Rabbers

Which I guess is why I tend to go for leather cleaning products which, at least for a few days, add the smell of old-fashioned real leather.

Confirmed. Tried this morning, and the symbol appeared on the MID after I took hands off the wheel for 3-4 seconds and the car started to drift. Strangely, this only happened at the second attempt although there appeared to be no appreciable difference in times and amounts of drift. This is my second car with LDA, so I must have been doing something right over the years. Not that I often switch it on except on the motorway. The only related warning I had previously seen was the coffee-cup symbol/invitation to take a rest as a consequence of excessive sway and frequency of lane departures, invariably on winding roads when I forgot to switch the system off.

I don’t know of a full-screen image of the steering wheel symbol with or without an accompanying text, or relatable to the LDA, but if there is an exclamation mark next to the image it would be warning you of a malfunction in the power steering system. Texts accompanying warning symbols usually tell you to immediately take the car to a dealer for inspection.

Peter, I had been waiting for you to properly settle in to your ownership of the RX before getting around to enquiring if and how much more demanding its routine detailing might be compared to the RC, but it seems you are alteady well on the way to answering the question ….

Oldie (indeed positively ancient) but still a goodie …

… sometimes purgatively so.

I recently came across an interior cleaner called Omnia (no shine, goes without saying), which is one of a comprehensive line of premium detailing products, including some innovative ones, manufactured in Italy by Labocosmetica, a subsidiary of Mafra, itself the local market leader. I found it better than anything I have used before, lifting unsuspected further grime from surfaces I thought were perfectly clean. Look up Labocosmetica.com to find the U.K. distributor and read about the products.

There have been many discussions about this over the years on the LOC with no consensus being reached one way or the other. As for me, I have noticed no improvements in mileage and performance when using premium grade fuel in any car I have ever owned. As a consequence I have in all humility come to regard enthusiastic third-party claims about extra punchiness and better acceleration as a possible confirmation of my own personal inadequacy in properly judging a car’s performance. With the best will in the world I have tried to apply the principle that if I always want the best for myself, I should also want the best for my car, but, since I get no objectively detectable response after filling it up with “the good stuff”, I have given up on it (for the car, I mean). Filling up with premium every five or six tanks in order to “flush out” the system might seem a good compromise solution in respect of always using regular grade alone. At least you might get the feeling that you are doing something good and certainly not bad for the car. You would probably get the same result by using an injector-cleaning additive like STP with similar frequency and maybe save a few pennies at the same time, but why bother?

I have often noticed slight deviations from recommended pressures after servicing, which I then habitually rectify within the next couple of days. I’m glad to say, on the other hand, that all four are always spot on after seasonal winter/summer tyre changes done by my trusted tyre dealer. In the certainty that the recommended pressures were figured out as optimal by Lexus at the car’s development stage, I try and maintain them at all times, perhaps adding 0.1 to the rears when embarking on a long motorway drive with a full boot.

Hearty congratulations, Peter! Looks splendid. 👏👏 Guess you’ll now be looking literally down at your former fellow RC owners!

My dealership, like other joint Toyota/Lexus ones desirous of keeping the two marque images separate, has set up a well-appointed “walkthrough room” in which customers taking delivery of their cars are tutored and fed canapés etc., in luxurious hi-tech surroundings. I have experienced the process twice, learned little or nothing that I didn’t already know or want to try out for myself at my own leisure, and felt a little embarrassed at feeling obliged to politely listen to the salesman’s well-rehearsed spiel while trying not to interrupt the flow with too many questions to which I already knew the answers. Generally speaking, I find the classic printed user’s manual more useful, not only as a permanent reference source but as a self-teaching aid. Just as useful and educational, both as supplementary aids and as outright substitutes for the manual, are the visual tutorials, each up to two hours long, produced by Lexus Westside of Houston, Tx, covering most current or recent models, and available on YT. Although they are naturally based on U.S.-spec models, most, indeed almost all, of the demonstrations and information provided are no less useful for European and U.K. owners.

I think this thread has strayed a bit OT, but since we’re on the subject of water in Ireland, would I be right in recalling that Guinness successfully lobbied for a lower water rate? Which, of course, would be only right and proper, culturally, sentimentally, and economically.

Some years ago I posted exactly this question on the IS Forum, innocently and, I think, politely. There were no meaningful replies, and one or two barely stopped short of accusing me of misogyny (or whatever the fashionable term was at the time).

Underneath the plastic cover of left-hand strut, which is where the creak comes from, there is a cable contained inside a soft plastic sheath of its own, which can be felt but not seen and possibly needs unwrapping to access and remedy the problem. I’ll wait for my next service, which is fairly imminent and the last under warranty, so that the dealer can take of it.

Excellent news. Stay well.

I am getting an annoying creaking sound from my boot-lid. It starts when the lid is about half-way open and is continuous thereafter, the same sequence occurring in reverse upon closing. I’m sure a drop of oil will take care of it but I don’t know where to aim it. I don’t want to start taking things apart unless I really need to. Any advice?

I just heard a radio interview with an oil industry analyst. 2022 sales of automotive fuels in the U.S. and Europe are significantly up year-on-year but not as much as anticipated, rapid increases in mobility post-Covid being compensated by the higher number of hybrid and electric vehicles, increased reliance on public transport, and apparently successful private and corporate efforts to economise in view of higher prices at the pump.

John, was that intended as a subtle change of subject to the Frequency of Bladder Activity in Lexus Drivers?

Agreed. It’s a view to which I’ve more or less instinctively subscribed all my life, secure in the knowledge that the further I get into my next twenty tankfuls the less I’ll remember what I had been paying for the previous twenty.

When I took delivery of my RC it came with the so-called “Orange Pack” brakes, which I hadn’t ordered and initially thought were unsuited to the Sonic Titanium body - an opinion I have since changed. My dealer offered to repaint them in any colour I liked, and I recall the head of the body shop recommending, as he apparently did to all customers undecided about a new caliper colour, to look to the Porsche range for inspiration.

Piers, please add my own best wishes to the many already received. When former VP Cheney left hospital after a routine colonoscopy he had a sore throat. This led him to suspect his doctors had gone too far and people to discover he had a sense of humour.

Had I been able to predict the future cost of filling up my car I would have envisioned a scenario in which I would today not only be endeavouring to drive more economically but would also be driving less and walking more, thereby cutting out unnecessary journeys and acquiring a series of good habits to place alongside what experts tell me would be a significant reduction of my carbon footprint. However, I regret to say that this has not happened. I drive as much and as often as I did before, and my attempts to drive smarter have been disappointingly short-lived. When I ponder these facts, I don’t know whether I should be glad that I can afford an unchanged lifestyle or be ashamed of my lack of will-power and self-discipline. It would be interesting to know if anybody has succeeded where I have failed.

Absolutely. And if the numbers of used LC500 V8s offered for sale in Germany are a direct reflection of customer preference since launch, which I presume they are, it could be argued that Lexus should be thinking of withdrawing the hybrid like Ford in the case of the 4-cylinder Mustang (though I would think that Lexus Germany has already been shifting unsold inventory across other markets). However, I would doubt that it ever would, simply because the marque’s interests at present and in the immediate future are too deeply rooted in its proprietary hybrid technology.

Not top of the list, or even close to it, but surely it is somewhere in the mix of thoughts about whether to choose the hybrid or the V8?

A few months ago I posted on this Forum after looking on Autoscout.com to see what used LC500s were being offered for sale in continental Europe. More than half of the approximately 60 listed were German-registered and not a single one of the latter was the hybrid model, and the same went for Belgium and Holland. The few hybrids for sale were in Italy, which I supposed was because the bhp-related annual road tax is 40% higher for the V8 (€1231 v. €878) with the bearing on insurance being proportionately similar. I now imagine the picture in favour of the hybrid will become consolidated in Italy and possibly go in the same direction in Germany and elsewhere simply because of vastly increased fuel prices. The difference between 15km/l (35mpg) for the hybrid and 11km/l (25mpg) for the V8, which I understand to be the realistic average consumption figures for each, is now adding up to a lot of money, especially in countries where long drives, even multiple-tank ones, are not uncommon.