Parrot of Doom

Check the obvious - front tyre pressures.

This is the bodge I cobbled together: Tesco value meat skewer! And the best part is, being stainless steel it won't rust :) It'll do until my mate can sort me a neater job.

A pal of mine is going to fashion me a dog-bone shaped piece of sheet metal with holes for the bolts. I'll use soft rubber grommets to give it a little bit of play. I ain't paying £80 for a crappy bit of metal :)

£70-£80 for a new part from Lexus - obviously that's too pricey for what it is so I'll sort it out myself. Also, the shock absorber boot has gone. Money money money...

Thanks for that. I've just checked the rear height sensor (I recall the front sensor was fine a few months ago when I last looked in there) and it is, indeed, broken. I've bodged a quick repair that won't last long, so I need to replace it pronto. The SGS solution is elegant, but I'm wondering why a piece of Mechano and a few soft fat rubber grommets wouldn't do exactly the same thing.

Extremely unlucky. I bet Lexus won't put their money where their mouth is and guarantee that a bearing replacement will fix the problem. I'd be very surprised if it'd gone.

I've been commuting over the Woodhead bypass for the last week (an unlit hilly single carriageway across the Peak District, between Manchester and Sheffield). While driving at night, on a few occasions, oncoming traffic has flashed me, presumably because one or both of my headlamps are very bright. At first I thought it was people who didn't like Xenon lamps, but now I'm beginning to reconsider. Things I know: 1) The motors on the levelling mechanism work, I can see them cycle when I start the car. I can also see the lamps slowly changing angle as I drive, it's quite noticeable on the back of a white van, for instance, as I go over bumps. 2) The car body seems lower at the back - by around an inch or so. This may be because I have an lpg tank and spare wheel in the boot, or perhaps the springs have broken. 3) The headlamps look fairly horizontal and at the same height when parked on flat ground and shone against a wall 4) The beam cutoffs aren't anywhere near as defined as I've seen on other cars with projector headlamps 5) The lenses are pretty clear, and the washer mechanisms are fine 6) Experience tells me that while driving, the headlamps may well be a little high - I can't see much of a pool of light on the road ahead. Tomorrow I'm going to check the two height sensors on the car's offside, as well as the rear springs. Does anyone have an alignment guide for the headlamps? I'm fairly certain that the previous owner had the bumper off to repair something or other, as it's a slightly different colour than the rest of the car. Perhaps he didn't reinstall the lights correctly - in which case, perhaps I just need to angle the lamps down. is that done with the plastic screw on the top of each lamp housing? Also, I noticed that there is no rubber seal or strip between the bumper and headlamps (there's one between the bonnet and headlamps) - one would presume that that area would be sealed against water ingress. Can someone check to see if their car has them there? /edit - found an official Lexus alignment guide

Easy to check bearings, just jack the corner up and see if there's play in the wheel. The nearside manifold heatshield is loose on mine (far too cold to bother doing it at the moment), that rattles around on right turns. Food for thought, maybe something on yours is rubbing the tyre as you make that turn.

I'm on the normal Google Chrome, no fancy extensions to interfere with it. Every page is laggy when scrolling.

Is it the stereo system beeping?

I'm on Google Chrome, the site scrolls really quite poorly now. Nowhere near as fast as the old version.

You can Scotchguard it yourself for a hell of a lot less than £600. Warranty companies are in it to make money. They will try whatever they can to get out of paying. Besides, are Lexus really saying that there's a very good chance you'll have to pay out more than £2,000 in repairs to your new Lexus? That doesn't sound very clever to me.

On a car like the LS400 (which face it, handles like a boat), I don't quite see the point. On a sporty V8, yes.

Remove metal objects from the storage bin beneath your left elbow.

I've driven a great many cars, most of the cars I've owned are rear-wheel drive, including a TVR Chimaera. Just about all of them had wide tyres, and were therefore completely useless on ice or snow. There's nothing personal in my comments, I'm simply pointing out that you're wrong when you say that poor grip in inclement conditions is the car's fault. It isn't, it's the tyres you're using. I also do a great deal of cycling, usually on 23mm slick road tyres. But at this time of year, when there's ice on the road, I use my MTB with its studded winter tyres.

I beg to differ I have had this car 16 years I tried in my first year of ownership to drive it in snow and the experience so terrified me I have never tried since it was never designed to run around in snow it as no snow mode and three forward gears with overdrive.I suggest the only way you would get suitable driving and steering ability would be to apply snow chains as in NA and Canada but as they are illegal in the UK I'll play safe and leave it in the garage when it snows.Thats another reason she is 22 years old next year. Pretty much any car can drive in the snow so long as it has suitable tyres. The gearing is irrelevant. And snow chains are not illegal in the UK. Try some winter tyres, I think you'll be astounded at the difference in grip.

That isn't a problem with the LS, it's a problem with the tyres you're using - ie, they're not suitable for such inclement weather.

On my Mercedes snow mode disabled first gear and made gearchanges less "sprightly". I'm not sure if its the same on the LS.

Councils are legally obliged to provide their own dedicated MOT stations, so if you don't have a friendly mechanic, just go to one of those. There's no extra work for those guys in changing those brakes that "have only got a few hundred miles left on them love, lethal they are."

I remain unconvinced that this will improve road safety, since nearly all accidents are caused by road users not paying proper attention. It sounds more like a box-ticking exercise to me.

I watched an episode of the Aussie version, where they drove a car on the pavement, aping some cyclists. As someone who does many thousands of miles cycling per year, that put me right off. Of course they didn't show any cyclists doing 60mph down residential streets, or killing thousands of people per year. But anything for a laugh.

Take it to Worsley Autogas, let him sort it for you, he's done a few Lexuses. Mine is multipoint.

I've not worked out the mpg, but my car says about 32mpg best hovering at around 70mph on petrol. On LPG I can get about 55 litres max in the tank, and that gets me about 250 miles or a bit more if I'm purely on the motorway, at 70mph-ish. Let's say I pay £0.70 a litre for LPG (actually I pay £0.63 but let's be generous) that's £38.50 to fill it up. So £77 to cover 500 miles. My last car, a 1997 3.0TD E-class, would have been about £85 to cover slightly less - and at the absolute limit of efficiency, that car did about 38mpg. So I'm quite happy with what I'm getting. Anyway, including the LPG conversion I only paid about £4,000 for the car. My neighbours have paid five times that for a newer car with less class and less refinement, and only slightly higher mpg. So I'm still quids in.

I wouldn't wait for the next time, because then it will likely just leave you in the middle of nowhere with a dead car. Get that barrel replaced lad.

I can also recommend Worsley Autogas, 98 LS here and no issues whatsoever.