This (Almost) Million Mile Lexus Just Won’t Quit
Who doesn’t want a ride that lasts forever? Well The Smoking Tire and /DRIVE have teamed up to make our roadtrip dreams a reality in a 900,000-mile 1996 LS400 Lexus. While driving long distances in a car with so many miles racked up sounds to some like a nightmare waiting to happen, The Smoking Tire host Matt Farah sees it as a challenge. Farah purchased the infamous vehicle for only $1,500 from someone in Florida after looking at photos online.
On initial inspection by Farah’s good friend, car expert, and VP of Business Development at Hennessey, Vinny Russo, the car was deemed spectacularly endowed — from AC that still blows cold to working power windows and TVs in the headrest, this Lexus was quite a find.
What started as a childhood dream turned reality (Farah’s first car was a Lexus quite similar) has now become a community effort. Farah doesn’t have the time to rack up another 100,000 miles on the car by himself, so he’s enlisted the help of car enthusiasts and adventure lovers around the United States to help take the car to a million miles.
The most recent documentation of the million-mile Lexus’s trip comes from Tavarish at Jalopnik. Tavarish got a bus ticket to Ohio to pick up the car from The Truth About Cars Editor-In-Chief Jack Baruth. After making some slight repairs to the radiator, Tavarish and a friend made a 500-mile trek back to Tavarish’s house with little to no trouble from the near-ancient Lexus outside of some sticky downshifting.
Even with 900k miles on the engine (the entire thing was rebuilt at 600,000 miles but is still the original) Tavarish clocked the Lexus at a whopping 22 miles per gallon. It makes sense — the LS’s 1UZ-FE V8 engine is the only engine to be rated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Which means you can put it in a plane if you want to. So maybe driving the Lexus to a million miles really isn’t that crazy of an idea after all, considering the high-flying alternative.
For a car that may as well have been to the moon and back again, Farah explained to CarStories in a podcast that there’s nothing “particularly special” about the Lexus LS outside of the fact that it was a cheaper version of the S-class. But he feels like he owes it to his new (old) Lexus to get it up to one million miles, even if it takes two years or more. Farrah plans to include the million mile Lexus in his film All Cars Go to Heaven 3 — hopefully it makes it that long.
But if a Lexus with nearly a million miles on it isn’t really your thing, no worries. Head over to Lexus of Highland Park to get a Lexus with no miles at all, or give us a call at 847-999-0095 for more information about sales.
