I flew to Madrid expecting to drive a small Lexus. What I didn’t expect was to spend 24 hours being gently encouraged to feel, listen, inhale, contemplate and eventually eat my way towards an understanding of modern luxury.
This, I was told on arrival, was a Lexus experience built around the five senses. Beautifully produced. Slightly surreal. Occasionally baffling. And yet, somehow, I still came away liking the LBX, despite the nonsense.
The Madrid Edition
We stayed at The Madrid Edition, a hotel that plays the “quiet luxury” card perfectly. All soft lighting, marble, muted tones and spaces that make you instinctively lower your voice without cutting back on the fun.
I’ve stayed in several Edition hotels and am always impressed with them. Yes, they’re part of the Marriott chain, but like the Reykjavik Edition, they all feel individual.
From a purely practical point of view, it’s also a brilliant base for exploring Madrid, right in the thick of things, but insulated from the noise once you step inside. The rooftop pool alone would justify staying there: a calm oasis hovering above the city’s terracotta rooftops.
A short walk away is the Mercado de San Miguel, a wrought-iron-and-glass cathedral to Spanish food, full of croquetas, jamón, olives, and much more from over 30 gourmet tapas vendors.
If Lexus had simply said, “We’re going to Madrid to eat, stay somewhere nice and drive a car,” I would have been fully on board with that. Instead, we were here to experience the senses.
Sight
Sight was the simplest part of the brief. The Lexus LBX looks good. Proportions are tidy. The detailing is sharp without being aggressive. It manages to feel premium without trying to look sporty for the sake of it.
The outdoor displays, the colour themes, the curated interior atmospheres — Elegant, Relax, Emotion and Cool — all work as design studies. They also feel very Lexus: restrained, deliberate, quietly confident.
As a piece of urban design, the LBX makes sense. It feels well-judged for the sort of buyer who wants a premium feel without the bulk or drama of a larger SUV. It won’t shout for attention, but it also won’t fade into anonymity.
Touch
Of the five senses, touch is the one that translates most naturally to a perceived luxury car. We began with a workshop focused on materials like leather grains, trim finishes, stitching, and textures. This is Lexus territory, and it showed.
Whatever you think of the brand, Lexus still does tactility extremely well. Everything feels deliberate. Switches move with quiet precision. Surfaces feel chosen rather than simply applied. It’s the sort of detail you may not consciously notice every day, but you’d immediately miss if it wasn’t there.
The LBX itself reflects that approach. It may be the brand’s smallest car, but nothing about the interior feels “small” in ambition. It’s calm, measured, and genuinely pleasant to be in. If the whole event had stayed in this lane — materials, build quality, real-world design — it would have made perfect sense.
Sound
The sound experience took place at a separate venue and centred on Lexus’s long-standing collaboration with Mark Levinson. We were treated to a beautifully staged audio demonstration that explored how sound is tuned, balanced, and refined until it reaches something close to perfection.
The story of sound was told through chocolate. Honestly, this bit made sense, comparing individual components like salt, flour, and sugar, which aren’t necessarily all that satisfying on their own. Bring them together into a salted caramel brownie, and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.
It was impressive. Immersive. Carefully controlled. The kind of thing you expect from a high-end audio brand.
It’s just a shame that the cars didn’t have the Mark Levinson sound system installed.
This wasn’t a disaster — the standard audio is perfectly decent, and I’ve had plenty of experience with the optional stereo in previous drives — but it was the first moment where the carefully choreographed ‘five senses’ narrative developed a noticeable crack. We had just been immersed in the philosophy of premium sound, only to drive away without the thing we’d spent an hour being taught to appreciate.
Smell
Things drifted further into the conceptual during the smell workshop, hosted outdoors at Finca El Gasco, a location best known as a wedding venue for the wealthy and one of the filming sites for Money Heist. Surrounding us with nature, Lexus introduced fragrance experts from Givaudan — a Swiss company that develops scents for the likes of Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana — to explain how scent affects memory, emotion and wellbeing.
We were introduced to a bespoke bamboo-based fragrance, inspired by Japanese forests and designed to create calm inside the car, alongside a series of other scents intended to create changing moods throughout the day.
Again, the idea itself is genuinely fascinating. The science of scent is real. The emotional connection is real. The presentation was beautiful.
There was, however, a small practical snag.
While Lexus intends to put the multi-scent technology in its cars, it’ll be doing so on just one Chinese model in 2027.
For European buyers, including the UK, it’s essentially a thought experiment. An idea. A philosophy. A mood board in olfactory form. Interesting to experience, yes, but also a reminder that not everything showcased at these events exists in the form you’re actually going to buy.
Taste
Taste, as it turned out, was largely represented by a very agreeable lunch.
It was good. Madrid rarely disappoints on that front. But in the grand framework of a five-senses luxury philosophy, it did feel like the most literal interpretation imaginable: we ate something, therefore the box is ticked.
I’m sure that, in a meeting room somewhere in Brussels many months ago, having butter in a jar that looked like a candle — complete with wick and flame! — to dip your bread in said something about the car or the brand, but it passed me by.
At this point, the conceptual scaffolding supporting the facade of the event had collapsed slightly, revealing the core structure. The car. Ultimately, the reason I was here.
The Lexus LBX
Somewhere between the workshops, venues and philosophy sessions, I did actually drive the Lexus LBX. And this is where the whole thing grounded itself again.
On the road, the Lexus LBX is exactly what you’d want it to be. It’s smooth, quiet, easy to place in traffic. The hybrid system works seamlessly in the background, gliding through urban streets in near silence and settling into unobtrusive efficiency once you’re moving.
It doesn’t need an emotive soundtrack from the exhaust, and doesn’t try to be sporty. It doesn’t need to. This is a car built for modern urban life — tight roads, short trips, stop-start traffic and the occasional longer run out of town. In that context, it feels very well resolved.
The real luxury here isn’t scent or soundscapes. It’s the absence of effort. It simply does what you ask of it with minimal drama.
Like the event, it’s not perfect. The ride is a little firm, tall drivers might struggle, the engine drones when accelerating hard, and the prices go far higher than they really should.
I applaud Lexus for the car and for trying to show it off with pure theatre. Sure, the message was sometimes more elaborate than the product itself, but as a piece of brand storytelling, it was meticulously produced, occasionally contradictory, and far removed from how most people will encounter the Lexus LBX.
And yet I still like the LBX.
Underneath the scent experiments, audio philosophy, and rooftop cocktails is a genuinely calm, well-judged, likeable little car. It doesn’t chase trends. It doesn’t shout. It just quietly gets on with being a premium, compact, urban-friendly Lexus.
Madrid was wonderful. The hotel was exceptional. The workshops were beautifully staged, if sometimes conceptually overcooked. But when all the layers are stripped away, what actually matters is the car.
And that bit works.
He is the founder of Huff Media, publisher of Professional Pickup, Professional Van, Average Janes, Average Joes, and CALIBRE. His work focuses primarily on light commercial vehicles, pickups, and real-world vehicle use, with much of his time spent on manufacturer launches, industry events, and long-term vehicle testing.