Has anyone any suggestions as to why my ES300 is extremely sluggish when doing hill starts. By sluggish I mean being out accelerated by fully loaded buses. I commute daily up and down a single track mountain road which requires several hill starts and the car simply does not want to pull away. It is OK when the revs get to about 3,000 but until then it is quicker to walk. Switching the A/C off makes very little difference. It is perfectly OK starting on level ground and has plenty of power going uphill in normal running. I have had the normal servicing done and new fuel and air filters, plugs etc. installed, all without success.

To answer my own question for the benefit of any others who may encounter the same problem, the fault has now been traced to an all but invisible split in the concertina air intake hose on the engine side of the butterfly valve air flow meter. When on an uphill stretch the engine moved back fractionally on its mountings, just enough to open up the split and allow too much air into the mixture, making it too lean to give any power. On level ground or downhill the split remained closed and so did not disturb the air/fuel mix.