It’s easy to forget about the Lexus GS. Even though it’s a competent mid-size luxury sedan, it’s easily among the older and less-loved vehicles in the Lexus lineup. That’s saying something—because the gigantic, old-school LX SUV is, deep down under its crazy styling quite on its years. The most recent bone Lexus tossed the GS’s way was a limited 200-car run of Black Line Special Edition GS models. If a report from Yahoo Japan is to be believed, GS production more broadly also is limited—because the Lexus will die in August of this year.
Rumors and hints have been swirling for a while now that the GS was on the chopping block. For 2020, Lexus dropped the entry-level four-cylinder GS200t trim. Last year, Lexus sold just 3,378 examples of the GS. Compare that to the 51,338 examples of the slightly smaller, front-wheel-drive ES the automaker sold, and it’s clear the GS is no longer the not-SUV Lexus of choice for a vast majority of buyers who want something larger than the entry-level IS. Even the more luxurious and vastly more expensive LS outsold the GS in 2019.
The fourth-generation GS has been with us since 2012, and even though it received a major overhaul in 2016, the platform on which it is based hasn’t changed at all. While the facelift also included the addition of a V-8 powered GS F model, the mid-sized rear-drive sport sedan continued to slowly fall out of favor with consumers.
According to the report, there are no plans to replace the GS with a new or refreshed model for 2021. After more than 20 years, it’s looking like 2020 will be the GS’s final year with us. Apparently, the IS and ES are expanding enough—translation: growing larger—to cover the gap left by the GS’s absence.
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