Six wheels on a Lexus, at a furniture fair in Milan, sounds like either a provocation or a punchline. At this year’s Milan Design Week, Lexus is betting it’s the former. The brand rolled into Superstudio Più in the Tortona district with its LS Concept, a long-body, flat-roofed, twin rear-axle machine that first appeared at the Japan Mobility Show in 2025. It’s a chauffeur-driven vehicle built entirely around the passenger, and it’s Lexus’s clearest statement yet about where its flagships are going. In fact, Chief Branding Officer Simon Humphries said it plainly: the “S” in LS no longer stands for Sedan. It stands for Space.
The car sits inside an installation called SPACE, a fittingly simple name for a big idea. The LS Concept is wrapped in a cylindrical LED screen that’s always moving, cycling through textures and color palettes that wash over the car’s matte metallic finish. The whole thing sits on a low turntable, rotating slowly so you can take in every angle while the screen behind it blurs the line between the vehicle and its environment. From the back, the body is dark and geometric, with red light cleanly tracing the corners and the LEXUS wordmark centered like a final statement. The front has no grille at all, just a wide bar of white light, a dark glassy face, and some sharp diagonal cuts at the lower corners. The side profile is what really sells the scale of it all; the greenhouse is so long and flat it forces you to rethink what a luxury car is supposed to look like.
Designer: Lexus
You’ll notice those sharp diagonal white light signatures at the corners of both the front and back, and they do a great job of anchoring your eye so you don’t get lost in all that surface area. The front is an exercise in restraint, especially for Lexus. There are no intakes, no heritage cues, and definitely no spindle grille, which defined the brand’s look for fifteen years. Instead, a single, clean bar of white light carries the Lexus name across the top, and below it, dark glass sweeps down like a theater curtain. The back is just as clean, with black geometric planes and red light tracing the corners so precisely it feels more like sculpture than taillights. There’s also a louvered panel on the rear quarter that looks both cool and functional, the kind of detail you have to go back and look at a second time.
The twin rear wheels are probably the first thing that throws you off, but the more you look at them, the more they make sense. A six-wheel layout, something you usually see on overland vehicles or high-end coaches, lets Lexus pack in a huge amount of interior volume without the big wheel arches that eat up space in most long cars. The turbine-style wheel covers keep the look clean, where normal spokes would have ruined the effect. When you see it from the side, the lower body looks like a single sculpted piece, and the way it tucks under itself makes the whole thing feel like it’s floating. Lexus is basically saying that a vehicle with the footprint of a small bus can be the next word in luxury, and after a few minutes, you start to believe them.
Step through the door, framed in a bright white light, and you see what they mean by hospitality. A slatted wood panel runs up the entire wall of the cabin, a single rear seat is finished in cream and burgundy leather, and the floor is so open you get the sense it was designed for standing as much as sitting. The real achievement here is how Lexus managed to package so much genuine room inside; it feels more like a small, well-designed living space than a stretched-out car. Whether any of this makes it to production is anyone’s guess, and Lexus seems happy to leave that question hanging in the air.
What Lexus is showing here is a clear signal of where its design thinking is headed, and that alone makes it one of the most interesting things you can see in Milan this year. If you want to see it for yourself, you can experience the SPACE installation and the Lexus LS Concept at the Daylight Hall in Superstudio Più, located in the Tortona district, from April 21st to the 26th.
The post Lexus LS Concept First-Look: The Six-Wheel Flagship Turning Heads at Milan Design Week 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.
