Coupe is on the way

The hardtop coupe is set for sales next year. “That will be in Australia by late next year and it is going to be a very important model for us with what we see as almost totally incremental sales,” Roca says.

He confirms the as-yet-unnamed and unseen hardtop convertible will not be a replacement for the ageing V8 SC430 boulevard cruiser.

“We have been told that the SC will remain as it is until 2011 and there are no plans beyond that as to what will replace it. By 2011 it will be a 10-year-old model . . . and that's too long in the tooth,” he says.

According to Roca, the convertible IS will be based squarely off the IS 250 platform with the same 153kW 2.5-litre V6 engine.

A facelift version of the IS 250 with new front and rear sheetmetal, reworked lights and external jewellery, as well as a substantially refreshed interior, will head the coming Lexus range changes.

The new IS 250 arrives in twin with the IS-F in November, followed by an all-new RX350 in February.

“Three months after that will come the RX450h (hybrid) and later in the fourth quarter of the year will come the IS Coupe Convertible,” Roca says.

“The IS Coupe is going to be pretty much all incremental sales, and we are expecting the RX volume to increase with the new model because when we launched the original there was no car park of RX owners. We now have a huge car park, and that is a great advantage.”

With the new models and an increase in dealerships that will almost double the present 22 outlets to 38 by 2015, Roca is confident of steady sales growth.

“Sales of 8200 by the end of this year is where we want to be, then next year around 9000,” he says. “By the end of 2010 we will have put 10,000 sales a year behind us.

“It will be through a combination of customer growth and model expansion. It's a bit of both.

“What we can't really accurately measure is the effect of the growth of the dealer network with a lot of those new outlets being regional.”