When it comes to great cars on sale today, pretty much everyone agrees that the Lexus LC 500 is something special. A sensory-rich blend of leathers and colours, this grand tourer hones a time-honored formula so finely, its resulting edge could split an atom. It’s also one of those cars we all know can’t stick around forever, but so long as you can still buy a new one, life’s good. It brings me joy to relay the message that the Lexus LC 500 is sticking around for 2026, although one previously available powertrain is now off the table.
A Lexus spokesperson has confirmed that the hybrid-powered LC 500h will no longer be offered in America for 2026, leaving grand tourer shoppers with a penchant for reliability the sole choice of a 471-horsepower naturally aspirated five-liter V8. It’s one of the all-time great engines, a visceral instrument of induction and exhaust noise as intoxicating as it is robust. The lineage of this V8 dates back to the 2008 IS F and features a solid track record of reliability, giving LC 500 owners another great reason to grand tour in their GT car.
While dropping the hybrid option may seem puzzling considering how Lexus has gone hard in the hybrid paint, I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Not only was it only available in the coupe body style, it didn’t exactly sell in huge volumes. Last year, Lexus sold 1,464 LC coupes and convertibles in America, a respectable number for a six-figure luxury two-door. Care to guess how many of them featured hybrid power? Just 18. That’s only a 1.229 percent take rate for an entire powertrain.
So, the LC 500 that almost everyone wants carries on for the 2026 model year, but not without some fresh new color and trim options to mix things up a bit. There are two new Inspiration Series models that add a little something extra to each body style, starting with the coupe. Exactly 200 units will come to North America in Smoke Matte Grey with black accents, black forged wheels, canards, a carbon fiber spoiler, red brake calipers, and a black-and-white interior. As you’d expect, this limited edition gets all the performance options, including rear-wheel-steering and sport seats, along with gadgets like a Mark Levinson Reference sound system.
Dropping the top on serialized editions, the LC 500 Convertible Inspiration Series takes a lighter approach with a ceramic-like paint called Wind, a striking brown-and-silver top, Saddle Tan and white leather, canards, and forged wheels of many spokes. Sure, the canards are a bit rakish, but this is a refined spec suited to C-suites and Pebble Beach.
Of course, if you want to pull a Fleetwood Mac and go your own way, the Bespoke Build option remains, allowing you to mix-and-match a variety of colors, textiles, wheels, trims, and options, including red or blue soft tops, and a choice of comfort or sport seats on coupes. Each Bespoke Build LC 500 also comes with a console badge and a washi paper certificate of authenticity signed by chief engineer Yasushi Muto. That’ll look fantastic framed in your office.
Oh, and perhaps the best news is that in an age of heavy price increases, the 2026 Lexus LC 500 keeps things reasonable. The coupe starts at $103,150 including freight, a sensible $1,275 more than the 2025 model. As for the 2026 LC 500 convertible, it starts at $110,650 including freight, a reasonable $1,575 more than the 2025 model and five figures less than a comparable Porsche 911 or Mercedes-AMG SL 55. If you’re shopping for a sub-$200,000 grand tourer with a sizeable dealer network and want a big ballet dancer rather than simply a leather-lined sports car, skip the BMW 8 Series, skip the Mercedes range, and just go directly to your local Lexus dealer. It’s that good.
Top graphic image: Lexus
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…Is it bad I never knew a hybrid was even offered on this? I always thought it was V8 only.
Then again, if I had the money to buy one…
I’d buy a V8.
The hybrid version of this car is for the typical Lexus customer who wants that ‘sporty-looking’ coupe, but doesn’t need the noise of a V8, and wants to silently creep along when the traffic is slow.
Then again, my spouse is a huge hybrid fan, and if this is what it would take to get the green light….. (Then again, I like the sound of the V6. Never have driven or heard the V8 except on YouTube.)
HEY! I daily drive a 2017 LC500 I bought last year. Fantastic car, makes very un-Lexus V8 burbles. Owned a C5 and C6 Vette, then shifted to a Camaro SS (because baby)…and now the LC500, because even though I used to buy performance I know in my heart of hearts I’m really a GT guy since I never race anything. I was always turned off by the Lexus widowmaker grilles but the rest of the car styling is fantastic.
The LC500 slots in between a Porsche 911 Carrera and a Panamera. The 911 is lighter and smaller, shorter wheelbase…but it’s a 2+2 with similar power outputs and sits in the sport/luxury space. A Panamera is closer to the same weight and can be spec’d with a front mount V8…but it is much longer and larger than the LC500. A shortened 2+2 Panamera would be the most accurate, but that car hasn’t existed in the Porsche lineup since the 928.
Am I the only person perplexed about cars being pulled out of a promising market in which they made no attempt to market the product? Where are they advertising? I can’t tell you where the closest Lexus dealership is to me or what cars they make. I have only heard about them from this website. And they make decisions based on sales when they don’t advertise anything? Explain this to me. I may not have seen a Jaguar as lately but they stopped making those and started building a Frankenstein Monster that will finally kill Jaguar.
Where do you live that you aren’t seeing Lexus ads? I see plenty of them here in Oregon. (Or maybe more important – what are you watching as different brands target different markets)
Apparently in the last month they aired 8,324 ads which ranks them 68th. That is more than Toyota which only aired 6,294 ads.
Some of the competition:
64 – Lincoln
460 – BMW
469 – Acura
580 – Cadillac
822 – Mercedes
2,205 – Audi
2,565 – Genesis
If you want to watch some Lexus TV ads:
https://www.ispot.tv/brands/dHn/lexus
“I can’t tell you where the closest Lexus dealership is to me or what cars they make. I have only heard about them from this website.”
Nice humblebrag!
My mother in laws best friend, 77 years old, has one of these. She happens to live local to us. She came to our house for dinner when my in-laws was came down from PA for a weekend visit. She is sharp as a tack, and a wickedly sarcastic Yankee living in the South.
Hers was some kind of silver with a light blue-gray-ish interior (she said she had it re-done at a shop here that top $$$, the best around).
The thing looks and sounds amazing. I made a joke that when she is ready to sell, to call me..
Sadly, she said that her only child had died recently, so there was no one to inherit it, and that if I was serious, that when she starts downsizing, she’d call me. But…she’d expect fair market price. But she plans to live to at least 100. 😀
So…I dunno..we’ll see. If the price if right, I’m in.
The LC is a car I desperately want, despite it filling no niche I don’t have. I have a Miata, which provides the most driving engagement you can get as a daily driver. I don’t commute, and when I need to put on miles, it is with a car full of enough stuff for two adults and two dogs for two to four weeks away from home.
If I purchased an LC, it would spend most of its time in the garage and likely get driven less than a thousand miles a year. But it doesn’t matter, every time I swap out a car, I spend more time looking at LCs than whatever car I end up with.
I just can’t bear to give up the fun of the Miata for the luxury of the LC.
I am not surprised the hybrid sold so poorly, primarily because most dealership typically only have one LC in their showroom and it is always a V8 model. Certainly, most LCs are custom ordered, but I can’t imagine anyone taking a test drive in the V8 and then still deciding on the hybrid.
Like so many others, I love the LC500 and would love to have one down the road, but I suspect they will hold their value long term better than anyone would expect. Gorgeous design, great build quality, and great reliability. I am not a fan of convertibles, but the LC500 is the one model since probably the 1960s where the convertible version looks just as good as the coupe version. I wish I had the means to buy one, but I doubt they will ever depreciate enough for that to be an option for me.
Honestly, I was planning to be a buyer of the hybrid LC500 for my next purchase. My only reasons for delay are waiting for the kids to get older and wanting to put more down for in the given interest rate market.
I can’t quite explain why… It just seems absolutely perfect. I’m a fan of the Toyota hybrids and I think this has been the peak of that to date. Hopefully they replace it soon.
Let us clear, these are fugly cars wit no redeeming qualities whatsoever and when they are three years old they smell like a derelict chicken shed that has been dipped in smelly poo, they are nightmare to mantain, do not get me started about the tyres, or the annoying gasket thing, or that dreadful noise,yes that one. Which is why second hand ones are to found for about $2000.everywhere.
Well, it’s worth a try!
We are assuming that that is sarcasm. It does sound just like what the pathetic trolls like to post when a particularly good vehicle is profiled.
Nic wants prices to remain low after it goes out of production. Nic is a smart man. I’ll second Nic:
Yeah, these are are absolute shit and buying one is the worst thing you can do in life.
The green ones with tan leather interiors are especially atrocious. I wouldn’t take one if it was free and have definitely never visited the Lexus configurator page to see how much one would cost.
I would expand that and say any of the non-gray/silver with black interiors are truly vile. The standard silver with black is somewhat passable.
I never understood why they put a hybrid drivetrain in this thing, especially a hybrid V6. That V8 sounds so good, it would be criminal to buy one without it.
A guy in my old neighborhood had one when they first came out. White with red interior, which is my personal favorite spec, especially on a Lexus, because Lexus Ultra White is a fantastic white. The LC has haunted my dreams ever since. I’m hoping that I’m able to find a decent pre-owned one in the next 3-5 years.
i imagined that Toyota envisioned a customer that just doesn’t exist. An executive that wants an expensive, yet stylish car but they either drive 20k miles a year and want to keep fuel costs low or they want the image of caring for the environment and the “HYBRID” badge is important to them. Or maybe it was just a test mule/ proof of concept for some next gen hybrid technologies.
I imagine a retiree that wants to buy their “last car”, and can stomach the up-front cost but wants to keep maintenance and fuel down so it doesn’t continuously drain their savings after. A similarly non-existent market, in this day and age where anything without a third row is considered compact.
This is not the route I expected them to take. Regardless, the moment the LC halts production, values will skyrocket.
Shut your dirty little mouth! I want to buy a second hand one at some point.
It’s a dream car of mine. Comfy grand tourer, Toyota reliability, amazing engine noise, super special and bespoke interior, good sound system. It’s like they made it for a rich version of me.
The V8 in these must be so sweet. I bought an LS460 as a highway cruiser and was amazed to find such a sweet, snarly engine in a Toyota product. It just begs you to put your foot down and I’m happy to comply.
It’s difficult to see why anyone would choose the hybrid. On paper, it’s great that you get a car like this with performance not far off the V8, plus get decent mileage, but that V8 sounds so damn good. I don’t know why they don’t sell better. They’re cheaper than the predictable, boring choices you see everywhere, come in fantastic color combos, have Lexus quality, and really stand out in person without going too far. They’re not as quick as the competitors, but they aren’t slow and they’re not track cars, so in the real world, the performance is accessible. I just wish they depreciated more. Hey, everyone, these suck! Stay away! Bad!
Not that I can afford to be in the market (so: grain of salt) but I think the front end styling might just be ugly enough to drive folks toward a Merc or Porsche.
This is the one spindle grille that works. The car is magnificent.
I agree this is on the less-offensive side of the spindle grilles they’ve done, but the issue for me is the droopy/blackeye headlights bisected by a 2000s-era tech logo swoosh.
To me, Porsches look like suppositories they might give a hippo. They’ve offered nothing new in terms of styling in decades, they’re a lot more expensive, and they’re ubiquitous. If I’m paying even half that much for something interesting, I don’t want to see other cars like mine everywhere. I like the AMG GT, but that’s also a lot more expensive unless you want a turbo 4 and I’d want something a bit more interesting for 6-figures (and more trustworthy than a 2.0 with that much power). In person, I think the Lexus grille works on this one model, though it’s not its best styling point. I don’t disagree that the styling might put some people off, but the sales numbers seem particularly low considering how well regarded they are by seemingly everyone who’s driven one. Like you, though, I’m not in the market and I don’t know if I’d spend that much on a new car even if I were when there are so many animal rescues and research projects I could support with that money.
The only redeeming quality I see for the hybrid is you can get 700 miles on a tank at a non-abysmal mpg, while being in the lap of Grand Touring luxury the whole way. It might even be the only one to hold that spot?
Yeah, it’s normally the kind of idea that appeals to me as a weirdo, and I also can’t think of anything quite like it, but it’s ultimately more of a heart car than a brain one and the V8 is just a better fit in that case. I know if I bought the hybrid, I’d be regretting it every time I accelerated. Turns out that the V8 is even a few grand cheaper.
I genuinely have no idea why the hybrid ever existed in the first place
I hate Lexus front-ends (the hourglass grill, mainly), but everything else about this car seems great! That convertible especially looks really nice.
Excellent news that this lives another year (at least).
I legitimately do not know why someone would choose one of its direct competitors.
If I was in the position to drop 100 large on a fun car I’d have a hard time picking anything other than an LC500. The 718 GTS would warrant a look though, and of course there are two different C8s lurking in the background as well. The Z06 serves a VERY different purpose but I’d imagine that the E Ray makes a mighty fine GT.
The Z is pretty basic at LC prices, to get one similarly furnished is more like 130-140k. Tougher call for sure, as good as this sounds, it’s no 8600 rpm flat plane.
For me though the decision is easy because only one car you named even has a chance of putting a kid or two in back.
This car is pretty much the definition of a “panty-dropper” – it impresses her so much on the first date with you that she wants to make damn sure that you’ll ask her out for a second date.
Gross
Ew.
…and yet, nobody in high school can afford one. Sorry.
Because they’re not breathtakingly ugly.
Imagine how many Lexus could sell if these had been attractive cars – Like the X Coupe and Convertible Concepts from Genesis?
Calling this car ugly is a take I never expected to see, but it takes all kinds I suppose.
For me the BMW 8 series or Porsche Panamera would be a pretty easy “yep” over this.
From my POV you either need to like Lexus styling (I don’t) or be fiercely loyal to the Lexus brand to want one of these.
A Panamera is a sedan, so OK I guess but not really a competitor.
I’m not fiercely loyal to any brand but I do like this styling.
Not wanting the car to spend most of its life in the shop would seem to me to be another reason to go Lexus over the Germans. So would the sound of a NA V8 instead of a downsized and overboosted competitor.
Four doors or not, the LC500 is a GT car and for that reason I consider Panamera a far more relevant competitor than Corvette, for example. Standard Lexus perspective applies – aggressive looks don’t equal aggressive performance.
Can’t fault you on reliability / repair cost though.
I cross-shopped a Cvic and a GR86, but that doesn’t make them similar. A GT and a sedan are different things. The LC500 doesn’t really have a direct competitor. It’s a combo of a PLC with a great engine in a more extravert compact GT package. Traditionally, it would probably be equivalent to something like a Facel Vega Facel II or Gordon-Keeble. There are performance cars of varying states of luxury in and around its price (mostly more expensive, so much so that they’re a stretch to include, like the 911), but nothing very close. It’s kind of like a Miata or GRZ twins: they get compared largely because there aren’t anything else close to them in the price range. While they’re both sports cars, they exist at opposite ends of that traditional spectrum. They might be cross-shopped, but back in the days of choice, they’d have had more direct competitors to be compared against in magazines unless it was one of those huge shoot-out issues.
“It has 4 doors / it’s a sedan” is an artificial purity test. If you need convincing of that, look at the 8 series – it comes in 2 and 4 door variants.
Additionally, some quick Googling would seem to indicate the Panamera is more performance focused than the LC500 is, meaning it’s – again – a more meaningful LC500 comparison than a Corvette.
Look, if you’re really convinced that the LC500 stands alone, I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. But can we please drop the “ItS a SeDaN” nonsense?
I never compared it to the Corvette and I think it’s a terrible comparison, so why would I, particularly when my point is that it has no direct comparison? If you can’t fathom the difference between 4 doors and 2 or a vehicle that’s a whole foot longer and how that would affect the driving experience, then there’s no place to go from here and I can see from your weird tone and angry-rabbit hostility that I am not going to find any value in interacting further.