MR2-FA - Design: Analyzing Lexus Styling Elements

I’ll state for the record that I have no real design experience, I'm not an engineer by education, and I’m not a professional fiberglass fabricator. Truth be told I'm about as far away from being any of those things as educationally and professionally possible. I'm just a guy with no fear of failure, lots of ideas, and some disposable income messing about in his garage for fun. What I’m about to attempt, given my level of experience and knowledge base, is absolutely bat-shit crazy…and I’m doing it anyway. He who dares wins.

Car companies love "Halo" cars. Halo cars are the pinnacle of what a company has to offer; the absolute peak of their technological and styling expertise. Nissan has the GT-R. Dodge has the Viper. BMW has the M-cars. Audi has the R8. Porsche has the 911 GT3-RS. And Toyota? Toyota's got the Lexus LF-A. The $400,000 Japanese sports car nobody expected and almost nobody can afford. Halo cars typically start out a styling trend, and then that trend is filtered down to other lesser models in an effort to draw in buyers who love, but can't afford, the Halo car.

Purely based on configuration a modernized SW20 MR2 would have to be performance oriented so it’s safe to assume that it would look like the LF-A’s little brother, with just enough differences that you know they’re siblings. The problem with siblings is that even though they share the same basic parental DNA sometimes they’re both different but attractive in their own right and sometimes one of them is uber hot and intelligent and one of them is sort of ugly and stupid.

That’s really the challenge and it’s a big one. If this were easy when you applied familial styling elements you’d always end up with the 1 Series BMW, whose good looks were almost universally praised, and not the 7 Series BWM, whose looks were almost universally panned.

To figure out what styling elements are familial, and which are model specific, you really have to look at the LF-A next to another Lexus and then discern what’s similar and different about them. Once you’ve done that you need to decide which of those differences are attributable to the purpose and configuration of the car rather than model specific styling. It's also instructive if there is a performance oriented version of the vehicle that you're comparing the LFA to because anything that's on the LFA, the performance model, but not on the base could be charactarized as a performance oriented model styling element that should therefore be carried over to my MR2.  It's handy that the Lexus lineup includes the IS-F and IS350 because those combined with the LFA give me everything I need to complete the analysis. 

I wouldn't be writing this post if I hadn't already done this analysis so here's a picture of each model and the accompanying table I built to try and discern the similarities and differences:

IS350


IS-F (Performance Model)


LFA


Here's the analysis part:





That's a little hard to read because I had to resize it to fit in the window so here are the direct links:

Table 1

Table 2