Wass

Doesnt much matter if the recalls havent been completed. If you end up buying the car you can check with your local lexus and get the recalls completed free gratis anyway. I hear what you say about not being a petrol head. " approved" means nothing to me because I am a petrol head. Does this mean that the vendors wife likes the car? Find out what" Approved "means and why is it worth £1000 more? Perhaps they could say it is "approved and recommended" and charge even more, maybe extend the warranty by 12 months too... Always a good ploy to winkle more money out of punters. Sorry for being cynical but you have the money so to speak so you are in the driving seat. If you are going to go into finance for this motor, get the vendors to do a bit of work for your money. While you are at the "approved " vendors try asking to see a vehicle which is similarly priced but is not " approved".

It looks to me that since the introduction of the ct model, Lexus have just revised a few plastic mouldings. All fairly superficial. I thought that the last revision may be the final and yet it seems that we must wait for the next significant step. TBH, I had expected to see something of a mechanical follow on from the latest Prius. The fine tuning of what i consider to be pretty good from the word go seems to confirm that my opinion is mirrored by Lexus..... if it aint bust, don't mend it.

It all depends on what you want. All models have exactly the same engine and gearbox. There are various levels of trim and generally speaking, the more you pay for, the more you get.The sport model has the same number of seats and the same performance as all the other models but it does say "sport " on it which makes me smile. You can choose from a range of wheels and tyres if you like to look at yourself in shop windows or you simply like to stare for hours at your car as it stands outside your house, personally, I couldn't give a damn whether the low profiles look the business, I am more interested in how much it costs to fit new tyres. MPG depends on a great many things. The weather, the type of terrain, the mode of operation, your right foot and how heavy it is used on either pedal, the ambient temperature. In the ideal weather, the ideal speed ,on the ideal journey, with the ideal 40 mph lorry following techniques ( lorry speed limit on national speed limited single carriageways), I have been able to achieve the published figures. Dial in a real 70 mph (ie 77 or 78 on the speedo) and sprinkle in some comfort braking, idiot braking, mild acceleration and tyres which are too soft and not super efficient coupled with dealers short cutting costs by filling with alternate specification oil instead of the 0/20, and you are looking at high 50s real fuel consumption if you are just careful.

Still prefer Garmin, I can take it anywhere, get a lifetimes updates and the all up cost was less than a single Lexus update.

ditto

I havent noticed that the cars we buy are specially made narrow versions. We currently park a Mazda 6 and a CT200 in the garage which has individual doors rather than one large one. The mazda 6 is bigger than the CT and bigger than the honda CRV but not so wide as the Jaguar I used to park in the garage.

Well if i could get my eyes on Sandra Bullock, I wouldn't be bothered about putting the ships brakes on either!

No, most single garage doors are just over 2.1 metres wide and yes, I am confident enough not to have hit any part of any car whilst parking in any garage since I started to park my mums car in a garage when i was 13 some 45 years ago. Your post is short but I still had to read it more than once in surprise and in order to understand that some people really have no idea where their car begins and ends. It certainly goes a long way towards explaining some supermarket parking i have seen. It also explains why I see people with their offside wheels on the white stripe in the middle of the road whilst their nearside wheels are nearly 5' away from the gutter.

I have the more expensive but old fashioned option which is a garage which stops the entire car from getting too cold. It works very well and the time spent ice scraping in the mornings is reduced to zero--- so even less use for a heated steering wheel. Worthwhile options that I had fitted to the garage were remote operated rolling shutter doors which also turns the lights on and off and a burglar alarm. Now I don't have to fumble with frozen garage doors or their locks either. Parking a luxury car outside in frosty conditions is almost an oxymoron "a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction".

When you reduce speed by reducing the cruise control you do get some retardation but it isn't any more than what you would experience driving a manual gearbox and simply taking your foot away from the accelerator. In both instances your brake lights wouldn't come on. When you reduce speed like that you just have to hope that other drivers are paying attention to their driving ( as we all should ).

The way it is rigged with all manufacturers is that having bought a vehicle from a dealer, you continue to pay for it throughout your ownership until you exchange it for another vehicle whereupon you pay for it again into the deal. Owning modern vehicles is unfortunately loose lose lose for the punter. There's a good argument for running a classic! Cheaper to buy, more thirsty, less reliable but worth more when you sell them than when you bought them.

The motor servicing industry would have us believe that every car needs to be serviced at least annually ....even if it hasn't been used. They have this thing which they refer to as a "full service history" which they use to their advantage when buying second hand vehicles. Vehicles without a full service history attract lower prices at the dealers and yet somehow, it is almost impossible to find a second hand car at any sales outlet, official dealership or not, without a full service history. Hmm! A dealership would probably tell you that your car is overdue a service by 6 months. One of the reasons cited for this is that the oils would have turned acidic due to combustion byproduct contamination and will be eating away at the surfaces inside the engine. However, the reality is somewhat different.Degradation of the oil is dependent not only on the time which the oil has been inside the engine but also how the engine has been used. Lots of fast warm ups and short journeys in cold weather will lead to higher levels of oil contamination. A few long runs with gentle warm ups and at a gentle pace leads to low contamination despite the distance travelled. Some manufacturers are building algorithms into their engine control software in order to monitor the way in which the engine is being used so that an accurate assessment of oil condition may be derived. Lexus might be doing this on some models but it doesnt appear to be the case with their CT200 model ....yet.

No

Experts who get it wrong clearly aren't experts are they?There is a word for an expert who isnt. Opening up the door does nothing if the battery is flat. Please read. you cant jump start a toyota derived hybrid. All you have to do is give it a 12 volt feed. You can easily do this from another car, you just don't start the engine on the other car because you wont be drawing a high current so its no use in subjecting the hybrids electronic sensibilities to the dirty power which comes from some vehicle alternators. I have started both my prius and my Lexus CT from a flat battery a number of times. It is very very simple indeed. There just is no way to start another car from a Toyota derived hybrid but there is a way to start a stranded vehicle either by pushing it or by applying the small booster battery which I carry when I will be leaving my car for prolonged periods in long stay car parks. Maybe the reason I dont have a problem is that I do it all by myself. IE I connect to the remote battery terminals, I then take the time to check that the power connections are not going to fly off if the engine fires up, Next I cancel the alarm which quite often announces that someone has opened the door without disarming the alarm. Next I go and sit it the car to start it as usual.... so there is always a minute or two between connecting up a power source and trying to start up. Having fired up the computer, the engine generally starts quite quickly afterwards particularly in cooler weather. There really isn't anything very complicated..the technology involved with this sort of thing is 30 years old or more...unlike other aspects of the same vehicle. but there again I have a lot of engineering experience, so i would say that i guess.

Jump starting anything incorrectly causes many electronic issues. The trick is check , check and check again to make sure you get it right. It is , however a very very simple thing to do if you can read the owners manual and follow the simple instructions. Starting a CT200 or any other Toyota derived hybrid is just a case of getting the on board computer start up. You don't actually jump start the engine. The on board computer starts up the engine on the HV system once it has started itself up on the 12volt system. So unlike starting a conventional set up with a flat battery, you just need to draw enough power in order to fire up the computer. Reversing polarity trashes a lot of electronic circuits unless they happen to be protected ( they are very rarely protected).

If you look at"mytyres" web site they offer you the option of searching for tyres under a number of categories, one of the categories is road noise. Road noise from the CT200 is comparatively high compared to engine noise. I think that it is more noticeable because everything else can be so quiet. People say that the engine is noisey.... compared to the engine not running at all, it is noisey, compared to another non hybrid car , it isnt.

turn the air conditioning on and set the temperature to maximum. Your engine has to be up to full operating temperature in order to ensure that the heat going through the system is at the highest temperature. You need to get the temperature of the entire system including the air ductwork as high as possible. I always do this on a hot day so as to get the maximum effect. My ac systems are not "serviced" by motor mechanics.because they havent completed a 4 year apprenticeship in refrigeration. My air conditioning systems have never smelled like urine. By the way, fox urine has an extreme smell which I have never encountered from an air conditioner, I would liken the odour to be more akin to horse urine in its mildest form and ferret urine at its worst. I discovered this method of keeping an ac sanitised whilst working in Saudi Arabia. vehicles which are parked in the sun out there get their air conditioning systems sanitised every time the car starts up due to the very high ambient temperature and the time it takes the ac system to drag the temperature back down to normal levels. The air temperature insidea car parked in the sun can reach crazy levels so high you can scald yourself on the steering wheel if you arent careful.

The odour is normally caused by bacteria.Typically, this bacteria dies at 60 deg C. Periodically, I maintain air conditioning while the car is on a run by selecting heating, turning the set temperature up to its maximum, selecting fresh air make up and turning the fan on to full speed. I also roll down all of the windows in order to preserve myself from the heat wave. 10 minutes of this normally does the trick of killing any bacteria which may be collecting on the coil. A good cause of odour forming is a blocked drain. Easy to spot a blocked drain: when the air conditioning has been in use, park the car and then look underneath it to see if there is any condensation dropping from it onto the floor.... If there isnt, your drain is blocked... so unblock it or ask you dealer to unblock it. Bacteria collects on the coil more easily when the recirc mode is selected more frequently.

I don't believe that something so fundamental as a windscreen crack could be anything other than an owner issue. The reason I have for this belief is the quality control shown by Lexus over their products. If there were to be a problem with windscreens the issue would most likely appear would be throughout the CT range due to the shared bodyshell of all models of CT. An issue such as this would have been the subject of a recall both in UK and across the pond. A fault with windscreens would cause Lexus some serious headaches and would be the sort of thing to be dealt with during pre-production trials and would , at worst have appeared in the early 2011 cars rather than in 2016, some 5 years after the first models rolled out. I would expect this sort of issue to appear in other marques ( notably european in origin) but not in Lexus. My 2011 Lexus still has its original windscreen which is actually marked up with its own identification number which matches all of the other windows on the car. Mine shows a number which starts 200 and is followed by a chain of other numbers. Most cracks in laminated screens start from a small chip. The chip raises stress and allows a crack to develop. A crack will continue to develop seemingly on its own but is actually assisted by thermal expansion and contraction experienced between day and night temperatures, defrost heaters etc.Claiming on the grounds that the crack got worse while the car was at the dealers is like saying your favourite football team lost a game while your car was at the dealers... it would ,most likely have happened anyway. Cracks will normally continue until there is nowhere else for them to go ie they will go from edge to edge if left long enough. This probably wont help to get your problem fixed for nowt but it might help you towards understanding the issue in a little more detail and getting the windscreen replaced in a more timely manner via either your own insurance or straight out of your pocket.

the warped disc theory is unlikely. It would have to be very obviously warped to create alarming levels of noise. Intermediate steering shaft just clunks but not particularly loudly and you feel it through the steering wheel.It could be the camber as Rayaans says but camber adjustment just doesnt "go out" unprovoked, you have to hit something very hard. Heavy steering could be causing some of the noise if there is a faulty steering rack. Without seeing or hearing the issue, its not possible to say anything definite. By the way, taking a wheel off will never void a warranty. Would you void your warranty if you had a flat tyre? Didn't want the job sounds to be more accurate. Like you say... hope for the best and let Lexus have a look.

Two recall tasks completed. Car was collected from home in the morning and returned in the evening duly valeted and safety checked with video and paper documentation. Cost nowt.... good on yer Lexus!

Generally, there is nothing which you should look out for which isnt part of how the car originally left the factory. Some would say that the ride is harsh ( as it left the factory) some say that the gearing causes the engine to be noisey ( yes , it isnt a low revving 3 litre lump with bags of torque) some have even said that it is too cramped ( yes it isnt a big car). Some complain about the sound system ( it is a car, not a concert hall). So, as Rayaans says, you look out for stuff which an individual owner or garage has done to the car...knocks scrapes, scratches and bumps. Kerbed rims, stonechips, irregular tyre wear from heavy kerbing deranging the steering.Or you look out for poor servicing. (missing fasteners,wrong grade of oil,improper reassembly of undertray etc)

I agree with Rayaans . This is why I never bought myself a new car since the one and only time in 1986!

Didnt ford produce Ka convertable which was that colour? A definite design coup!

I have never really understood the F sport as a model. It has suspension which is harder than standard when the standard CT suspension is already harder than most sports cars and the engine/ gearbox which is just as unsporty as the base model. IE not very sporty at all. What does the F in F sport mean? Fake?