This is what happens when a luxury upstart stops apologizing and just builds a genuinely excellent sedan. The current G80 nails the fundamentals, a cabin that feels $20k richer than the sticker, a ride that dissolves highway miles, and styling confident enough that strangers assume you paid BMW money. The infotainment will test your patience with menus buried three layers deep and touch controls that occasionally ignore your finger, but that's the tax for entry. Depreciation is brutal if you're the first owner, glorious if you're the second: $82k lease returns selling for $33k with under 30k miles. Buy it if you want S-Class comfort without the S-Class payment. Skip it if the nearest Genesis dealer is two states away.
If you want a luxury sedan that'll outlive your mortgage and still feel special at 200,000 miles, the 2019-2025 ES is the one to buy, owners report zero drama, 50+ mpg from the hybrid, and an interior that hasn't aged a day. It's the last ES with the smooth V6, and the last one that feels like a proper Lexus before the brand lost the plot. The 2026 redesign strips out the V6, replaces buttons with touch-capacitive surfaces, and swaps hand-stitched luxury for Tesla minimalism that screams 'cost-cutting.' Nobody's driven one yet, so the hate is all aesthetic, but when a brand kills its best engine, ditches the iconic L logo for spelled-out branding, and makes the interior look like a rental car, that's a red flag. Buy the outgoing generation while you still can, it's the last ES that knows what it is.