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Well, I am very pleased to report another clean MOT pass for my 2002 LS430, all good, no advisories. This is the 5th clear mot and I have had very little spend, other than religious servicing and preventative items, I.e. new radiator. In that time I have driven 40000 trouble free miles and plan to continue doing the same, I must confess encouraged by Malc and The-Acre who demonstrate total confidence in their LS Lexi. Each time I consider that I should buy something newer, hopefully more reliable, I consider just how brilliant and reliable my current car is, and basically can’t bear to part, even with now, a lowly 100,000 miles. The ride , comfort and performance, I know could not be bettered, even by spending a lot of money, on another Lexus, so why do it ? I have my LS serviced by Paul Frost and mot’d next door at a very thorough garage, who casually tell me ‘yeh we see very few problems with these LS’s’ . In conclusion, don’t believe the hype about problems with LS 430’s ....but ....... do check the service history and ownership, mot history is I think a very good guide, particularly, advisories. Cheers, Roger

I have been ensuring the traction control works today and the closest I can liken the driving experience to is a Corvette Stingray I hired in the states a couple of years ago. You can almost see the nose raise under hard acceleration, LOVE it 😍 Growing to hate speed limits even more, she’s just starting to open up when...... oh no foot on brake time. She will be getting detailed and ceramic coated next month, one too many Rat like foot prints in the lacquer @Big Rat 🤣 It would appear the bonnet attracts stone chips, not surprised given the size. Ceramic won’t help, too late for PPF, but I will have to do something at some stage to calm my OCD 😅 Everyone loves the seats and plenty of room for my wife and daughter inside which is great. I am well and truly loving her, almost having to come up with excuses to go out and drive! She appears to be quite a bit more economical than my 05 RX300 which would have been my daily drive had I gone with plan a and not bought a new car to replace my Alfa.

Took some better photos today, the first one was me trying to be 'arty' and failed playing with the light/shade. Also note the £12 e-bay rear diffuser.

I finally had a bit of time to look at this after your great write-up Jason. A nice bit of maintenance and easy to follow. I made sure I got that reassuring click you referenced when reconnecting the motor, and had a quick test drive to check no error messages before putting all the trim back 55k miles on a 64 plate Executive. My fan blades didn’t look too bad but the filter gauze was pretty dusted up. Some before & after pics below.

Hi all, thought I'd add some pictures on for you all as requested. I added a few extras: New rubber boot mat, brand new Lexus roof bars and Heko wind deflectors. All of these added makes a big difference to the car as it stands. Disappointing thing is i might have to sell it because the Mrs can't get used to it 😫.

If it’s important to you that’s all that counts and why the hell not make the car exactly what you want it to be. The wheels look great & i’ll be very interested to see how it looks. As you say it sounds like you have embarked on a very cash negative path 😉👍🏻

I got my car back last night from paint shop! I could not spot any issues with it, looks like they did a really good job! I am so happy to have it back! I missed her a lot! :) Qashqai was not a bad car but I love my GS, it's quieter, comfier and much (much) quicker and much more relaxed to drive be it town or motorway!

I am not familiar with Lexus protect. My Gen 3 glasscoat was applied by the main dealer for around £300. It is a ceramic coating. When I had to use the smart insurance to get rid of a door scratch the repairer said that as I had the glasscoat the scratch had not penetrated the paint so could get the scratch out without repainting. I also use the glasscoat shampoo. Which costs a lot more than any shampoo I would put near my hair and hand wash using two buckets. The paint still has swirls in but stays clean for longer and still looks good after four years. https://www.gen-3glasscoat.com Cleaned it yesterday.

Welcome to Europe's Leading Lexus Club! Please Enjoy!

I've purchased several cars and brought the paint protection. Some are good and some aren't worth the money at all. If it's applied well, it definitely helps protect your paint work longer, but personally I wouldn't pay the dealer prices for this. I asked for a polish on collection and the dealer was good to their word and applied an autoglym polish for free. Still looking good three months on. Alloy wheels protection is good if you park in towns and are prone to kerbing, but read the small print, some large scuffs and scratches aren't covered.

The diffuser looks good. The sun is out, the car is clean, looks great!

I'm not used to being right, double check those numbers just in case! 😄

She like to have a overview of the front end of the car, we had the same issue with the BMW f10.. she didn't like using a cushion 😂. She has only driven it once so far. . .so once she starts to drive it a little more, time will tell... positives are that she like the looks and pearl colour, she also likes the height of the car and also said she feels alot safer too. IF. . . i did sell it i know i'll make money and not lose out.

Ah yes, you're right. Somehow I ended up thinking the pollen filter was different last night and apparently ordered the wrong one but I've just checked the mann catalog again and you're right they're the same.

Certainly very similar to how we feel about our 15 plate 450h Premier. Handling is superb compared to our previous Volvo V70 - the GS has much better weight distribution, much less roll, grips WAY harder. The drivetrain is much more securely mounted in the car (in the volvo you could feel the engine flop about on its mounts) which gives a much more predictable feel, and when you really pitch it into a corner and the adaptive dampers do their thing... well, it's the most capable roadholding car that I've ever had (or driven, come to that). Drivetrain is superbly refined, able to cruise @ 1500rpm at any speed. Acceleration doesn't FEEL super fast, and doesn't have the peak punch that our V70 did (twin-turbo 5-cylinder diesel, 470Nm torque), but the EV-like linearity of the acceleration means that it actually gathers speed with so little fuss and effort by comparison, and in a much smoother manner. This fools you into believing it's slower than it actually is. Fuel consumption is as per my fuelly sig at the bottom of this post. I'm very pleased with that, as our V70 only returned 38mpg (225bhp, diesel). The 450h is 50% more powerful and petrol so to get basically the same economy is remarkable and welcome. The CD thing doesn't bother me - our V70 was the same, and we never once used it. Our honda had a 6-disc changer which we did use, but in a world of USB I don't miss that faff at all! The infotainment UI isn't very good. I'm not complaining about the mouse-thing - I actually think that works very well. It provides useful haptic feedback (we have it set to max strength) and once you understand that it has an absolute relationship to the position on the screen (rather than a relative relationship like an actual computer mouse) then it's a very good bridge between hand and screen. The problem is that the actual UI of how things are accessed is really awkward, taking many more presses and actions than it should. For example, when playing some music off the USB stick and deciding that I want to listen to a different artist I must take the following steps: Select right-hand screen, select music panel, send music panel to left-hand screen, select browse, select artist, select letter group (or scroll list), select artist, select album. If partway through that process I come to a road junction or whatever that requires my full attention then if I do not return to it quickly enough it will time out and I must start again. Another example is that it is not possible to cancel the navigation when it is giving you instructions - we have been a couple of times to a shop where the postcode doesn't quite align, so pulling into the car park the sat nav is constantly re-routing and trying to direct. Every time it does this it blocks you out of the menu to cancel the route navigation. And why are postcodes (the PRIMARY method of destination entry in the UK) on the second page of the nav screen? We once tried voice commands to cancel navigation with totally hilarious (and depressing) results - completely useless. Now, in fairness most car infotainment UIs are awful - our volvo was limited and tedious (for example, choosing an artist from USB required scrolling through a list - could not jump the list using the physical number/letter group keys, and every time you went to the list it started from A). My Leaf is extraordinarily annoying (Doesn't give a list of Artists, but instead the complete list of Albums, sorted in Artist order.... Then don't get me started on its interpretation of finding charging points (Start a journey with a full charge, ~90 miles range. Put in destination 150 miles away. Warns you that you won't make it on your current charge, and offers to find a charge point for you - guides you to nearest charge point which you will arrive at with 95% battery remaining and still won't make your destination)). In other words.... the Lexus system has its annoyances and idiosyncrasies (and idiocies), but so do most others. Another issue is the spray of buttons and some settings buried in menus. I spent 10 minutes looking through the menus one time because the mirrors weren't folding in when locked. Gave up, and 5 minutes later noticed that the "auto" button on the door mirror control panel did not have the little green tell-tale LED lit. Similarly the auto-wipers are only indicated by a little green tell-tale on the wiper stalk, that is obscured behind the steering wheel (our volvo had a similar tell-tale, but it also put an icon up in the instrument panel - and the wipers defaulted to off every time you started the car (sensible because it meant it wouldn't try wiping while you were deicing the car, clearly an important consideration for volvo)). How many buttons and telltales are there in the car marked "auto" (one on the mirror panel on the door, one on the wiper stalk, one on the headlamp stalk, two in the HVAC controls, one on each seat heater control, one on the rear climate panel, one on the rear view mirror....) The build quality is excellent, although the paint isn't particularly good (we have a couple of patches of crazing, and it's soft, picking up scratches easily). The most remarkable aspect of build quality to me is the way that when you shut the doors the noise of the outside world is so comprehensively drowned out - my Leaf has very thin glass and lets a lot of noise in, whereas the GS does not. Noticeably quieter than our V70. Seats are generally very good.... but I have a funny shaped back and I just can't quite get the lumbar to work for me, even the 2-step lumbar in the Premier. The problem that I have is that even the higher lumbar control isn't quite high enough up the seat for me (and I'm only 5'7). It's a shame that despite super-many-way-adjustable seats, the Premier does not have a proper 2d lumbar (ie in/out, up/down) but rather 2 separate 1d controls (lower in/out, upper in/out) - the lower is so low as to be useless for anyone, and the upper one is not high enough for me but may suit others. I love the adjustable bolsters and thigh support, but the memory functions are weird. It's extremely annoying not being able to recall the memory position whilst the car is moving or even stationary but in gear, and the passenger memory does not recall the thigh support position. On the plus side, the ventilation and heating are great, and I love being in the front passenger seat, set the thigh support out, recline a bit.... way too comfortable. Visibility is excellent! The A-pillars are designed exactly right in terms of size and angle. The V70 wasn't great in this regard, but the Leaf is truly appalling (you can literally lose a van in the A-pillar blind spot). There's a few little things you don't notice at first about how lexus designed the vehicle to improve this - the windscreen bonding overlap is moved as far outboard as possible, so the windscreen covers the front of the A-pillar, and with minimal masking applied on the screen, so there's not 1/2 inch of visible (from the inside) black masking at the edge like other cars. Then the A-pillar trim is angled to not project into that space, and the door overlap is also slightly carefully designed. You can see a similar overlap on the rear screen on the C-pillar, that the rear screen is wider and overlaps further onto the C pillar than other cars, making the view from inside wider. Really lovely piece of design work. BSM is good, ACC is ok - not as good as a VW hire car I had recently though (66 plate touran. It was the only good thing about that car). The ACC tends to pick up vehicles in adjacent lanes on curves as obstacles (which the VW was much better at), and the ACC is only a guide (the VW, I quickly discovered, allowed you to use it as a virtual bumper - once it was locked onto the car in front you could floor the throttle and it wouldn't move, which was a nice way of driving - felt like there was something the car was pushing against). AHB is totally useless - it works for a minute or two, then gets confused, doesn't dip for oncoming cars and then goes into a sulk and never turns high beam on ever again. I've not really played with LKA. LED headlamps (I know, a VERY rare option in the UK) are excellent, but confusing. Excellent in that they provide extremely wide, bright coverage, although in common with many high-power flat-beam systems they don't project as far down the road (in order to avoid dazzle) as a good halogen dip-beam setup (but that is very dim by comparison). The optic design isn't great, with extremely strong chromatic aberration at the cut-off (blue-red-yellow). The confusing element comes from them turning with the steering (which the xenons on our V70 did also). They turn much faster than the volvo and that works fine - I just don't understand why bother? The LED lights project light SO widely (pavements on both sides of the road well illuminated, pool of light extends out almost perpendicular to the motion of the car) that what's the point of turning them? You don't see any better over that way because it was already lit over that way. I understood the purpose with much narrower projected Xenon and Halogen lights, but it's just a totally unnecessary complication on the LED lights. So, I know it sounds like I'm focused on the negatives... I'm not - I just don't indulge in blind fanboyism with any car. I love the car and it's easily the best car we've ever owned (but I might not be saying that anymore once my Leaf is replaced with the Tesla). It's brilliant for what we do with it, and if you live your life on the motorway I can't think of a car I'd rather have. It feels special to be in and to drive.

New Carbon fibre Bonnet, spoiler and F grille badge

to my mind it only makes sense paying dopey money for such a car if you're going to keep it in aspic and never get the joy from using it and that's dopey too really ...... mine's at 217k and a daily driver at 12/15k miles a year AND I get enormous joy and satisfaction from driving her Malc