saracen

Myself (and I)

With that type of occassional use you should be OK with the rear seats. Parking sensors are a nice to have but they are not essential. In fact there is a school of thought that says they make you lazy as you start to rely on them rather than your own judgement. The SE-L has parking sensors combined with a visual display - very elegant. My IS250 SE-L was fine on country roads. The best thing to do is get the car for a 24 hour test drive and then do your journey to work a couple of times. That should answer any questions about road and tyre noise.

Who

*Sigh* This kind of dialogue only seeks to increase hatred against Muslims and further alienate those Muslims already in Australia. Perhaps, as an elected member of Parliament whose duty is to serve all members of the community, Brendan Nelsons time might be better served by engaging with the Muslim community rather than sending out what is quite clearly a message of hate. And for the record I'm not a Muslim. Neither am I pro- or anti-Islam. I just feel that this type of sentiment does nobody any favours.

Disease

Hi there and welcome to the club. You won't go far wrong with 250SE Auto, it's a great car. On smooth roads it's v. quiet but on rough tarmac at high speed it is prone to noise. Although to be honest I only noticed that when I turned the Mark Levinson stereo down! Rear legroom is not great. It's not awful but it's not great. If you have young kids you should be fine. If you are expecting to take four rugby playing mates up and down the country they may start to despise your choice of car. I suggest you visit a dealer and sit in the front and the back that's what I did. I don't have kids and rarely carry rear seat passengers so it was not an issue. Rear visibility was never an issue in my car and parking sensors and reversing camera will obviously help. BMW - they sell a lot so there is obviously a market for them but it's not what I would call the thinking mans choice. The new merc does look good but it's very early to tell whether Mercedes have resolved some of their reliability issues. Don't even think about the Audi A4, the new model is due soon and then the value of the car would drop like a stone.

I can see why it needs to be kept in a garage - where are the doors and windows??

try and look at the perfect all round car not what you would want personally Like I said the SC430 is the perfect all round car - and it goes off road. I live on a farm and mine goes off road every day!

This week my perfect car is the SC430, a few weeks ago it was the IS250. And the other day I was thinking of the new LS600h... it changes all the time.

I don't think people praise everything Lexus regardless, I just think they have had fewer problems overall... When I had a problem with a squeeky seat I mentioned it immediately and it was fixed, with no further recurrences.

I do feel for a Jamboo and some of the other unfortunate IS owners who are having issues. As this is an owners forum and they are owners they are entitled to vent their spleens when things go wrong. I think the issue is exacerbated when Lexus, who scream from the rooftops about their customer service have dealers who fall short of their gold standard. However as others have said some of what Jamboo is unhappy about (door locks, boot space) was known to him before buying the car and yet he still bought it. I was dead set on buying a diesel till it was announced that it was only available as a manual and from the reports on here I am so glad I didn't buy one. The IS250 was nothing but a dream, no problems, rattles or such like and as you will know I only chopped it in to buy an SC430, otherwise I would still be driving mine. The dealer while not perfect were very good, I'd give them 9 out of 10, while my local BMW/Audi/Merc guys would fail to register above 5 out of 10.

Bjork

Cosy

Cup

Plate

Carvery

elephant

Reliant

Batman

Can't help with the first question but I would say while it may be technically possible to install OEM navigation after purchase I can imagine it would be more expensive and a lot more difficult to do. If you wanted to install the full Multimedia option you would need to change the steering wheel for the phone controls, add a mic into the roof. Also add all the GPS equipment and this is before you've added the screen. Save yourself the heartache and purchase a car with it installed.

Not if he has concerns about fuel economy!

Chris, not sure if you are going to be opening a whole can of worms by asking people for their opinion of the diesel as going by the recent posts a few are very unhappy with theirs. I would tell your neighbour to look hard at an automatic petrol IS as they are phenomenal and very smooth. From the accounts on here I don't think the same can be said of the diesel. Plus the economy is not a million miles away from the diesel too.

Brother

Olympic

Wedding