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First off, ever since I saw these beauties in Options years ago, I wanted one. I've got the Hyper-Rev for it :) That and the GS400. I even scanned pics for IS300.net quite some time back. Anyway, when I first saw the taillights, I was in love. No one had done anything with clear/red here and it was very clean and very nice and best of all it was STOCK. Perfect compliment on that car. Alot of the Altezzas were also tricked out there and as such, there are some great 'clean' body kits for it and a ton of performance parts. I didn't know the price or anything of that sort then... all I knew was that Toyota was rumored to be bringing it out here under the Lexus brand at some point. I was happy For quite some time they were debating an engine to bring over. People pleaded for the V6 rather than some shitty I4 they were considering (though the power difference wasn't drastic). How could they sell a car under the Lexus name with an I4? During all the hype, the press, the hooplah, I started noticing something VERY disturbing... A few people grafted the Altezza lights into their preludes/etc. I thought it looked nice actually. A month later, molds to fit like stock were coming out for Accords, oldie preludes, and others with similiar taillight shapes. A month after that, every damn car had clear with round red crap and in every variation you could think of. It totally washed the unique factor of one of Altezzas strongest points (I believed it won a few design awards in Japan as well). I was very, very sad. No fucking originality. Clear is out. Clear/red is in. Sooo... Lexus announces a V6. Then they announce a price and I just about died. $34k ($35?) BASE. hahahahahahahahaha. Comfortably equipped, you had a $40k car. Not too shy of a GS' price. After that nail-in-the-coffin, I pretty much wrote off ever owning one. The car is not 'worth' that price. It simply isn't. And the kicker is, everyone says it resembles a civic for the most part. Well, yeah, considering that before the Altezza actually hit here, every H&A car had their taillight style! The body form and shortness of the car were Civic-y as well. If you spend $35k on a car, you'd expect it to maintain some of the features that made you want that car in the first place. I can buy a Civic and practically turn it into an Altezza aesthetically, and I certainly know I could make it faster for half the cost. At this point you're paying strictly for the comfort (which some say is debatable) on the inside cuz everything else is moot. I still love the blue ones, but I can't say they 'do it' for me anymore. Lexus' big mistake was price (probably to keep it out of the hands of the masses more than anything else). The rest was, well... dilution. Boo. Boo hoo.
-Tim
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