Lexus IS

The Lexus IS is one of 72 Lexus models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1998. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Lexus IS properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Peugeot Peugeot 206, the Ford Ford Focus, the Cadillac Cadillac Escalade — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lexus IS reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 2.0 L Toyota S engine#3S-GE / 3S-GE Straight-four engine / I4 (SXE10; RS200) / 2.0 L Toyota G engine#1G-FE / 1G-FE Straight-six engine / I6 (GXE; kerb weight is recorded at IS 200: 1360 kg / IS 200 SportCross: 1430 kg / IS 300 5-Speed: 3255 lb / IS 300 E-Shift: 3285 lb / IS 300 SportCross: 3410 lb; drive goes through 5-speed Toyota W transmission#W55 / W55 manual transmission / manual / 6-speed J160 manual / 4-speed Toyota A transmission#A47DE / A47DE/Toyota A transmission#A340H / A340H Automat; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, all-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Lexus story

Within Lexus's own catalogue the Lexus IS sits alongside the Lexus ES (V20), the Lexus GS 450h (2012), the Lexus IS 200 (GXE10), the Lexus LS 400. The record names the Lexus GS 460/F (for IS 500 F Sport Performance) as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Tomoyasu Nishi (exterior: 1995) / 2003 facelift: Hiroyuki Tada (2002). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Kanegasaki, Iwate (Kanto Auto Works).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Lexus IS costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.