December 11, 2022

Of Fake Finger Nails And Knees: Lexus Goes Beyond The Interior Design Norm


Lexus is going beyond engineering cars with a fake manual gearbox to make things interesting for its rivers. In the course of designing their cars, it’s been revealed that they’ve been using fake nails and fake knees as well.

An in-depth look by Toyota Times, Toyota’s in-house digital publication, reveals that Lexus has gone through great lengths to make sure their car interiors are user-friendly for everyone.

According to Hiromi Yagi, chief of the Lexus design department, interior designers over at Lexus would actually wear false nails to make sure women (and men, for that matter) with long finger nails would find every button and knob easy to use and operate.

Yagi-san says that computer-aided simulations don’t take the entire picture into account. It’s only through coming up with actual cabin mock-ups would they be able to properly place, space, and even angle controls just to protect a Lexus owner’s “beautiful nails.” Sometimes, he says, the angle need only be 1 mm different to make the interior experience uncomfortable.


Aside from false finger nails, Lexus designers would sometimes wear weighted knee braces to help them verify if people with limited dexterity such as the elderly could easily get in and out of their cars.

They also don special glasses to simulate color blindness just to make sure emergency controls such as the hazard switch are easily visible.

All the while, Lexus would also design an interior which feels consistent throughout the entire line-up.

To that end, Lexus has come up with a “Goshintai” (lead photo). Literally translating to “an object of worship,” it condenses Lexus’s entire design form, in this case, the interior, into a physical object. This serves as an actual physical reference where designers and even production engineers can go back and forth on to check and double-check everything from textures to colors to even the tactile feel of the controls.

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