{"id":231467,"date":"2018-03-14T07:46:27","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T05:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=231467"},"modified":"2018-03-14T07:50:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T05:50:18","slug":"a-look-at-the-new-lexus-ultra-luxury-sports-yacht","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/motoring\/231467\/a-look-at-the-new-lexus-ultra-luxury-sports-yacht\/","title":{"rendered":"A look at the new Lexus ultra-luxury sports yacht"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Lexus thinks it finally has a way to catch up with Mercedes in luxury-car sales: go into the high-end boat business.<\/p>\n

Toyota Motor Corp\u2019s premium brand plans to start selling a 65-foot (20-meter) ultra-luxury yacht in the US in the second half of next year.<\/p>\n

The vessel, announced at a boat show last week in Yokohama, will have room for 15 guests, three bedrooms with their own washrooms, plus separate quarters for crew. Executive Vice President Shigeki Tomoyama wouldn\u2019t reveal the boat\u2019s price, but said it will be comparable to others in its class. (Sunseeker\u2019s 66-foot Manhattan goes for about $3 million.)<\/p>\n

For Lexus, taking to the water is less about selling big, beautiful boats – the market is tiny – than it is about adding luster to a brand that\u2019s lost some of its shine. Lexus hasn\u2019t held the lead in high-end US car sales for almost a decade.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, mass-market automakers are closing the quality gap and the shift toward autonomous driving and vehicle-sharing threaten to turn cars into utilitarian people-movers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this does is raise Lexus\u2019 luxury quotient,\u201d said Jaqui Lividini, founder of Lividini & Co, a New York-based brand strategy firm. \u201cI mean, what\u2019s more luxurious than a yacht?\u201d<\/p>\n

An image makeover at Lexus is probably in order. Since it ended an 11-year run as the US’s top-selling luxury car brand in 2010, it\u2019s been outpaced by BMW AG and Daimler AG\u2019s Mercedes-Benz, which has been faster to shift toward the sports-utility vehicles that Americans love.<\/p>\n

In 2017, US sales of Lexus sedans dropped by a quarter and the Japanese brand sold about 10 percent fewer vehicles than market-leader Mercedes.<\/p>\n

To catch up, Lexus this month unveiled a new ultra-compact utility vehicle, the UX, at the Geneva auto show. It also added a three-row variant to its RX line of bigger crossovers, redesigned its flagship LS sedan and launched a sleek new sports car to draw people into dealerships, the LC coupe.<\/p>\n

Aside from the new hardware, the company is also taking a different marketing tack, trying to recast itself as the purveyor of a luxury lifestyle, not just high-end cars. To do that, the company last year jettisoned the \u201cpursuit of perfection\u201d slogan it had been using for decades and adopted a new one: \u201cexperience amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new tagline is meant to appeal to wealthy consumers who, studies show, are spending less on stuff and more on activities.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the boat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at boating, you\u2019re not buying a shell, you\u2019re buying an experience,\u201d says Pamela Danziger, owner of research firm Unity Marketing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a whole lifestyle that goes along with it. So, to me, it makes a tremendous amount of sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lexus hasn\u2019t unveiled its yacht design yet, but Tomoyama says most of the details have been worked out and it\u2019s now in the production planning stage.<\/p>\n

A clue to how it may look is an early sketch the executive revealed at a Tokyo event last May, which appeared to show three decks and borrow heavily from the same swooping lines used in a 42-foot one-off concept yacht that Lexus put on display last January.<\/p>\n

\u201cImproving the quality of the cars themselves is important, but we also need to present car owners with a dream-like vision of the luxury lifestyle,\u201d Tomoyama said at last week\u2019s boat show.<\/p>\n

\u201cA yacht is a very effective part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the concept craft, the new boat will be engineered by Toyota Marine, a business that\u2019s been around since 1990, and manufactured by the Marquis-Carver Yacht Group in Pulaski, Wisconsin. But whereas the smaller vessel was made entirely of a carbon-fiber composite, the 65-footer will be made with a mix of materials that lowers costs.<\/p>\n

Lexus isn\u2019t the only carmaker dipping its toe in the water — Mercedes in 2016 started selling its own limited-edition yacht and BMW has been playing with concept crafts since at least 2011 — but the Japanese luxury brand is the only one that\u2019s committed to mass production.<\/p>\n

Robert Passikoff, founder of New York-based marketing consultancy Brand Keys Inc., says he likes the strategy of using big boats to sell more luxury cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust the fact that the boat is there may reinforce values that are important for the automotive category — like speed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt becomes more emotional, and you kind of go, \u2018Well, I can\u2019t afford a million dollar boat, but a $80,000 car? That I can afford.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Read: A look at the new R23 million Mercedes-Benz AMG racing boat<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lexus thinks it finally has a way to catch up with Mercedes in luxury-car sales: go into the high-end boat business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":231485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11119],"tags":[26,5676],"class_list":["post-231467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-motoring","tag-headline","tag-lexus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231467"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231505,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231467\/revisions\/231505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}