Northern Boys Luv Gravy

You may be right - I wonder if Burberry could do a "Lexus check" baseball cap for us non-MM chavs.. :)

Saw this on You Tube the other night. Best thing on the internet at the moment. Deserves to be a hit.

Garmin Streetpilot i3. £130. Small, portable, clear voice intructions and screen. Postcode entry. Never let me down yet.

Having had the ventilated seats this Summer I would now insist on them for future cars. They have gone from something I thought I'd never use to one of the best features of the car. My gonads have never felt so comfortable.

We used to have a couple of Passats at work that would do this. You'd come out and all the windows would be wound fully down. Never did get to the bottom of it.

No I don't - I really think you need to take a reality check. Where are you doing all this research? The Big Boy's Book of Car Facts? Mercedes, Audi and BMW don't make cars to be chaffeur driven and only Lexus, Bentley and RR do? I really have heard everything now. BTW. Lexus already have a scheme to buy back cars - it's called the Dealer Network. They buy your car off you and stick a couple or three grand on it and sell it on. No dealer is going to pay more than he has to so are Lexus going to just give him a few grand more so he can pass it onto you. I'll show my backside in Woolies' window if that happens.

I was initially interested in a diesel auto but when I found Lexus weren't doing one I tried the 250SE Auto and found it to be absolutely brilliant - it is so smooth and powerful - easily the best auto I've driven, and the most economical. The 220d was not out when I bought mine but I have subsequently had one as a courtesy car but I wasn't terribly impressed, the gearbox being the main problem. I found it had a long throw and was a bit vague. The engine itself was good, modern in terms of design, meets all current and future emissions standards and seemed a good balance between power and economy, albeit not as good on mpg as the older Audi/VW designs. As for the MM, well I was buying with my own money and couldn't possibly justify the £2700 price. Again, I have tried an SE-L with MM and found the satnav to be no better than my £140 Garmin while the better sound system was only marginally better than the standard fit. It all depends how much of an audiophile you are I guess. I also thought that with all the advances in Satnav I could be stuck with an out of date system a couple of years down the line. Another thing, the price difference between a 250 SE Auto and a 250SE-L Auto with MM is £5,300. There's no where near that much added value between the 2 in my mind. I love my IS but I don't think it's a £32k car in any spec.

Almost every other new IS owner .............. rattle this, rattle that !! That's all I see on these forums these days !! Well there certainly seems to have been a few rattles thrown out of prams....

I thought I read somewhere that the shark fin aerial was to be fitted to all 2007 model year cars in the US for satellite radios. I could be wrong though.

In my experience it is not the mirror that vibrates, rather the rear window as the sub is mounted in the rear parcel shelf. If the bass is that loud you have to ask yourself are you listening to the music or working on the assumption that everything sounds best with the maximum bass. Much like the chavs in their Corsas with sub boxes.

An IS250SE-L basic??? Aren't they more expensive than the Sport?

I can understand your disappointment concerning your handover experience. However, you are doing the classic British thing of not complaining and just grouching about it to all and sundry. If we don't complain things will never get better (see food in pubs for example). I was unhappy with my first service experience and wrote a letter of complaint to the dealer principal and copied Lexus Uk in on it. I have to say the response was swift and extremely satisfying. They completely turned me around in my opinion of the dealership. In fact my wife, who works for Audi, was amazed at the lengths they went to - Audi customers would not have been treated as well. You can't please everyone: If they offer to wash the cars someone will complain they will scratch it. If they offer free coffee and cakes someone will deem them an irrelevance and an expensive add on. If they offer Golf days, non-golfers will moan. If they offered free lap dances the eunochs would complain. And alcohol is never overrated.

That's assuming she has daytime running lights which you have. If it's like in the UK the AUTO setting only turns on the lights when it gets sufficiently dark.

Don't feel like that fella...don't let it get to you...any other car in this price/grade is flawed too...even more than the Lex!! I paid with my own dosh...writing a check for £27odd grand is no easy thing to swallow...and makes all things not 100% feel as though they are totally flawed... PS - dripping water onto the leather is a real problem...one of the pitfalls of a 0.27CD drag Coeff factor! I paid with my own money as well and admit it was a bit of a leap of faith going with the Lexus. Anyway I'm happy enough athe moment not to regret it. Of course when my missus comes home in a new A4 next year I might feel different! Don't worry about a bit of water dripping on the leather - it's tanned in water anyway and it won't do any harm.

That's a point - I went Gold in March...mine still shows me down as a casual!! That's a very good point - I went Gold in March as well and it still doesn't show. As for the car - I love it! No matter how tired I am after a hard day I look forward to getting in for the drive home. 30 minutes of effortless wafting along I'm sufficiently recovered to flick it over to Sport and enjoy a bit of spirited driving to get the blood pumping again. I know it's not perfect and the plastic centre trim was the one thing that slightly bothered me at first, however never having been a big fan of wood in car, it has grown on me and is a bit more interesting than the aluminium/black in our diesel A4 Avant. There's no rattles as such - just the odd creak as plastics warm/cool. In fact the Lexus is so good that the A4 is not getting used much, it hasn't reached a 1000 miles yet, we just prefer the smooth power over the tractor. And the mpg is getting better - averaging 31mpg now.

I never got to use the "Handover Room" either, but then again my car was parked in the centre of the showroom and they waved off towards open double doors. Once the shouting had died down and the salesman who had thrown himself in front of my car got back up again, they guided me back and sent me off in the right direction and not through the front windows.

Couple of points: The Lexus LS400 was in no way based on the platform of any Toyota - it was a completely new product with its own engineering team - that was the whole point of it. Toyota is not yet the number 1 manufacturer in the world and certainly not the only one operating at a profit. I think the Quandt family who own most of BMW would disagree with you. How is Lexus more exclusive than BMW and Mercedes that are wholly independant companies with no parent company like Toyota? There are numerous threads on here with GS430 owners complaining about horrendous depreciation. It doesn't take much research to find that out. Your later comment about Lexus being built in East Germany as a positive (actually it will be China first) doesn't square with your derogatory comments about SOME Mercedes being built in South Africa.

I had the recall done, took a couple of hours and they washed my car, left a bottle of nice champagne on the seat and put £20 of fuel in the tank. Can't say fairer than that.

Who says it has? One person's experience is hardly definitive. The FM reception on mine is spot on and trouble free.

I understood that BMW/MINI had a big display outside.

Agreed. It's pretty rotten if you ask me. I'm glad this doesn't share the Lex badge. There are a lot of Lexus design clues in that and while I'm not sure of its dimensions it looks to me like it shares the floorpan with then new LS460.

I went along to the dealership end of November and liked the car. Dealer phoned me to say that they would have one for 22nd December, so all in all about 4 weeks. Apparently one of the big selling points Lexus use is the shorter delivery times than their German competitors..

Items I'd like to come as standard in my Lexus, just little things but would just make it a bit more perfect: 1. Cooled glovebox. 2. Illumination for the petrol flap and boot release. 3. Somewhere for my spare change and sunglasses. 4. Tilt forwards on head restraints. 5. Kylie Minogue I should be so lucky...

Well if people cancel then more will become available and those waiting will get their cars sooner... Seriously, I think the problem is that BMW and Audi largely build to order - there is a build slot programmed to go through the factory and your individual spec is put onto that slot so you or the dealer can track it through to delivery. That slot may be a 12 week delivery schedule but you can pretty much guarantee that it is yours and you can plan for it. I may be wrong but the way Lexus seem to work is that they predict a mix of colours and specs that they feel will be popular and then plan production. The actual sales mix is then fed back to the factory and the production fine tuned to meet the actual demand. This does mean, however, that when a particular specification proves to be inordinately popular e.g autos and MM, they quickly build up a backlog that takes some time to clear.

It may not be - this recall has been coming for a while and most people seem to have had the registered letter about 2 weeks ago. You may be lucky.