That's why they are consistently a few years behind, always playing catch up but never can.

 

The funny thing is that Lexus has a comerical of the Germans trying to reverse engineer the RX330 when it first came out.

 

Every car company does it. It's always neat to poke around and try and figure out what the other guy was thinking. You also get to see who really spends the time on getting the little things right.

 

That's why it always me when people say that no other manufacturer has been able to match the handling and feel of a BMW-3 or a Lotus etc. when it seems it would be straightforward to copy all the basic designs (without infringing patents) and geometries, suspension specs etc.. Also, I think so much of perception and dogma is due to marketing combined with the resulting placebo effect. I bet if they took a BMW-3 and a Lexus-IS and totally swap all visual appearances and have a bunch of journalists do a test comparison, they would all conclude the usual dogma that the Lexus (actually the BMW) comes close but still not there yet with the BMW (actually the Lexus) .