar sensor on the top of the front end. That said, SAIC Maxus sells a wide variety of RVs in China and other versions of the V90 are pictured on the company website. The basic (i.e., non-Villa) edition of the Life Home V90 starts at the equivalent of $70,960, but according to New Atlas, the V90 Villa Edition starts at just over $413,000.

SAIC

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Road & Track will be chatting all things McLaren next week. Want in?
For the next episode of Inside Track, the magazine’s virtual Q&A series, our friends at R&T are excited to welcome guests Andy Thomas, McLaren of the Americas VP, and Dave Shuten, renowned builder from Galpin Speed Shop, star of Discovery’s Car Kings, and artist behind this 765LT that appears on the latest cover of Road & Track. It’s all happening on Thursday, February 25, at 5:00 p.m. ET, and they’d love for you to join them.
Register Here
In this episode, Road & Track executive editor Dan Pund will sit down with Thomas and Shuten to discuss the custom-painted 765LT and the recent launch of the all-new Artura—a creation that draws together decades of McLaren’s pioneering expertise. If you want to see it all go down, head over to the dedicated sign-up page here.
Inside Track is one of the many offerings of the newly revamped Road & Track. They’re hosting live events, virtual experiences, and adventures around the globe. They will also be hosting driving rallies at racetracks and on the most epic roads, holding discussions and debates on cool topics with some of the most influential people in the car world, and giving members the white-glove treatment at concours and auto show events.
Plus, you can access McLaren’s global reveal of the Artura here and read all about the new car here.
If you want to get in on the fun, become a member of The Track Club. You’ll get every issue of Road & Track magazine, plus a whole lot more. Find more details on the membership tiers and exclusive discounts at roadandtrack.com/join, and check out the full experiences lineup at experiences.roadandtrack.com.
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A Window Shop viewer sent us this week’s challenge: It’s often said that Miata is always the answer, but what if Miata isn’t the answer? What would we buy instead? Contributor John Pearley Huffman had the exact same idea and deputy editor, host of this recorded Zoom call, and author of this sentence, Tony Quiroga decided that perhaps he could put the Window Shoppers to work to find him a replacement for his beloved 1995 Mazda Miata.
To tailor the task to himself, Quiroga set a $10,000 budget, requested cars that offer an interesting driving experience, low mileage, and Miata-like reliability (as if such a thing is possible). He also suggested that a manual gearbox and rear-drive would be preferred, but not mandatory, and opened the possibilities to cars and SUVs.
Huffman didn’t pick a rear-drive car, but his second-gen Honda CRX nailed the fun-to-drive and reliability aspects. Unfortunately, his CRX suffered from some aggressively applied tire sheen and he also ran over the $10,000 budget. Contributor Jonathon Ramsey also picked a two seater, a high-revving Honda S2000 with nearly 200,000 miles, but the listing left too much to the imagination. Deputy testing director K.C. Colwell and senior editor Joey Capparella went outside the two-seater box entirely. Colwell went with an E39 BMW 528i manual and Capparella cleverly chose a 2002 Toyota Tacoma, which somehow meets all of this week’s requirements.If you make it to the end, you’ll notice that we miscounted the votes and mistakenly thought there was a tie. There wasn’t a tie. One vehicle emerges above the rest, but it really doesn’t matter, because Quiroga was only interested in buying his choice.
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Popular Twitch streamer Fuslie and 554,000 unique viewers crowdsourced customizations to this 2021 Lexus IS350 F Sport to transform it into a high-performance custom gaming PC.
Viewers on Twitch voted to choose the theme of the exterior, interior, gaming hardware, and even which refreshment to fill the six-drink center console cooler with.
Fabrication work was completed by SCPS in Southern California, the same production studio that built concepts and movie props for Spider-Man: Homecoming and costume pieces for Avengers: Endgame.
Over half a million Twitch viewers voted to decide how funky the internet should make a 311-hp Lexus IS F Sport. Popular Twitch streamer Leslie, better known as Fuslie to her 762,000 followers, chose between several themes and hardware options provided by Lexus to create an IS F Sport with a 27-inch 4K display in the passenger seat, connected to a high-performance gaming PC in the trunk.

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A team of 20 fabricators at the SCPS production studio used 3D printers, artists, structural engineers, and computer techs to bring this crowdsourced IS350 F Sport from concept to completion in five months. The outside of the IS350 F Sport is wrapped in vinyl, with a design that’s supposed to represent some Special Operations/Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six type of stuff. The dark colors and geometric shapes are meant to illustrate a stealthy first-person gaming experience. Below are other options viewers had to choose from.

MORE IS350 PHOTOS

Lexus

The guts of the car look a lot like the inside of most modern PC cases and other computer hardware. It’s been filled with a bunch of RGB LED lighting, including programmable ceiling tiles that are crazier than the starlight headliner Rolls-Royce put in its Ghost Zenith models. The 27-inch Samsung 4K curved display is big enough that Lexus told us it doesn’t suggest people drive this particular IS350 F Sport on the open road because its mass blocks forward visibility.
A retractable keyboard and mouse are also onboard, as well as a 3D-printed controller for less than serious gamers. The passenger seat uses haptic feedback technology that lets you feel the gameplay. There’s also Smart Tint film on the windows that can darken the cabin on command to cut back on glare while you game.

The added computer power is enough to handle everything from Goat Simulator to Call of Duty Warzone at 4K resolution. Viewers elected the hardware package that included an AMD Ryzen 9 590X processor, an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. That graphics card was out of stock during fabrication, so SCPS had to use an MSI GeForce RTX 2080 card instead. Unfortunately, the Lexus IS350 F Sport doesn’t power the system. Lexus explained that a wall outlet is required, because it’s obviously a giant waste of gasoline to sit in the driveway while the car idles just so you can rant on Twitter and watch Engineering Explained on YouTube until 3 a.m. every night.

Lexus

The Lexus IS received styling updates for 2021, with a better infotainment system and more driver-assistance features, but we’re glad they featured the rear-drive F Sport for this partnership, because it has bigger wheels, more aggressive styling, and a peppier V-6. When we tested the 2021 IS350 F Sport last year, we found its interior comfy but felt the powertrain could be more exciting with forced induction.
The trend of automakers partnering with Twitch has become popular recently. Honda debuted its 2022 Honda Civic concept live on Twitch in November 2020 just before jumping back into Esports gameplay from Rocket League.
According to TwitchTracker.com, the livestreaming platform reached 2.9 million average concurrent viewers this month, with total hours viewed reaching over 2.1 billion hours in January. In other words, it’s like a small Super Bowl every day in terms of viewership. Although this year’s Super Bowl caught 96.4 million viewers for its roughly four-hour football game, nearly 15 million people watch Twitch per day.
If you want to watch Fuslie and the Twitch community design the car step by step, you can find the stream below:
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This prototype of a Taycan Cross Turismo gives us a glimpse at the production version of this wagon variant.
The Cross Turismo was first shown in concept form in 2018.
It should share its electric drivetrain and basic components with the Taycan sedan, but with more cargo space and a raised suspension.
Porsche is nearly ready to take the SUV-inspired wagon trend into the electric sphere with the upcoming Taycan Cross Turismo. First shown in concept form years ago, the Cross Turismo is now in prototype stage, and these images give us a good indication of what the final product will look like.

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The Cross Turismo’s extended roofline is the biggest change compared with the Taycan sedan, and it should offer considerably more cargo space. There’s also extra wheel-arch cladding, and Porsche says that it has revised the air suspension to provide extra ground clearance. As such, we don’t expect the Cross Turismo to offer the Taycan’s new rear-wheel-drive base setup. Instead, it should come standard with all-wheel drive like the Panamera’s Sport Turismo wagon variant does.

Porsche

The 522-hp dual-motor setup from the Taycan 4S is the most likely candidate for the Cross Turismo’s base powertrain, with 670-hp Turbo and 750-hp Turbo S models set to join the lineup as well. It will likely offer the same battery-pack options as the sedan, meaning either a 71.0-kWh pack as standard and an 83.7-kWh pack as optional. Due to the Cross Turismo’s extra weight, it may offer worse driving-range estimates than the sedan, which is rated at up to 227 miles by the EPA for the 2021 Taycan 4S with the upgraded battery pack.
Porsche doesn’t say exactly when it will reveal the Taycan Cross Turismo in full, but we think it will arrive within the next few months with a starting price around $110,000.
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The Morgan Plus 8 ended production back in 2018 with a limited run of 50th Anniversary edition cars. It was supposed to be a final sendoff for the flagship and its aging BMW-sourced 4.8-liter naturally aspirated V-8. But today, the low-volume British retro carmaker announced it will be putting the Plus 8 back into production for an extremely limited run of high-performance “GTR” models.

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Why? you ask. Well, Morgan says this special project was only possible because a number of Plus 8 rolling chassis, built by the automaker before 2018 for a third-party manufacturer, had recently become available for purchase. Morgan presumably bought them back and decided they’d be best used for developing an ultra-low-production special edition model. So the GTR was born.
The Plus 8 GTR, like all Aero-chassis Plus 8s, will be powered by BMW’s naturally aspirated N62 V-8 engine. While previous cars made 367 horsepower, Morgan has yet to release final outputs for these new GTR models, suggesting more power could be on the horizon. Torque will be sent to the rear wheels via the buyer’s choice of six-speed manual or ZF six-speed automatic transmission.

“Reviving a V-8-powered Morgan at the current time may not seem like the obvious choice for a manufacturer firmly focused on new platforms and powertrains,” head of design Jonathan Wells said in a statement. “However, when the opportunity presented itself to recommission a number of rolling chassis and create an exciting special project such as Plus 8 GTR, we embraced it fully. This project has allowed Morgan’s design and engineering teams to revisit some of their favorite elements of past Morgan models, as well as experiment with some features that we hope will appear on future Morgan cars.”
Morgan will build just nine examples of the Plus 8 GTR, with production starting in summer 2021. The company says buyers will have the opportunity to visit the factory to commission their cars, which is pretty cool considering how awesome the Morgan factory is.

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