LS400, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I feel like such a copycat, but it's true: I drove from coastal SC to central MS all at once. I stopped for gasoline and "necessaries." When I calculated my average speed by my odometer / my watch, it was 79.5 mph. . . with three stops. . .
At one point I honestly did look down at my speedometer and find I was traveling 110mph without a clue. Mind you, this was after four new tires, four new sets of springs, and four new struts, oh, and new brake-pads all around! But there was *no* sensation of moving that fast. It was boring at 110mph. I may as well have been in my comfy chair at home. No wind noise. No tire roar. No engine noise. No buffeting. No hint of speed, just center stripe after center stripe disappearing in the rear view mirror.
But it wasn't just the lack of noise. The car didn't "feel" like it was "on the edge." There was accelerator left. There was no "brittleness" in the steering. The brakes just slowed it down when someone made me slow down - without nose dive or any hint of the rear-end trying to come around me. As far as my "inputs" told me, I could have been driving 70-75mph in my other vehicles (including the 2002 ES300).
I'm too old and have too many mouths to slap. . uh, I mean, feed, yeah, feed . . . (teenagers make you wanna - - - do things ----- nasty things ---- Edgar Alan Poe things, sometimes) and I feel my mortality creeping up on me for the first time in my life - so to drive 110mph is nonsense; or even 90mph. In fact I get better gas mileage at 65mph (GAD, did I just say that? ? ? I'm turning into my father; somebody shoot me, quick <flashback> "Well, son, the trip may take an extra four hours, but we'll squeeze an additional 3mpg out of our fuel economy, and I wouldn't want to waste that money - especially considering I spent seven hours changing the spark plugs and analyzing the proper gap with a scanning electron microscope to be certain we were getting optimum spark. If we continue to be careful like this, I can pay for my fuel-saving customizations in only 17.484 years at an average of 14,230 miles/year at the mathematical mean of the price of gasoline from 1956 to present, inflation adjusted for a 2004 dollar constant. Well, don't just sit there staring at me blankly my boy; hoist the mainsail!")
Anyway, what I was trying to say was that every time I see a speedometer register over 80mph my sphincters all tighten-up like they were when I was 25 and I realize that even 70 will probably leave you squished. A wreck at 110mph and I think you might end-up looking like a smear of something unidentifiable. Why I care I haven't a clue.
Truly, this was kind of cool (again, showing my age with 60s lingo): On this trip (I kid you not one bit) as I was leaving Charleston, SC I was blown off the road by a black LS4x0H - brand new, shiny black, and oozing the new look. Well, my old girl wasn't having it, so I pulled in behind this new LS and hit the gas. I kept a distance - short distance - between us. The two of us were moving through traffic at 80+mph, not a care in the world, and we both blew past a pearl white LS400 ('94 or later) who decided this looked like too much fun and it pulled-in behind me. The three of us passed another LS, this time a relatively new 430 and *it* pulled in behind the car behind me!
I slowed-down on purpose and let the later models pass me. I suppose the 430 driver didn't "get it" because when the lead 400 slowed, he didn't go around. The new car paid no attention at all, but for a while I thought we were going to get a 4x0H followed by a 430 followed by a badged 400 followed by me (unbadged) and all of us going like a bat-out-of-hell. The 430 pulled out of line and disappeared. The lady / girl in the 400 slowed down and I passed her, then she sped up and kept pace. But the biggest surprise of all was when the new model slowed to make an exit. As I passed, this was the first opportunity I had to see the driver.
I was imagining some General Dynamics guy, mid-forties, $5,000 suit, Rolex. What I saw was a little-old skinny lady who looked like she may have witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence first-hand. The hair on her head was that awful grey-blonde, and it was stacked high, but I'll bet it wasn't her's. There was a male corpse sitting in the passenger seat. He might have weighed all of 80 pounds and his back was so bent that I could just see his head hanging there off the misshapen stalk of a neck - so far forward that his nose was closer to the dash than the headrest. He wasn't grey. He was bald. The only color he had were his blue veins at his temple.
I was keeping-up with THAT for fun? As I said, I'm getting older. Fun gets harder and harder to have without pain. I suppose this was all the excitement I could take - but it would have been great to run-up beside that car and found Ronnie James Dio driving. . . come to think of it, the guy did look just a little like Keith Richards.
The girl in the pearlized white 400 ran up beside me and with a smile to match her beautifully kept Lexus' paint, she looked over and enthusiastically waved at me before dropping back, exiting, and leaving me there all alone again. . . naturally. We'd had our affair at 80mph. Well, o.k., not really an affair, but at least we were sharing a love.
B
1992 LS400
86,511 original miles
a one family car, just Dad and me