ubersonic

As with all automatic cars it should be practically impossible to lose the transmission due to the radiator leaking, by sheer virtue of the fact that before the transmission gets anywhere near hot enough to fail one of two things will happen. Either the loss of radiator coolant will cause a rise in engine temps which the driver will notice and pull the car over, or the loss of radiator coolant will cause a rise in engine temps which the driver will not notice and the engine will blow a gasket causing the driver to pull the car over. Either way the car is stopped before transmission damage. When people talk about losing the transmission due to the radiator on an automatic car what they actually mean is that one of the hoses that connects the transmission to the transmission cooler inside the radiator has broken/come off or that the hose fitting on the radiator for the transmission cooler has broken/come off, resulting in the transmission pumping out it's coolant. Neither of these should really be a risk as long as hoses/clips/fittings are checked properly during service and tightened/replaced as required. As far as current car prices go, they have risen across the board in the UK but it remains to be seen if this is a temporary increase or simply a long overdue correction as UK used car prices have historically been quite low. ISF prices have also increased independently of the market but this is almost guaranteed to be a correction rather than temporary (probably being fuelled by a rise in the cars popularity and more people knowing they exist) as they now appear to be worth as much as an equal age/mileage VXR8 or Mustang, which is good as ISFs being worth less than two more well known but arguably inferior vehicles always bugged me 😛

I wouldn't really call them boy racer mods, he's replaced the gear knob with one more to his taste and had the steering wheel retrimmed like a '11 car, both common mods in the ISF community. Granted it's two downsides to most buyers but both can be "fixed" if a new owner wanted to, a used ISF gear knob is dirt cheap as so many people replace them (personally I replaced mine with the solid metal knob from the IS200 sport, much better and should have been the factory option on a performance IS) or they could just put a regular IS/GS one on as you can't tell the difference unless within 2 feet anyway, and a (better) wheel retrim is hardly bank breaking. The rest of the additions are big plus points as it shows the previous owner has obviously spent money on the car as they paid to import a premium exhaust system from the top ISF tuning company on the planet and also paid £4k+ for a premium set of wheels that are highly popular for the ISF. In fact thinking about it, if a buyer didn't like the additions they could just eBay the wheels and use the money to buy a set of ISF rims, a new steering knob/wheel and have money left over for fuel ^^

Another difference is that the JDM ISF has RHD indicator/wiper stalks whereas the UK car uses the same LHD stalks as the rest of the European models. I call it a difference rather than a drawback as most Japanese car enthusiasts prefer the RHD stalks (which used to be standard on UK models too).

If you go to the page for the intake on their page and scroll to the bottom there's the links for replacement filters as well as the cleaning kit 🙂 The filters cost about $70 and have a part number 24-91060 but don't seem to be on any UK sites.

Er... It's a lifetime/cleanable filter. Every 20/30k miles you're supposed to use the cleaning/oiling kit ($16) to chemically clean then wash it, then reoil when dry. Hence why they don't sell replacement filters as you shouldn't be able to destroy one without a front end collision 😛

This has been known for some time, the valley plate design aspect that causes the issue was never changed for the LC500/RCF/GSF, hopefully it's revised on the IS500 lol.

I've always run my IS-F on Premium 95RON unleaded as that's what it's designed for and so the only effect of buying super was higher fuel bills. But now that the premium unleaded has all changed to E10 I've switched to E5 super unleaded because once you factor in the MPG loss of E10 (due to the higher ethanol/lower petrol content) the cost per mile of premium/super is roughly the same, and so it's basically just a case of "do you want you car to go further per tank or not" 😛

Thanks for the help guys, looks like I've managed to find the issue. Came across this 6 year old vid of a guy with the same sound: Which amazingly was still getting comments even four years later including from a Lexus tech who identified the issue. It's a known issue with the left side timing chain tensioner on the ISF, GSF, RCF and many other Lexus with a UR series engine, they addressed it in Technical Service Bulletin EG-0031L-0516 (PDF attached) back in 2016 and replaced the part with a better designed one however the fix was never implemented on future ISFs as it was no longer on sale, and they didn't issue a recall as it's more of an annoyance than a problem (hence the guy in the above video having it for four years until he had it fixed). So a ~£50 part and 7 hours labour, I wonder how much my local Lexus dealership are going to charge 😛 4b615dae112b39d84e0368a831eca731.pdf

I have a similar-ish issue sometimes. intermittently I will go to open the boot and the whole circuit is unresponsive, the boot switch, key button and dash button all do nothing and I have to open it with the key. Seems to be more prevalent on cold mornings or nights. I tried replacing the physical boot latch/actuator thing but no effect.

Hi all, My car keeps making this intermittent noise as per video (between the 15-21 second marks), sounds kinda like a railway carriage clacking over joins in the track. Any ideas? Loose/damaged cam chain? Imminent engine death? Wasps? Also yes I know the engine bay needs a clean... VID_20210904_162403101.mp4

It sounds epic. Does it have cats in the manifolds, or in the centre section? or both like stock?

Great, now I need to change my underwear. Is this new manifold with sports cats fitted or catless? What's the rest of your system like do you still have the secondary cats? This sounds amazing. And what nav screen is that? O.O

The reason its never become popular in this country is because over here it's illegal to leave a vehicle running unattended on a public road, and not everyone has a driveway.

I've been a Lexus/Toyota man for over a decade and when I was looking to get my ISF I had pretty much decided already but figured I may as well check out some other options. The only other similar sized saloon with the same power V8 in the same price range was the Vauxhall VXR8 (albeit they needed a 20% bigger engine lol) I even test drove one and I cannot fathom why they cost slightly more than an ISF when there's three times and many in the UK and they look and feel like a beefed up Vectra (with reliability to match) xD

IIRC the engine coolant and brake fluid get changed on the 10y/100k service as does the fuel filter (engine oil and filter are changed every annual service). But plugs and diff/trans oil aren't part of the 10y/100k service, IIRC the plugs are every 6y/60k or something like that so yours won't be done until it's 12 years old or hits 60k, and Diff/ATF fluid is every 3y/30k so next will also be 12 years or 60k (NB: ATF is not replaced unless inspection shows it's needed). I could be remembering this wrong but I did check it before my 10y/100k service a couple of years back so I'm sure it's mostly correct.

Pretty sure that it's the same one I had on my '95 Supra and '94 LS400. My '90 Supra had the buttons built into the steering wheel and it was called "Auto Drive", I guess they probably changed the name to cruise control to stop Americans turning it on then taking a nap xD

The track edition looks cool, but unless you actually intend to track it every week or want to pay five figures for alcantara it's definitely a waste of money. I mean, the only parts it has that aren't options for the standard/carbon models are the big wing, the titanium exhaust, the torque vectoring diff and the special interior. If you buy a standard/carbon edition you can use the money saved to buy an aftermarket carbon wing AND a titanium exhaust AND still have change left over to put towards maintenance (or more carbon if you desire). If you don't intend to track it every week then it's just a bad investment as the mandatory carbon ceramic brakes will add massively to the maintenance costs without really adding anything positive to your ownership experience, and the TVD adds almost no value over the standard Torsen* *Car and Driver tested the RC-F with and without the TVD when it first appeared as an option, same road course and driver, the TVD did it in 78.7 seconds instead of the Torsen's 79.1.

Not sure why there's such a hoo-ha about the price? A set of Novell headers is over £5000 delivered and PPE headers with custom RHD option retail at $2200 (and they're out of stock anyway) so factor in shipping and VAT that's £2100 to your door. These coming in at up to £2500 depending on interest looks pretty good all things considered, especially as you have the possibility of having them installed by the manufacturer (and the obvious advantage of not having to post them to Arizona for warranty issues). After all this is the most expansive mod for our cars short of supercharging, as evidenced by the fact that OBX headers cost £1100 to your door, and their stuffs a joke.

If there's an option with sports cats that would be a direct swap for OEM I would def buy a set.

It's a feature they include on all cars with radar cruise in case it refuses to engage due to heavy rain (or malfunction, but it's mostly so people can still use cruise in a rainstorm).

Gotta be honest, I don't like it. The facelifted (2017+) version of the current (2013-2020) IS F-Sport looks way nicer. And if the reports are true that it will be used as a last hurrah for the 2UR-GSE that that's a definite nope, not paying that much money for a car with the same engine and worse satnav, that was the whole reason I didn't buy the RC-F and the RC-F looks better than this lol. It should use the 3.5L TT from the LS460 or the hybrid one from the LC500h (pref the TT).

As a JDM car It has RHD indicator/wiper stalks which may be confusing at first for younger drivers (Manufacturers have saved costs/time by fitting their UK cars with the LHD stalks off their European models for decades now).

Depends on how good your DIY skills are I guess.

As far as I can tell, The 08-10 ISF received the 16400-38210 part code radiator from the factory, whereas the 2011 model and later received the 16400-38211 part code radiator instead. It seems the 16400-38210 was then superseded/replaced by the 16400-38H10 (although I can't tell exactly when after 2010 that occurred). One thing that nobody apart Lexus can explain though is why that all happened, I.E was the radiator changed on the 2011 model due to the new headlights/suspension/something requiring it or did they discover something they didn't like about it's structural reliability (surely if it was changed to improve cooling performance that would have been mentioned). The odd thing though is that the 38H10 replaces the 38210, but not the 38211, which means if there is an issue with the 38210 then why not just have the 38211 supersede it instead, unless it doesn't physically fit. It's all quite bizarre.

Hi man, I checked on parts.lexus.com and lexuspartsnow.com both of which are maintained by big US distributers and reference Lexus/Toyota databases, plus toyomods.com which is a Russian database (really good one too, a decade or so ago it was THE site for finding a part number, especially if you already had the Lexus code but wanted the corresponding Toyota one to save money).