A “sports sedan” is a regular sedan, but tuned to drive more like a performance car—usually quicker and more fun to steer. The hosts are debating whether the car they’re discussing really fits that label.
The Lexus IS 500 is a sportier Lexus IS sedan with a bigger, more powerful engine than the regular models. Here, they’re talking about a specific 2025 example and why it’s special because it’s limited.
Resale value is how much the car is worth after you’ve owned it for a while. They’re saying they try to drive carefully because it can help the car keep its value.
The BMW M Coupe (E36) is a small, two-door sports car made by BMW’s performance division. It was built to be a serious driver’s car and to compete with other sporty coupes. In the podcast, it’s mentioned as one of the cars BMW aimed to measure up against.
“Fake” exhaust tips are decorative outlets that don’t actually connect to the real exhaust flow. They’re used to create a certain visual effect, but enthusiasts often dislike them because the sound and airflow don’t match the appearance.
Torsional rigidity is how well the car’s body resists twisting. If a car is built stiffer than it needs to be, it can end up heavier without necessarily improving how it drives.
ZF is a company that makes car parts, including transmissions. Some drivers really like ZF gearboxes because they tend to shift smoothly and feel well matched to the engine.
Continental is a well-known tire brand. The host is saying their winter tires were from Continental, which matters because tire choice strongly affects how well a car can move in snow.
A manual is a car where you shift gears yourself using a clutch pedal and gear lever. Here it’s mentioned because it can change how the car behaves and how much electronic intervention you feel.
“0 to 60” is how fast a car goes from stopped to 60 mph. It’s a common performance number, and here it’s being used to judge whether the car is worth the money.
Paddle shifters let you tell the car to change gears using buttons on the steering wheel. The speaker tried them, but says the car doesn’t feel engaging enough to make you want to use them.
The platform/chassis is the car’s basic skeleton and engineering base. If it stays the same for a long time, the car may feel dated unless Lexus keeps updating it.
Car
BMW M340i
The BMW M340i is a faster, sportier version of the BMW 3 Series. They mention it to show that other cars in this category are making a lot of power.
Horsepower is a number that represents how much power the engine can make. The speakers are saying that even when the horsepower looks high on paper, the driving feel can be different.
The Lexus LC 500 is Lexus’s V8 grand tourer. The speaker is basically saying it may be the last of its kind before the industry moves on to different powertrains.
They rated the tires after landing using colors. Green was okay, yellow meant it might fail, and red meant it was basically going to fail. They used this to judge how risky the tire was even if they couldn’t predict exactly when it would fail.
The shuttle tire grading wasn’t just one measurement—it combined visible wear, the temperatures the tires experienced, and how many missions the tire set had already been used for. They also accounted for which tires took the first impact, since those would wear faster. This is an early example of data-driven component life management.
They built a huge test machine to simulate extreme tire speeds and then crash the tire into the ground on purpose. The goal was to see how much damage and wear happened after a realistic impact. It’s like a lab version of what the tires would experience during shuttle landings.
Tamiya is a company that makes model kits and hobby vehicles. In this story, they used one of those model tanks as the starting point for a custom remote robot.
The V1 was a German missile used in World War II. The speaker is saying some of the people who worked on it later helped with rocket and space technology.
After World War II, the U.S. brought over a lot of German scientists. The idea was to use their expertise to help with rockets and space research.
LIVE
Hello, and welcome to the Unnamed Automotive Podcast. My name is Sammy Hajasat, and with
me as always is my good friend and fellow automotive journalist, Benjamin Hunting. Say
hi to the people, Ben.
Sometimes I'm so caught off guard by how you instantly switch into this suave, sophisticated
broadcast voice. It's like bringing me back to my childhood listening to CBC broadcasters
who have been trained on decades of elocution and proper pronunciation. It's really impressive,
and it just sweeps me away in this like warm, buttery, basundo, basso profundo.
Do you think I have what it takes to be on CBC?
I think so.
I'm going to pitch them. They just opened a whole, they opened a whole Hamilton chapter.
I'm going to, maybe I should pitch them.
Why not? I mean, leave me behind in the dust. That's what you've been wanting to do since
day one.
Yeah, clearly.
Get rid of that baggage.
That is the voice and opinion of my friend and fellow automotive journalist, Benjamin Hunting.
You can find his work all over the internet. Ben, hit them up with some plugs.
Sure. You can find my work at Hagerty at Motor Trend and at driving.ca and also auto trader.ca.
Let's put that in there.
Yeah, put that in there because then I'll get to say it again, auto trader.ca, driving.ca.
That's where you can find my work. Ben, we've got a really cool car to talk about this week,
but before we do, is there anything you want to talk about? Like anything you want to say?
Oh, you've really caught me off guard. Perfect. Nailed it.
I wanted to scare you.
Just wanted to get me on the wrong footing to start the podcast.
Well, what is it that you think is like, we have a, so for the listeners that don't know this,
me and Ben have a long preamble before we do any recording of any kind.
We get into the mood. We talk about what's going on.
Literally over an hour this time.
Yeah, it was a really long time this time.
And then you say, I get into like podcast voice.
Yeah, it's like a total swap. It's like, you have your normal voice and then it's like,
hello. It's like, you ever listen?
You are listening to the quiet storm. W-E-X-P 99.5 FM all night long.
Last on the dial, but first in your hearts.
It's like, that sounds like you've got, it sounds like you've got one of those too.
No, except I don't use it. You haven't weaponized it and use it as an effective tool for podcasting.
I only bring it out as a joke from time to time because I'm afraid of its power.
I'm not afraid of my power. If I have any power, I should be using it in any way or form.
That's a very modern opinion.
Like the power to get this podcast off the ground and start talking about the car that you've been
driving, which from what I understand, and I haven't written down here, is a sports sedan.
So you might think it's a sports sedan.
It says sports sedan on the paper that you mailed to me in preparation for today's episode.
With all those and all those polarites I took of you going in and out of your garage that you
could puzzle over. Why didn't you just knock on the door?
It certainly advertises a sports sedan and once upon a time it was a sports sedan,
but then a weird thing happened and that weird thing is Lexus kind of lost interest in building
sports sedans and they ended up producing something that's neither a sports sedan nor anything else
really. It's like a mishmash vehicle that was only available for like two years.
In fact, the vehicle I drove is a 2025 model year, which is odd because it's,
Sammy, take a look at the calendar. Can you tell me what year it is?
I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm looking at the calendar, it says 20,
and then there are two more numbers after that, 20. Yeah, which seems like we're onto, oh, 26.
I see. Yeah, and, and it's, and that is how I read the calendar. Most people don't know this,
but I really analyze each. Really struggle with it.
Not only is it 2026, but it's been 2026 for a while and yet I was given the Lexus IS 500 to
drive even though it hasn't been in production now for at least five, six months. I am going to,
this is a low production vehicle. The model I had had a placard on the console that said,
ultimate edition 009 of 500. So between Canada and the US, I think they made 500 and I think
Canada got 140 of them. I'm not exactly sure. And you went and you ruined one of them.
I didn't ruin it because I barely drove it. Do you know why I barely drove it?
Yeah, I know why. Yeah, because you wanted to keep the resale value really high for the other
100. I always think about Lexus resale value whenever I'm driving there and I try to be
super respectful of that. Oh, here's what happens. Lexus resale value is always high
because nobody drives though. Back in like what, 2009? Lexus came out with a super fantastic engine.
That is, yeah, that is the, oh, and I just realized that I made a mistake in this review
that I wrote. It's not, I had thought this was happening. I'm correcting myself on the fly.
I believe it was 2008, 2009. Lexus came out with a really cool engine that surprised everybody. It
was a five liter V8 engine. They put it, at first it was in the ISF sports sedan. It was an actual
sports sedan. It was a car, they took the Lexus LS, sorry, IS, the compact entry level car they had
four door. They wanted to go up against, you know, BMW M and Audi RS and AMG and all that stuff,
all the Alphabet suit of the era. And they're like, all right, we're going to come up with something
called F sport. And we're just going to call this the F, which is going to be our, you know,
capital letter flagship. And I remember the funny thing, but there's two things I remember
about the launch of the ISF. The first is everyone was surprised by the V8. But the second was it
had fake exhaust tips. At the back, it had quad exhausts that were like stacked at an angle of
each other. Very cool looking. And then cool, but the actual exhaust was behind that. And you
can see it through those tips. And the funny thing is like, you don't have to do that guys,
you can just make an actual exhaust that is the actual exhaust and everyone would have been okay
with that. It's just, it was kind of like a hat on a hat and they cut a lot of flak for it. But
all that to say, right in that period, I believe this engine was around like 430 or 440 horsepower,
something like that. It was, it was quick. They put a suspension tune in it that was, you know,
at least comparable to an M3 at that time. They were, that was the bogey they were shooting for.
And it was the first time Lexus had done that. There had been no real sports today in front of
them. I mean, we had the GS with the V8 that I think was as close as anyone had ever gotten from
Lexus. And also the older, the first generation, this is the second gen IS, just to be clear,
the first gen IS had a 1JZ V8 under the hood, V6, sorry, 1JZ inline six, which is a very popular
engine related to the 2JZ that had been in the Supra. And a lot of people would turbo that engine.
They would turbo the heck out of it. So I remember being in the street racing scene in that time
and someone showed up to a meet and they had, they had a Least IS 300 that they had put a full
wide body kit on and turbo and it had to go back. Yeah. The Least was up in like three months and
they didn't know what they were going to do. Like if they were going to buy it out or like,
I guess, imagine the penalty if you return like a essentially a car that belongs.
Something that belongs in the cover of like sport compact tuner or something and you show up at
the dealership and you walk around it with the person inspecting it for the Least return and
like just have that conversation. Anyway, the ISF was an interesting car, if not a perfect car. It
had flaws. It didn't necessarily capture the imagination. They came out with a second gen
version. It had a lot more power. The V8 engine that was used in the ISF, it started spreading
out through the Lexus lineup. We got it in the RCF, the GSF and currently the LC 500, which is
a perfect car. Can I stop you for a minute? Yes. The RCF. Do you really want to go down that path
because we're going to go down another path pretty soon? Is it a similar path?
Two cars diverged. The motor wrapped in a car, right? Like it's a motor that's wrapped in a car
that didn't feel like up to it. What happened with the RC is Lexus intended to make, Lexus had
built a convertible version of the ISC. And they were like, and it was not a good convertible.
It was not popular, but they decided to spin off a coupe called the RC and they were like,
okay, we're going to make a coupe and we'll make a convertible as well. We'll just, you know,
put everything under that banner. So when they built the platform for the RC, they took like the
middle bit from an ISC, the rear end of like a GS and the front end of an IS and they put it all
together and then they said, just joking, we're not going to make a convertible. So you had this
platform that was overly strong. Like it didn't need to have the torsional rigidity that it had
because suddenly it had a roof. To give you a comparison, the RCF weighs like 400 pounds more
than an ISF and it has two fewer doors. It's so heavy. It's so heavy. It was a two door and it had
this, the RCF had this sweetheart of an engine. It's fantastic. It's a great V8, but also worth
pointing out that the regular RC was saddled with the same weight, but it had like a three and a
half liter V6. I think a four cylinder came to it eventually. I'm not sure. And then it was like
engine. Yeah, sorry. It just reminded me of like Lexus trying to do a muscle car.
Like I can remember being on a racetrack in the RSF and like not having any fun at all.
Sorry, RCF. It just did not want to turn and stuff like it wasn't into turning. It was quick
in a straight line, I guess, and it made the right sound. It sounded so good and it went fast
decently and that was its thing. Then we got a car that didn't need to go fast with that engine,
sounded good, looked good and felt good in the RC500. Which is one of the best looking cars of the
last decade, regardless of price. But was not overly performance oriented. Well, it's a grand touring car.
Yeah. And it felt like a grand touring car. Love it. The major drawback to the LC500 is
its infotainment system. But they fixed that. They fixed it in later models. They got rid of the
track pad. So that's it. You know, all of this to say this engine is still around and it's the
engine is well received. It's only around now in the LC500 because as I mentioned, this IS 500
went off the market last year. But here's where things get super weird and twisted.
The IS 500 is not an ISF. What it is, is it's the IS 350, the last generation IS 350.
F Sport, which means it has adaptive shocks, but everything is tuned for like the V6.
Okay. And keep in mind that's important. We'll get to that later. It has a Torsen differential.
Okay. That's nice. But the only other difference between the IS 500 and like a V6 F Sport version
of the car is six piston Brembo brakes at the front. That's it. Everything else is just bone
standard V6 IS. So they take that platform and they drop this five liter V8 in it. Now the engine
at this point in time makes 472 horsepower and 395 pound feet of torque. I think it red lines around
7000 and it has an eight speed automatic transmission, not the ZF transmission that everyone's so happy
with. Just another transmission that also happens to have eight speeds. You can see where things
might go wrong here, where you have this fantastic motor and a platform that is not intended to have
this motor, but they're married together and they have to make the best of it. Yeah. And they don't.
They straight up, they straight up, do not. This is one of the most disappointing cars
they've driven in a long time. It is one of the few performance cars I've actually had to leave
at home because there was snow on the ground. That almost never happens. I actually can't think of
the last time this happened. The last time I had problems in the snow with a press car that
was a serious problem was when I was living in Montreal, my alley in the back,
the snow removal people didn't always come on time. The city abdicated all of its snow
removal responsibilities from the alleys in Montreal. So we had to hire private contractors
to do it. And sometimes there's a big snow storm and you're kind of last on the list.
So I had like a, I want to say it was like a four series. And I ended up having to
I get to the corner of my alley where it's like a 90 degree turn to get to the street
and the snow had built up so much the car high sided and it got stuck. Oh yeah. And I normally
in old school cars, you can like open the door of the car and rock it back and forth with your body
to try and get traction. But this was right around the time that BMW had introduced like
if you open the door, it puts itself in park and you can't have the door open and the transmission
and drive because quote unquote people were dying. So like, remember Anton Yelchin? Yes, no.
Yes. He passed away from the Jeep grand chair that had crushed him when it was in drive. And
yeah. So that's that was right around that period. So a lot of automakers put in the safety
override. So I actually got stuck there and I had to have someone help me push the car,
but I was able to get it out and keep driving with the IS 500. I'll just detour quickly into my
snow problems before I get to the rest of the issues with the car. It was on winter tires.
It was on continental winter tires. I had a snowfall of about two, two and a half inches.
My road out front is gravel and it wasn't plowed. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to go out and have
some fun because that's what I usually do when it snows in a car that's has performance pretensions,
right? I stop at the end of the driveway to make sure no one's coming from either direction.
And this is where the problem is started. The vehicle doesn't want to move at that point.
And like literally two, two and a half inches of snow is not a lot of snow. I try disabling the
traction control. It's almost impossible to know whether it's on or off because instead of giving
you a light on the dash that says, you know, traction control is off or like, you know,
when it lights up to let you know in yellow that it's not on, you get this message on the
driver's gauge cluster that says, traction control turned off, but the message never turns, never
goes away. No matter how many times you push the button again, I actually turn the car on and off,
open the door and closed it and the message still wouldn't go away. So I had no way of knowing
where the traction control was on. I try going up the narrow hill that's near my house, the one
that I actually was able to get up in the Nissan Leaf with no problems in the similar snowstorm.
The car barely made it up going sideways and I mean, crawling sideways up this road. So
at this point, I decided this isn't worth it. I just, I turn around in a neighbor's driveway.
It's completely flat. The car gets stuck in the driveway. It just keeps going sideways.
I eventually was able to rock it out and then limp back home. Really, really surprising. I
used to daily drive my CTSV in the winter on Lizax and it only, it had 400 horsepower,
but it was a manual and it didn't have like invasive traction control like this.
It had like less invasive traction control. Yeah, exactly. So that was not impressive, but
the fundamental problem with this car is it's an old, old platform with a really great engine
and it's a total mismatch. In the U.S., it costs about $60,000. Let me double check.
Sorry. No, yeah, $60,000. Is that right? That can't be right. $68,000 in Canada or in the U.S.?
In the U.S., I guess that is right. I've got the price range of it. I got $60,800 for the
entry-level model. Yeah, there's three different models. The top-end model is $72,000, almost $73,000.
And that would be what I had because I had the ultimate in Canada, which has those 19-inch
BBS wheels and whatnot, and they only sold 150 of those in the U.S. Mine wasn't flare yellow.
Canada didn't do that. In Canada, the price is $79,000, which is a better deal. But still,
once you get to that amount of money, you're up against much better cars.
Yeah, you're in a world of beautiful cars, wonderful cars. More modern cars, too.
Sorry, keep going. Because I know we're going to get to the reality here. It's not just like
attraction control that won't let a V8 get done. It's not just a transmission that's tuned for like...
This car is only good at one thing, and that's going quick in a straight line,
and it is decent at that. And it's only decent at that, yeah.
Everything else about it? What is that, 0 to 60 again? 4?
4 or something like that? I don't know. And that's tough because modern cars,
even in this class of like C63s, which I think have like a hybrid powertrain or M3s,
which don't... But this is not an M3 competitor, right? Like the way this is priced,
it's probably like a 340i or something. M340... M340i? Yeah. Those are still wicked. Those are
such good cars. That's still a way better car than this one is, because everything else about
this car falls apart as soon as you are not driving in a straight line. The suspension
is not fun. It's not in any way engaging. Like even when it's in Sport Plus, there's nothing about
the car that makes you want to fling it around. And even if you did, the electronics on the car
are constantly way ahead of you, wringing their hands and going, oh no, think of the children.
Like it's really a car that does not... It's aggressive about you not having a good time.
The exhaust sounds great, but the transmission, it's not very well tuned in the sense that
occasionally it's reluctant to shift, especially part throttle shifting. It's not happy with that
kind of stuff. It can feel clunky. It has paddle shifters. If you want to do that kind of thing,
I guess, I never did. Oh, you didn't use them. Well, I tried them, but there's nothing about it
that makes you want to do that. You don't get in this car and want to drive. You get in this car
and you're like, all right, back to the 470 horsepower salt mines, I guess. It's just so
weird. It's so strange that there's nothing about this car that made me want to engage with it.
I mean, it looks okay inside. Mine had red leather. It's got a terrible infotainment system with the
little touchpad, but it's a touchscreen at least so you can avoid that if you want to.
But it is dated inside. It's okay. But again, for $80,000 Canadian, it had better be more than okay.
The bottom line for me on this car is it feels... And this is... I've seen other people who've driven
this car say, oh, what Lexus did was build a classic muscle car. They put a big engine in
a small car and they didn't really touch anything else about it. And that's what you get. And it's
charming because it feels like an anachronism. It feels like how cars used to feel. No. That's not...
If you want to go back to the 60s where they did take an intermediate-sized car and put a
big engine in it and then not really do anything about it, that, sure, that was a thing that people
did 50 years ago. But that's... In this case, we have a car that is a, quote, unquote, luxury sports
sedan that is supposed to be competitive with other luxury sports sedans, not bog standard
intermediate sedans that have a big motor, of which there's nothing else in its class.
This is perhaps most equivalent to a four-door Mustang, except the Mustang is a much more put
together package. Like a V8 Mustang, a GT, is so much more engaging to drive. There's been so much
more thought put into the experience. This is really a car that was cobbled together from the
parts shelf. They did not put any effort into tuning it into a cohesive whole. And that is a huge...
I mean, I just don't see why anyone would buy this car.
It sounds a lot like a... Sorry about the rant.
No, no, but I'm trying to think... I don't think it sounds like a Mustang at all.
I think it sounds a lot like a last-gen charger.
Yeah, you're probably right. That's a much better analogy.
And the charger is not... Unless you got a Hellcat is not a $80,000 car.
It would be like a last-gen charger scat pack, except the scat pack knows what it is.
And the scat pack is tuned to be a comfortable cruiser, and it pretends you can go on the track,
but no one does that. And you can go to a drag strip and have fun with it if you want,
but it's soft enough to use every day where you're like, okay, this is comfortable,
and it has, I believe, it's a ZF transmission, that fantastic 8-speed,
which is a real gem of an automatic. And it's large and roomy inside.
So all of the things that the Lexus is, in terms of dynamics, not focused,
wallowy, too bumpy, just not going to go around corners in an aggressive way.
The charger does that too, but you expect it because it's a big car.
Right. So it's like a full-size sedan. So the sports sedan is much smaller,
and its rear seat is compromised. Its trunk space is obviously compromised.
And the luxury element of it... Speaking of trunk space, you say it's compromised.
I can tell you that in the IS500, it's even more compromised than you might think,
because they included a full-size spare, but there's no room under the car for it.
So it's inside the trunk, and there's a big hump that they cover with a carpet,
like a removable carpet. And when I say big hump, I mean, imagine a 19-inch wheel or whatever
in your trunk that you have to lift everything over. So yeah.
Not great. But I think the most difficult thing here is the IS... This caught me off-guard when
I was doing the research on this. IS is in its third generation, and technically,
this generation is still related to a 20, I think, 13 model?
Yeah. Well, the new IS came out in 26, and there's only one model, the IS350 so far.
And that model is just trickling out now, and that's the fourth generation car.
There is a fourth generation model. Yeah. It's out right now.
And that means that this last one has been on the market in its current platform,
and chassis. For like 12 years. That's a long time.
Again, comparisons to the Dodge Charger ring true.
And that's really long when you compare it to how quickly Mercedes and BMW approach
upgrading the three series in C-Class. I think it's clear that Lexus has ceded
the compact sedan segment years ago. I don't think that they took the IS seriously for,
I don't know, five years now at least. At least, yeah.
Well, it had a major refresh, I think, during the pandemic, and that was kind of nice,
but it still had that weird trackpad issue. And it's a beautiful car, I think.
exterior design is quite nice. And interior design, if it wasn't for the infotainment system,
I actually kind of like. But it's like the car is not competitive overall, right?
Yeah. Eventually, all these things add up. It's not spacious. The technology isn't quite nearly
as intuitive or like. But even going beyond that, look at the drivetrains.
I mean, we're in an era where the M340i has an absurd amount of horsepower.
The four-cylinder versions of the BMW are also, you know, pretty quick.
Yeah, we say that for reference, that six-cylinder makes almost 400 horsepower.
Yeah, it makes way more than that. But it feels either it's transmission
tuning or it's just lying on the spreadsheet. Yeah, it's much more powerful than it gives
it credit. Then anyone will give it credit. And you could, you know what? If Lexus had put in a
bit of effort and said, we can't build, we're not going to put a twin-turbo V6 in the IS,
but here's a V8 version that will get us through until we can do that. And they put more effort
into making this an actual planned car instead of just a dump of big motor in the car we already
have, then that might have been more compelling because it is a way for them to stand out. And
if you look back on how Mercedes has tackled things, there have been times where Mercedes
just dumped a V8 in the C-class and was like, here you go. But they didn't just leave it at that,
like everything else, but the car was upgraded as well. The IS500 falls on its face because
it doesn't do the necessary work to take advantage of its fantastic motor.
That, so in your mind, if they're going to come back with an IS500 or an ISF,
what is required for them to do?
It's not going to happen. I think this engine's dead. I think that the LC500 will be the last
time we see it. I think we're out of that era. And it's sad that it went out like this. I mean,
at least the LC is going to be the final version. But like this, this is just, I don't know, man.
I mean, it's, it really, it left a sour taste in my mouth. I had this car because I was,
and I was looking forward to driving it and I thought it would be fun. And it never,
ever called to me from the driveway. It never, ever said, hey, let's go for a ride.
Except for that one snowy day when I did try to do it and it was a disaster. And that just
really turned me on it. And I was like, you know what, just sit there. Like, I don't,
I don't want to engage with you. I don't want to, all the quirks of driving this car,
I don't want to deal with them. You know, the rewards aren't there. And I know I'm
sounding extremely negative about this car. And it's rare that I rant like this about a vehicle.
But I think it's because two things, the way that some members of the automotive media have,
as I mentioned, positioned this as some kind of anachronistic old school throwback that kind of
celebrates a previous era. I don't think it does that. Okay. And also the fact that
it's advertised as an enthusiast car. And I don't think it is.
A part of me believes that sometimes there are a few parts of a car that can really like redeem it
or and save it. And I think that a good motor can save, can, can like paper over a lot of,
a lot of issues. And it's not that it's, it is a good engine, but it's also a great engine.
It's an engine we've seen for a very long time.
It has evolved too though. I mean, if you look at engines, if you want to talk about engines
we've seen for a very long time, Hellcat, also the 6.4 that would be in the Skypack.
And I think that those are very good. I don't hold their age against them because I think that
Chrysler put effort into redeeming those motors by refreshing them from time to time.
Old engines, you know, by making them for so long, by having the tooling for so long,
eventually the pricing on those come, come down a little bit. You can start to invest in other
parts of the car and we can start getting better transmissions and better chassis.
They just didn't want to make that investment. So crazy.
I don't think it's crazy. I just think it's like, this is maybe a car that was designed
by a marketing department rather than an engineering department. And they're like,
we've got this stuff. Let's just throw it together and see who'll give us $79,000 for it,
you know. And you're telling people absolutely it's not worth it.
No, not at all. Okay. I mean, get an ISF if you want that. They're out there. It's not like,
it's not like- It's cheaper than 70 grand. I assume they are. It's not like this is the only
V8 powered IS, you know? It's like, that's what's so strange about it. They did know how to build
a good version or a better version of this car. And then this one just isn't it. It just happens
to be the most recent. Ben, anything else you want to talk about with this, Lexus?
No, I think I've tried on it enough. I feel bad about it.
There's one more thing I want to talk about. I hope you're not too tired of talking because
it's a story that you recently published on HaggerD.com. And it's about space shuttles,
specifically tires of space shuttles, which I found to be really fascinating.
And something that you were really excited to talk to me about in the build up to this story
getting published. It's the Unnamed Orbiter podcast, right? That's where we're going now.
And I would love it if you could give me a little rundown about the story. The headline is written
how a Tamiya tank helped NASA stop space shuttle tires from exploding.
So it turns out that landing a space shuttle is stressful.
Why do you think that is? This space shuttle weighs 240,000 pounds.
Two, four. And it lands at over 200 miles an hour. And so it only has six contact patches to do that.
There's like four tires under the wings. And there's one tire. There's two tires up front.
And when it lands, things can get really crazy. There's something like 20 million pound feet
of torque applied to the the braking system on a typical landing. And when they were first
landing the shuttle, they actually in the first 17 landings they did from actual missions,
they had 14 brake failures like cracked rotors wild, including one case where they blew a tire
on the runway because they had there was a crosswind and it doubled the amount of torque
on the brakes on that particular wheel to 40 million pound feet, which is totally insane.
That's hard to fathom. That's wild. So throughout throughout its life, they were constantly fighting
the strength of the tires. They were like the tires were pressurized with nitrogen between
like 300, 315 psi depending where they were located on the vehicle. And they weighed about 200
pounds each themselves. They were 44 inches in diameter. It's a pretty big tire.
They were constantly fighting with how do we make these tires safer because blowouts are not fun.
They could be pretty dangerous. But even more problematic was the fact that like
if they landed the shuttle and they damaged a tire, it could stay dangerous for like
an hour after they had landed it. And they wouldn't necessarily know if they could safely
approach the shuttle because the because of the amount of pressure involved, if a tire on the
space shuttle blows up, if it pops, if it blows out, it's the equivalent of like detonating two
and a half sticks of dynamite. Like it is that that much force, it can cause serious injury at 50
feet to a human being and it will deafen you if you're as even if you're 100 feet away.
So NASA came up with this system where they were grading tires after landing. So a tire that
was graded green was one that was safe. A tire that was graded yellow was one that
could potentially be dangerous for a blowout. And a tire that was graded red was one that
was going to blow out. They knew it was going to blow up. They just didn't know when.
The ratings were based on like visible wear on the tire, temperatures that the tire had been
exposed to. And the number of missions that have been run on, I guess, like the rear tires,
they were good for one mission because they were the ones that hit first. Yeah. And that meant
they took the brunt of the shot. Yeah. Yeah. You can get two missions out of the front ones.
So in the early 90s, they were like, we need to fix the landing gear on the shuttle. We want to
make it more safe, more secure. What can we do? So they had this, they had two ways of testing
tires. One was they built this like 57 ton tire rack. It was pretty cool. It would accelerate to
like 200 miles an hour or 300 miles an hour in two and a half seconds. Whoa. Yeah. 250 miles an hour
in two seconds because they used a water jet that would spray at it and the water jet would
propel it and it was 3000 feet long. And then once it was going at like the proper speed,
it would, they would slam it into the ground and they would check out for wear and damage, right?
Okay. But they also had a jet. It was a Corvair 990, which was an obsolete-ish kind of passenger jet
that they attached a version of the landing gear of the shuttle to and then they would like,
they programmed these landing profiles into the jet and they would slam it into the runway.
Pretty much the best way to describe it. And the jet was better than the test rack because
there were three places in the world where they would normally land the shuttle. There's like
two normal ones and then a backup depending on where the shuttle is in its orbit.
Like the backup is pretty much for emergencies or if there's a weather issue kind of deal.
So the jet could go to these different runways in a way that the internal tire testing couldn't
and that would expose it to what the runway surface was actually made of. And they would do,
in the early 90s, they started really hitting this jet hard to do as much testing as they could
and it would get pretty dramatic. Like they could grind tires down to the point where the
wheel was like four inches away from the axle. Like that's how much material had been ground down.
They would have tires catch fire. They did a lot of work on it, but the problem was
just like with the shuttle, if you had like a yellow tire, like one that was in the yellow
danger spectrum, you could not approach the land. Yeah. As you said, like the, what do you want to
call it? The range in which a person can be around it is so huge. Yeah, it's too dangerous. It's
basically a time bomb and it's a time bomb with a fuse no one can see. You have no idea when it's
going to go off. So NASA decided, okay, we need a way to like diffuse the situation. They tried
using bomb testing robots, not bomb testing, sorry, bomb disposal robots. But like those dudes,
there's a couple of problems with them. The first is they're not designed to do like
any kind of work that requires precision. They're designed to grab a bomb and drag it somewhere
where it can be blown up and disposed of safely, right? Okay. So NASA, what NASA wanted to do was
take a drill and pierce the tire and hopefully let the pressure out in a way that it wouldn't
explode. But they needed to be prepared if it did. So whatever was doing this job had to be
armored against that, right? So that's why they went with bomb disposal robots. The other problem
with the bomb disposal robots is they cost between $75,000 and $125,000 back in 1993.
So like that's a lot of money and potentially get blown up. Yeah, exactly. So what finally
ended up happening is a contractor for NASA, this guy named David Carrot, two Ts,
he was like, why don't we just use a model tank? And they were like, what? And he's like, yeah,
he went and bought a Tamiya 116 scale Tiger II tank.
116 scale, yeah, a little Japanese remote control.
And he tore the top off of it, armored the bottom a little bit, and then attached a
DeWalt drill and three, he replaced the motors that were inside it with DeWalt motors, I believe.
Yeah. And then he used black and decker batteries and it was a three eighths drill bit
and it had a temperature, a wireless video camera, pretty fancy for the 90s and a temperature probe.
And he could drive this thing up to the tire and like use the temperature probe to find
a safe spot and then start drilling. And it was like an ingenious solution. It only cost like
3,000 bucks. Well, in comparison to the other costs, of course.
It's so cool. And the other funny thing I think about this is like in the 60s, or sorry, I guess
the 50s, after the Second World War, the American government brought a bunch of Nazi scientists
over to the United States who had been involved in the V1 program, which was the buzz bombs and
rocket bombs that had been launched from Germany to London. And they used those to develop the
space program that eventually put people on the moon. It was called Operation Paperclip.
Okay. So I like to think of this to me a tank. It was a Tiger II, which is a German tank,
a Wehrmacht tank from the Second World War. It's like the last time Operation Paperclip
employed some Nazis to take care of something in the space program. That's pretty funny.
Anyway, this little tank that could was really successful. It did 32 missions.
32 times they were too scared to the tire to go near it. And the tire blew up nine times
out of 32 and it survived. You can go to the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California
at Woods Air Force Base and see it. It's behind glass. You can take a look at the little Tiger
dude. It's great. I love it. They named it the tire assault vehicle. Oh, man. The TAV.
I just think that's cool. It's fun. It's like, you know, it's a very cheap way to deal with a very
real problem that was super dangerous. Normally when the government deals with these kinds of
problems, they spend billions of dollars to come up with something that seems like it could have
obviously been done a different way. And this is the one time that didn't happen. Yeah. So anyway,
I put together a story on Hagerty about that because I thought it was fascinating. I like writing.
There's a lot of stuff about the space program, specifically the NASA space program that ended
up in it. There was an automotive component to it. Yeah. For example, the reason we have
tire pressure sensors in our cars, that technology comes directly from the space shuttle that was
used, developed for the space shuttle and used for the space shuttle. So there's lots of stuff
like that that's really neat. There's also some like heat reflective technologies that are also
used in cars and engine bays and whatnot today that were originally developed for like re-entry on
the shuttle. They needed a way to reflect heat that wasn't very heavy because typically mass is what
you use to insulate heat, but putting anything into orbit costs a billion dollars per ton, right?
Like it's insane. So the later it is, the better it is. And if you look at the automotive industry,
it's the same deal. It's like the lighter vehicle is, I mean, you wouldn't think that looking at how
heavy cars are today, but there was once a time where we prized lightness and fuel economy. So
they wanted this kind of shielding technology. It was also very helpful for car manufacturing.
I love it. One of my favorite things I've ever read a headline of and then got me to read the
story of. So Ben, I really recommend people head on over to Hagerty.com and check out your full
story for all the full details, all the photos of this space shuttle story. There's some fun
shredded tire pictures and a fun picture of the little tank dude doing his tank job.
I love it. Anything else you want to talk about today?
No, I think that's it.
Really? That's it?
That's it. Can you handle it? Can you handle the podcast being over tonight?
I'm going to have to handle it. Yes. If you want to hear more of our podcast, I really recommend
you head on over to our website, unnamedautomotivepodcast.com. There are a ton of links to our previous
episodes, but more important than that, there is a contact form that you can fill out and your
feedback will land right in our inbox, which is really handy. But if you don't want to go through
the rigmarole of doing that, just send us an email the old fashioned way. It's benjamin
at benjaminhunting.com or you can reach out to us on social media. We prefer Instagram of all of
the ones out there. I'm at Sammy underscore how like you're laughing while Ben is at Hunting
Benjamin. Sammy, what are we going to be talking about next week on the podcast next week? I will
be driving a next week is my birthday. Wow. Well, hold the phone and I'll be driving the most
birthday car of all a Hyundai Sonata hybrid. Well, I bet you had to get in line for that one.
Yeah, I really did. I'm going to be talking about another vehicle that surprised me, but in the
opposite direction. And that is the Chevrolet Equinox, the gas powered Chevrolet Equinox.
Oh, yeah, I can't wait to hear that. I can't wait to hear this. I love it.
All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. See you later. Bye.
About this episode
The hosts kick off with a long, playful preamble before diving into two very different stories: a critical drive review of the 2025 Lexus IS 500 “Ultimate Edition” and Benjamin Hunting’s fascinating NASA tale about shuttle tire testing. The IS 500 discussion turns into a disappointment rant—an old IS platform with a great V8, but mismatched tuning, clunky behavior, dated tech, and even traction-control trouble in light snow. The space shuttle segment explains how extreme braking loads and tire blowout risk led NASA to use a remote “tire assault vehicle” tank to safely drill and vent failing tires.
When is a V8 powered sports sedan not a sports sedan? Benjamin tries his hardest to answer that question this week on the Unnamed Automotive Podcast, with his review of the 2025 Lexus IS 500. Powered by a sweet, naturally aspirated 5.0L V8 engine, the Lexus IS 500 promises the world and comes up a bit short in several important ways as Benjamin details its speed, power, and inadequacies especially in the harsh cold weather he's been experiencing lately.
Then the show lands from orbit to discuss NASA testing its tires, and how they safely depressurize shuttle rubber. The remote-controlled answer will warm your heart! Thanks for listening!
