Do you remember when you were growing up and all your friends were allowed to go on school exchange trips to exotic places like France and Germany? Well how’s this for progress. We now have an 11-year-old girl from Tokyo in the spare room.

Now, I’ve been to Japan and it was strange. The bath in my hotel room was vertical and made from wood, the food was mostly still alive, there weren’t any chairs, the walls were made from rice, I was fed by a woman with a completely white face and a shoe size of minus three, all the bars were full of men in slippers, singing, the traffic hadn’t moved since 1952 and all you could buy from vending machines on the streets were cans of drink called Sweat. And soiled pants.

Once I tried driving from Tokyo to Yokohama but it was impossible because none of the road signs made any sense. Elsewhere in the world “centre” is zentrum, or centro or some such derivation, but in Japan it’s just a meaningless squiggle. Honestly, I would have found more cultural reference points if I’d gone to Venus.

So after a week I went back to my hotel and spent the rest of the trip under my bed hiding. And I was 40. So how on earth would an 11-year-old girl cope over here? To get round the fact that the poor little thing didn’t speak a single word of English, she was sent with one of those gadgets that only exists in Star Trek, the mind of Stephen Hawking, and most Japanese high street electrical stores.

You type a message in Japanese and it speaks the words in a sort of Daleky Engrish. And the first words it spoke, just five miles from the airport, were “car sick”. Plainly, after 11 years in a Tokyo traffic jam, our visitor was unused to travelling at speeds in excess of 3mph.

She was also confused by her supper on that first night, picking up a spoon and staring at it in much the same way that a traveller from the future might pick up and stare at a gramophone record. Plainly it made no sense. But then neither did any of the foodstuff that had been placed on her plate.

After just one mouthful of mashed potato she rushed to the loo, where she vomited, explosively and for a very prolonged period of time. Not bad, I thought, she’s only been in England two hours and already she’s been sick twice. I desperately wanted to make sure she was okay, and not too worried by the beds with legs and the chairs and how all the trees were more than 6in tall and outside. But it’s pretty hard when all you can say in Japanese is “hello”, “goodbye” and “Subaru”.

I couldn’t even use her gadget, partly because all the keys were in Japanese and partly because it had stopped saying “car sick” and was now saying “broken”, over and over again.

We’d been told that the whole point of her trip was to provide an experience of England, but after the spoon episode we did give her some chopsticks. And then, after watching her use them to wrestle with a 6in Yorkshire pudding, I’m afraid I relented and drove all the way to London for some sushi. To be honest, I felt so sorry for her I’d have gone out and harpooned a whale if that’s what she’d wanted.

To make matters worse she had arrived with a suitcase full of presents, all of which were exquisite but completely unfathomable. I mean, what kind of face are you supposed to pull when you’ve just been given what looks like a squidgy test tube full of pink and green sticky tape? It turned out to be a pen that writes a musical score as you drag the nib across the paper. Honestly, I’d never seen anything so amazing in my whole life. But then everything’s relative. She’d never been to a house that had dogs on the inside and trees on the outside.

It’s said that genetically the human race is defined at one end by the tribesmen of New Guinea and at the other by the Basques. These, apparently, are the bookends. But I’m sorry. I reckon the genetic North Pole is a 6ft 5in Brit and the genetic South Pole an 11-year-old Japanese schoolgirl.

And that brings me to the new Lexus GS430 I’ve been driving these past few days.

Like all cars, it has doors, seats, pedals, a steering wheel and lights at the front and the back. But how can this be, when it comes from a people who are baffled by a spoon? How do they make something so instantly recognisable as “a car” when they can’t eat mashed potato without vomiting? We have knives and forks. They have chopsticks. We lie down in the bath. They stand up. We cook food. They don’t. Their culture is completely different from ours, and yet the Lexus, on the face of it, is just the same as a Jaguar, a Mercedes or a BMW.

Except it isn’t. It is much, much quieter. At 70mph it’s so silent you can hear your hair growing. Sitting in your garden after a lovely lunch is more frantic. In the cabin you are so isolated from the real world that you get some idea of what it might be like to be dead.

The six-speed automatic box swaps cogs like an albatross changes direction, and even if you do put your foot down, the big V8 responds by humming, quietly, like it’s in a church arranging flowers. Driving this car is like being wrapped up in a duvet and carried from place to place by a small white cloud.

Only faster. It is far from being a sports car — driving this car with gusto would be like going into a sword fight armed with a cushion — but in a straight line, at least, the 4.3 litre engine delivers the goods. It’d easily hang onto the coat-tails of a similarly priced BMW 5-series.

But the best thing about this car is the layout of the interior. If we ignore the spectacularly horrible wooden trim we find a sense of order and logic that would make Mr Spock look like a swivel-eyed madman. All the major controls are where you want them to be, and do what you want them to do, and all the minor controls are hidden away in a flap by your right knee.

Problems? Well, apart from the wood trim you have to dig deep to find anything tangible. The boot’s an awkward shape, I suppose, and there isn’t quite as much space in the back as you might expect. But neither of these things is a good enough reason for buying something else. As a long-distance cruiser this car is quite simply outstanding. Better than a Gulfstream V, and maybe even a rival for teleporting.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like it at all, partly because it’s about as attractive as a sponsored town centre roundabout and partly because Lexuses these days are driven by people who play golf, or people who like to slap their hos and drive around at night shooting at business rivals with submachineguns. Gangstas? Golfers? I don’t want to look like either.

Mostly, though, I don’t like this car because it feels like a facsimile of the real thing. And that’s hardly surprising because that’s exactly what it is. A copy. A Mercedes clone.

Cars sit in the Japanese psyche along with spoons and mashed potato. They don’t come naturally. Oh sure, they can copy a Mercedes and use it to earn vast lumps of foreign currency, but how do you copy flair and panache and feel? The simple answer is: you can’t, so you end up with a completely soulless driving experience.

It’s a bit like those vegetarians who insist on eating hamburgers that are designed to look, feel and taste like the real thing. But they’re just not.

Technically, this new Lexus is probably better than a Mercedes, in the same way that a golden egg made by laser is going to be technically better than one of Karl Fabergé’s originals. But which one would you rather have?

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Lexus GS430
Engine V8, 4293cc
Power 279bhp @ 5600rpm
Torque 308 lb ft @ 3500rpm
Transmission Six-speed automatic
Fuel 24.8mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 269g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 6.1sec
Top speed 155mph
Price £46,755
Verdict A counterfeit car with everything except panache
Rating 3/5

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