No doubt, car makers are looking for that one advantage that will turn a consumer in its direction for further analysis when they are buying a car. Some of the things that may turn heads could be as trivial as whether the surface of the exterior of a car shines more than it does for another brand’s car.
Lexus is one car company that has figured out a way to do just that. How does Toyota’s luxury brand do it? Well, it’s said that it is not the paint work. Rather, it is craftsmanship and robot technology.
Toyota is a zealot when it comes to quality. It is even more so for the Lexus line specifically because after all it is a luxury car. Not only are the parts checked to make certain everything works, but items as the speed in which the doors close and the sound of the seat and the sunroof sliders are carefully observed. Once a Lexus car is assembled, 1,400 items in the car go through quality checks. That’s 200 more items that goes through quality checks than at Toyota.
According to car pages, it takes 19 hours to build a Lexus and, most importantly, it takes 11 hours to produce that exterior shine. The car is dipped, base-coated, sprayed, hand-polished and sprayed a couple more times to get that shimmer that turns heads.
After the paint shop, the cars are placed under special lights where trained personnel look for flaws. If a car with a blemish is found, it is rejected and returned to repeat the process.
It is said that 10 percent of the cars produced by Lexus have to go through the process again, with 30 percent of the IS sports saloons and RX SUVs rejected alone.
Our take? Man, if our parents were that strict with us, we’d be seeing psychiatrists by now.
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