Visiting the LFA Centre of Excellence

The Lexus LFA was not built as a viable business plan. Even though they sold them for almost $400,000, Toyota was losing money on every car that left the factory. Production stopped in 2012, with exactly 500 cars built.

For Toyota tough, the LFA venture does not stop here. They still have to maintain, repair and honour warranties on all the cars sold.

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To this purpose, the LFA Centre of Excellence, a branch of Toyota Motorsport in Cologne, Germany, opened its doors when the Japanese supercar went on sale. The center was created to take care of the 38 cars sold in Europe and the UK. For all maintenance and repairs, from a simple lube and oil job to a complete teardown of the V10 engine to extract some faulty conrod, a team of crack technicians make sure that all work is done with the same standards used in the construction of the car.

Each nut, each bolt is checked thoroughly, and tightened to the correct torque. No eyeballing here! Once the repair is complete, the car undergoes 3 tests: the first is done by slowly rolling the car around the shop with the underbody panels removed, to make sure everything works perfectly. The LFA is then fully re-assembled, and a test pilot puts it through its paces on the twisty roads behind the shop. Finally, a little high-speed run is done on the Autobahn. All in the name of consumer satisfaction, of course...

If you own an LFA, you don't have to go all the way to Germany to have your car serviced. The techs will happily travel to a Lexus dealership near you, and work on the car from there, if the repair is nothing too serious. However, for a lot of those owners, appearance is everything. And there is a nice ring to the following sentence:

''No, I had to take the Mercedes this morning, The LFA is at the Centre of Excellence, in Cologne.''