Long-term wrap-up: 2012 Lexus IS 300C

Our Lexus IS 300C has now gone back to the dealer, having spent two months with us. While we still contend that it is not the kind of car that car guys like us would buy, it is still an excellent car in its own right, and we enjoyed driving it. At times, we had up to six cars on our fleet to pick from when heading out to events, and we’d pick the Lexus because it was the luxury car of the bunch.

Here is us showing up at the Yas Viceroy Hotel in Abu Dhabi for the Mercedes-Benz AMG Performance Tour roadshow. The event included free hotel stay and lots of free food.

Here is us showing up at the Meydan Hotel in Dubai for the Jaguar ‘Are You Alive’ event. The event included overnight stay at another resort, lots of free food, and lots of animals.

Here is us showing up at the Hatta Fort Hotel for the Ford Built Tough event. This one had free overnight stay, free food, free mini-golf and lots of peacocks.

It garners enough respect at the valets, so we could leave our Honda S2000 at home for those snooty showings. It also seems to suitably impress non-enthusiasts, women in particular. In fact, we started counting how many of these cars we could spot in Dubai, and managed to find about 5 or 6, mostly driven by upscale women. And that was already more than the number of BMW 3-Series cabrios and Infiniti G37 convertibles we could spot. Maybe the IS 300’s lower price is a factor.

Anyway, we’ll put up a full road test of this car soon, but for now, we’ll look at old photos and yearn for our Honda to have been this comfortable.