Lexus at it again with tennis ball fuzz-covered IS350
Lexus IS350 Tennis Ball Edition - Click above for an image gallery
Andy Roddick, your new ride awaits. Lexus has followed up its golf ball-dimpled LS 460 L built to commemorate the automaker's sponsorship of the U.S. Open earlier this year with another uniquely-finished car that's got us scratching our heads. In this case, the Lexus in question is covered in tennis ball fuzz in the traditional yellow-green hue.
This fuzzy fluorescent IS350 was on display last weekend in New York City during the ongoing US Open festivities. Sorry tennis fans, we don't imagine this will be a factory option, though we do wonder if the finish could alleviate the pesky unmanned shopping carts that leave dents and scratches in our cars at the local grocery store. See? There is a practical application after all.
The boys from Kicking Tires happened to be in town while the Open was going down and they snapped off a few shots of the car in question. Take a look at a few of the shots in our gallery below and then check out Kicking Tires for the rest.
Gallery: Lexus IS350 - Tennis Ball Edition
[Source: Kicking Tires]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
FThorn 6:37PM (9/08/2009)
I for one don't understand why ALL cars/trucks must be shiny painted surfaces. It's about the most fragile surface one can hope to maintain. Why not have something like THIS or even just unpainted plastic for utility vehicles? Makes more sense to me. I wonder if this absorbs radar or lidar somewhat?
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carcomptoy 7:15PM (9/08/2009)
Rain, mud, bird poop, etc. immediately come to mind as to why cars aren't finished like this...
Obviously DaMinority 7:44PM (9/08/2009)
Two words
Surface drag
I agree though, my car would look great around March with 10 good snows worth of mud and salt all caked on the fuzz. It'd look like the character from that Updike short story.
skablaw 6:42PM (9/08/2009)
There isn't much automotively-speaking that really makes me smile anymore, but this is pretty clever. Well done.
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zamafir 6:52PM (9/08/2009)
yup, to bad it's not an is-f, that'd be one fast serve har har har
vespid82 6:42PM (9/08/2009)
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm... LF-A Roadster :)
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Peter Rockwell 6:45PM (9/08/2009)
Wonder what this does for gas mileage? And can you imagine getting bird poop or tree sap out of it?
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Rocko 6:50PM (9/08/2009)
You know when you pop open a tube of new tennis balls for the first time, and you get a whiff of that fuzzy air, I bet this car smells like that all the time.
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prodrive1mike 6:51PM (9/08/2009)
things gotta weight a ton after getting wet.
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Merritt Johnson 7:03PM (9/08/2009)
Better stay away from the dog park while driving this one.
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Noah O 7:17PM (9/08/2009)
This was at the us open last year too.
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Jrejre 7:22PM (9/08/2009)
At least you're prepared if you get locked out of it.
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ckm 8:10PM (9/08/2009)
Totally off topic, but could the gallery be any worse? Every Autoblog gallery I load takes the better part of 80 seconds before even the first picture is visible. And I'm on a 6meg connection...
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RyanK 11:12PM (9/08/2009)
Yep. Whoever designed autoblog's gallery needs be smacked.
The last iteration was annoying. It used desktop wallpaper sized images and scaled them down using the browser instead of generating thumbnails server side (yes, you people can afford the hard drive space). This results in grainy, crappy looking images because browser scaling sucks ass in most cases.
This latest redesign makes it even worse. They take the browser re-sized humongous images and decided it was a good idea to PRELOAD THEM ALL ON THE FIRST VIEW. So, instead of loading a single, small, 50kb image on the first gallery view, you're downloading any number of 200kb+ images all at once instead of as you browse. This royally pisses me off when I'm on dialup (yes, people still use dialup in some places) and I'm sure doesn't help people on DSL or other low end broadband.
Fix your damn gallery already.
Jrejre 11:33PM (9/08/2009)
I'm having really bad luck with it, I don't know if it's because I'm on firefox or what but:
It doesn't matter which image I click at the article part, when I get to the gallery page it always loads the first image.
If I click another image in the gallery, then choose Hi-res it takes me back to the first image AGAIN
I have to hit the back button twice to navigate to the previous picture. If I've looked at 4 or 5 pictures I end up having to use the "return to article" button or just click the autoblog logo to get back to the main page or it takes a rediculous amount of clicks to get back.
Also my "avatar" or "profile pic" is a crapshoot, sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesn't.
SneakyE 9:36AM (9/09/2009)
I totally agree with how frustrating the photo gallery is. The worst part for me is trying to get back to the article the gallery is for. There needs to be a "Back to Article" button. I tried using the back button after I clicked around the images a bit and all it did was get stuck between two images. Click back get image one, click back again get image two, click back again image one....
Very frustrating. Maybe I'll just have to stick with jalopnik. At least their image gallery works and you stay with the article when viewing images.
ckm 10:38AM (9/09/2009)
@SneakyE
There is a 'back to article' link, but because it's just plain text (with no indication that it's a link), it just gets lost. Look for it next to the image size buttons, labeled 'Back to post'.
Just another example of how crappy the gallery UI and function is (although it seems faster this AM).
JDM Life 8:33PM (9/08/2009)
I would say even with the crazy yellow stuff the car still look great.
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axio.matik 12:52PM (9/09/2009)
I don't know about that. Looks more like a pikachu to me.
Steve 3:34AM (9/09/2009)
A boring car for a boring sport. Figures.
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