Having pursued perfection for decades, Lexus is now chasing something else: youth. Can a new turbo engine help to reinvent Japan’s leading luxury brand?

SINGAPORE — “Today’s Lexus is four years old,” says Kirk Edmondson, the the general manager of brand management for Lexus’ Asia-Pacific division. Edmondson is pretty much the ultimate Lexus insider. Having been with the brand since its origins in 1989, he’s uniquely placed to perceive how Japan’s leading luxury nameplate has evolved with time, and says the brand has changed more rapidly in the past three or four years than in the 20-something years before then.

One manifestation of how Lexus is discovering its youthful side is the new turbo engine that powers the NX 200t, the brand’s latest car for Singapore. The new engine is making its market debut in the NX, but will spread across the Lexus range. The all-new RX is another beneficiary of turbo power, and the 2.0-litre, 234bhp engine is almost certain to find its way into other models, most likely the IS and GS.

Lexus is counting on the turbo to win new customers to the fold. It’s certainly proven popular so far. Edmondson says the USA is seeing 85 per cent of NX sales come from the 200t. While Lexus has emphasised refinement over the years, the turbo engine is meant to bring something new to the brand: fun.

“The turbos are more fun to drive than the hybrids,” says Edmondson. “It had to be fun to drive first. Once we got that we could figure out the fuel economy and the smoothness.”

The stopwatch suggests that the turbo will offer more of what a keen driver wants, anyway. The NX 200t sprints to 100km/h in as little as 7.1 seconds, compared to 9.2 seconds for the NX Hybrid.

MORE: Full details of the NX 200t, Lexus’ first turbo car

This marks something of a new direction for a brand that has pretty much become synonymous with fuel-sipping hybrid technology. In Western Europe, nine of every 10 Lexus cars sold is a hybrid, while here in Singapore, 50 per cent of the brand’s best-selling model, the ES, are hybrids.

But having sewn up the market for hybrids, Lexus is now turning its attention to a different sort of crowd.  “A lot of people would rather dial up the fun factor than the fuel economy factor,” says Edmondson. Cars like the NX 200t are for them.

Yet, even as Lexus tries to reinvent itself to appeal to a sportier, more youthful crowd, as a car company it seems content to do things at its own pace. The turbo engine took 10 years to develop, an epoch in car industry terms, though Edmondson says the project was derailed somewhat by the economic turmoil that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007.

Perhaps that’s how the engine ended up very Lexus-like in nature. A huge amount of effort went into dampening NVH (or Noise, Vibration and Harshness), says Edmondson. Smoothness and what Edmondson calls “turbine-like” performance were high priorities.

“It’s about having a turbo in a Lexus way,” says Klaus Redomske, the marketing director for Lexus at local distributor Borneo Motors. “It’s about refined exhilaration.” While the new turbo engine is a few years late to market compared to German turbos, Redomske says that it doesn’t try to copy them.

MORE: Next in line for turbo power — the new RX

The engine is likely the only turbo out there that can switch into a fuel-saving Atkinson cycle mode of operation, for one thing. It also comes with start-stop tech (that is, it kills itself automatically at red lights, and starts up by itself when the driver wants to go) that Lexus has worked hard to perfect.

The engine apparently uses the precision of its direct fuel injection system to facilitate a faster, smoother start-up, to keep the engine from jarring the NX’s occupants each time it bursts back to life.

Unlike other carmakers, Lexus makes its own turbochargers in-house instead of buying them from a third party. That brings obvious benefits to a brand famously obsessed with quality.

But if hopes are high for the new engine, Lexus has seen a surge in sales even without it. Globally, the brand’s sales are up around 10 per cent compared to the same period in 2014 (itself a record year for Lexus), and here in Singapore the numbers are up 21 per cent, to 240 units in the first three months of 2015.

Given that the NX 200t has only been on the market for a little more than a week, its impact on sales has been impossible to judge so far. Redomske says the car is expected to help with conquest sales — that is, to bring customers from other brands into the Lexus fold.

It will be interesting to see how Lexus’ first turbo performs here, then. This time, a stopwatch won’t be the only way to judge an engine’s performance.

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