The Determined Employee Team That Convinced Lexus to Finally Drop the Touchpad
One of my favorite vehicles of all time is Lexus’ LC 500. It’s incredibly comfortable, luxurious, and the gas-only version has a wonderful primal growl. I took a new LC 500 convertible out on the track at Eagle’s Canyon Raceway north of Dallas last week at 100 mph and could not wipe the smile off my face. What has long bedeviled me about Lexus vehicles, however, has been the widely-despised touchpad.
The word is out that Lexus is finally ditching the Remote Touch and touchpad systems for an all-new high-tech interface, and it’s heavy on voice commands and touchscreen functions with 100 percent cloud-based updates on the fly. The new system has been a long time coming; maybe even longer than you might imagine. It was not, perhaps surprisingly, an easy path either.
A scrappy team inside Toyota pitched the idea of the new system back in 2017, led by two tenacious Toyota Motors North America employees: Connected Technologies Group Vice President Steve Basra and Global Chief UX Designer and North American Chief Engineer Daniel Hall. One might think that giving Lexus vehicles the latest user interface technology would be a no-brainer, but the reality is that there are major cultural differences between the way the previous interface is used between Japan and the U.S.
