What’s coming for the U.S. version of the 2021 Lexus LS? A look at the recently-revealed domestic version of the car may be illuminating.

For the 2021 model year, the Lexus LS doesn’t look dramatically different from the outgoing model. The nose is a trifle understated in comparison, and the roof is a little more raked, leaving narrowed side glass. Lexus’ website gushes a plenitude of auto-marketing platitudes about ‘Lexus DNA’ and ‘relentless evolution’; in the end, the patter can be distilled down to a general refining of the car, and on this score, as expected, Lexus delivers.

What Lexus focused on for the performance touring car are comforts of the ride and creature varieties, and driver assistance tech—what Lexus calls Lexus Teammate, a.k.a. AI is my co-pilot. Introduced for the Japanese market, the learn-and-adapt system will surely be adapted to U.S. and other export markets. Lexus tells us that it is ‘considerate of people’s sensibilities’; as ‘sensibilities’ is usually used in the context of human belief systems, one can assume that the use of the word here is a flourish of purple marketing prose. Either that, or Lexus has developed an AI-driven driver-assist feature which will avoid offending anyone in the car; if that happened to be the case, we wonder if it could be hacked, and adjusted to offend everyone in the car.

Also on the agenda for the refresh was a comprehensive comfort and performance overhaul. Hard facts include a newly-designed Adaptive Variable Suspension component, smoother acceleration and shifting, a new lustrous grade of paint, more comfortable seats by way of ‘deep stitching’, a quieter ride, and updated battery-assisted acceleration for the hybrid variant.