Sleepypete (FB)

It's worth getting it checked out anyway due to 2 questions : What's gone wrong ? What's caused it ? Answer to the first is : I can't start my car because the battery isn't giving the starter motor enough juice. If it's the type of starter I'm familiar with (took one apart, rebuilt it and it lasted longer than the car did*) then it's a pre-engager : It first moves a cog on to the flywheel and then the motor can turn the engine. In this case, the cog won't quite be getting to where it needs to be the flywheel with that causing a nasty noise when the starter motor starts to properly spin. What's caused it ? This is where you want to get someone with tools to check it out, the battery could be flat due to : It broke B) My Puma was ok one day, couldn't start the next. Reason - partial failure of the battery due to cold weather. It had enough juice for things like the radio but not enough to do anything with the starter. It's not getting charged. My Rover had 2 (two!) alternator failures in 2.5 years, the first time was a "start one day, fail next" like the Puma's. That was a broken alternator though, without any warning lights appearing ... I'm suspecting that you've had a stone or other missile come in and attack your battery, hence it needing lots of water to replace what may have leaked out of a hole. Either way, you need to know what's broken : Alternator or Battery. And for that you'll need someone with tools + knowledge ... Something else as a symptom - if you've been hearing a screech on acceleration, that's a sign of the alternator belt slipping. That'll break the alternator after a while. Best to fix that before a £10 item breaks a £100 item ... (dunno prices, just saying scale!) PS * "lasted longer than the car" - this isn't saying much because the car died in a pillar of flame a few months later :D

I still need to gps-calibrate my CT's speedo ... It's the different ways of measuring/calculating the speed : Speedos tend to do it by having a gear driven from the final drive. I.e. after the gearbox. Inaccuracies come in due to things like tyre diameter and the way the speedo-drive is turned into an indication. Older speedos used to work against a spring which would resist differently at varying speeds. Newer ones will work it out with optical decoders or similar. Satnav/GPS speed - GPS works by giving precise time and position. If you get enough position samples, find the distance between them and divide by the time difference. That gives a time averaged velocity. Note - that's not identical to instantaneous speed because you may have gone through a slight arc and it's average speed over something like 10 seconds ... There may also be some correction going on through : GPS reports a position that isn't on the road Satnav say : "I don't believe that, I ain't no 4x4" And satnav corrects the position to be on the road What I need to do sometime is set up my old satnav in my CT when I'm likely to do a steady run at 70(ish). I.e. aim for 70(ish) on the motorway, let the speeds settle and check what the GPS is claiming my speed is. Puma - 75 on speedo = 68mph on gps Focus - 75 = 72 Dad's Volvo - 75 = 75 (watching for speed cameras ...)

I'm definitely hoping for better than what I got from Carcraft (bleurgh) with my Focus ... I stopped bothering asking them for a courtesy car in the end because even though I booked one a couple of times (and they had a warehouse full of for sale cars), no courtesy car was ever available. Very shoddy, very poor. Definitely hoping for better, with that verging on "expecting" :D Everything I've heard about Lexus dealers has said they do things differently to the rest of the car garage world, that is they work for the customer, they don't look to take advantage. And that's just one reason I've bought into owning a Lexus :heart:

With the Diesel economy, might be worth checking out : Fuelly - Golf That's 2012 model year Golfs, looks like all TDI model, doing between 30 and 55 mpg. Not what was advertised ... Audi A3 diesels are : Audi A3 diesels on Fuelly And our little bit of loveliness on 4 wheels is : CT200h on Fuelly I'm dragging the average down there ! (And I need a better name than "Blue CT" )

Hybrid vs Diesel is very dependent on what type of driving dominates your regular trips : High speed motorway or A-road -> Diesel for the inherent economy Urban stop/start -> Hybrid for carrying energy that's otherwise wasted From what I hear of the blue-motion cars, the energy reservoir isn't that big so the stop-start stops being available for a while until it can regenerate enough energy. Plus it'll need the engine to move, which means clutch work and energy wasted due to mismatch between engine rpm and zero road speed. With the CT hybrid system, the motor can work from zero rpm so there's little energy wasted in heating up clutch plates. Might be worth finding some impartial reviews (if you can) that tell you exactly how the blue-motion system actually performs. I suspect it's not on autos yet because I think it works on whether you have the clutch pedal down or up. I.e. Neutral + clutch up = engine off. Clutch pedal down = turn engine on. It's much less wearing as a driver too, when you can drift along in stop-start traffic on brake to stop and no-brake to trundle forward a little. Are the used prices staying at about £2000 under list price (at best) ? After looking at prices daily, I've stopped looking since buying my CT. That's something that's a long since learned lesson from IT - buy now, woulda paid less later

Welcome ! :D

Almost had my first victim yesterday It was someone smoking outside a building and otherwise doing nothing but woolgathering. She just happened to be where the cars circle through that mini-carpark ... I got out, gave the Big Grin and asked if she could hear me creeping up behind her, with the answer to "no - I never heard a thing " being "Hey Cool B) " We both went away grinning so that's another for I-Love-My-Lexus Me too ! PS Chances of anyone else getting a chance to drive my CT are Slim To Non Existent. If it moves, I'm going to be the one behind the wheel

Does your's have the Hill Start Assist feature ? (I don't know enough about RX's). Try : Stop the RX (foot on brakes) Press brakes down some more while at a complete stop Hopefully see a little icon appear : Yellow background, black car, 2 black S's That'll be the Hill Start Assist, it'll keep the brakes on for about 2 seconds after you release the pedal. Took me a read of the manual to find it, plus a bit of up and down on the pedal. That's in a CT, hopefully it was in the 07 RX too :)

Managed to get 54.32 litres into a 55 litre tank once ... (Rover 420 - nasty car). Whereas one of my dad's Mundano's ended up going jumpy-jumpy and didn't take all its petrol capacity at the service station half a mile down the road. I like the having lots of reserve capacity thing I've always judged my "when to fuel up?" on the miles I've done. So the Focus would be 300 miles in urban or 400 miles on motorway. Not done enough miles yet in the CT to know its range. Must do something about that :winky:

Can't remember the age of it but I passed in my instructor's Renault 5 Campus in 1992. Passable car ... It had 5 gears !

Had 3 bikes in close company this morning ... 1 of them was steadily edging over to where I was. I suspect he couldn't hear me nudging along on the hybrid motor. It's the ones that overtake while people are queued at lights and then cruise 10mph below the speed limit that are the worst. They're usually sitting in the middle of the lane too. :duh:

Weird - just tried the dead "Sleepypete" again with another password reset via the link available when signing in, no joy. Could be something on this end (Firefox 7 just arrived). I think - shrug, leave it be and I'll switch over to the Facebook linked "Sleepypete (FB)" Thanks for the password reset offer, I suspect it would get the same results as the automatic password reset ...

Hi all, Has something been broken with the Logging in ? Noticed I needed to sign back in (not an issue - cookies expiring is expected B) ) but log ins were failing, even after I did a password change. Just managed to get in by connecting my Facebook account to the Lexus Owners Club login. (Hence display name of Sleepypete (FB) ) :) I'm betting this is just a transitory thing that'll be fixed before we know it but there's probably a few people out there going "Hey ! My password doesn't work!" who would appreciate a "Yep - we're on it" :D Cheers