Rabbers

Try plain warm water applied with a mf cloth and then immediately and energetically wipe dry with another separate one.

Interesting post, Bernard. Although I am very happy with the 300h, I must admit without being able to put my finger on exactly why, that I get an occasional twinge of nostalgia for the 250, of which I owned two. But, then again, I tend to get nostalgic about just about every nice thing I have ever had: cars, shoes and other items of clothing, old girlfriends etc., and this despite the subsequent availability of improved versions. Certainly, the 250 gave a more immediate impression of quality than the 300h. The "clunkiness" of the doors, boot- and bonnet-lids and fuel-flap, and, internally, of the door-pockets and glove-compartment was always pleasing. Not that the equivalents in the 300h can reasonably be faulted except for the exposed boot-hinges, which look and feel flimsy. And it still rankles that the top-spec 300h lacks the back-lit door-sills and rear-window sunscreen, standard on the 250 and eliminated, no doubt, by the bean-counters. As regards the overall design, the 250 has aged well and still looks surprisingly nice and solid on the road whereas the 300h, being longer and sleeker, looks lighter and perhaps less reassuring. Also, I am starting to wonder if the 300h's design, including that of the cabin, is not ageing a little too quickly, though this could be a case of familiarity breeding a tiny bit of contempt on my part after three years of ownership. As regards performance, and leaving aside the 250's alarmingly high fuel consumption, I much prefer the 300h for its quietness and smoothness in all situations, largely attributable to the CVT, of which I have become a big fan, but most especially during long motorway trips when I find the car to be a well-nigh perfect all-day high-speed cruiser.

I once read a letter in a motoring magazine suggesting that owners of luxury cars with rattles or squeaks should take them to down-market workshops which, being accustomed to lower build quality, are generally better able to handle this kind of problem. The author, I seem to recall, was an irate Class E owner who had ended up using a KIA garage to rectify a dashboard rattle after several unsuccessful attempts by his own dealer. The 300h, I am glad to say, has never given me cause to test the soundness of this advice, but I do remember an occasion in a first-generation 250 when, suspecting a slow puncture, I reluctantly pulled into a seedy one-pump garage specialising in tractor repairs somewhere in the middle of France. After efficiently changing a wheel, the proprietor, complete with greasy overalls and a Gauloise permanently stuck to his lower lip, took only five minutes to permanently sort out a maddening rattle in a door which my Lexus dealer back home had not managed to do after keeping the car for a whole day.

I too have been using Dr Leather wipes for many years, and have always been satisfied with its cleaning ability, especially as regards denim stains. The leather smell is also nice but not very long-lasting. Good as the product is, I would recommend to use it only sparingly and not too often because, despite the manufacturer's claims, there can be some slight surface accumulation and consequent undesirable shine - undesirable, that is, if you want to maintain the original matt finish of the leather. Also, for this same reason, it is best to let the product dry by itself after application without any further wiping.

I'm happy to say my wheel-nuts are showing no signs of rust. Also, I'm still using the same set of Toyota-branded anti-theft nuts fitted to the first IS I bought twelve years=approx. 350K km=ago, and they are still look as good as new after being transferred to my present fifth! Tore, I think you have grounds for asking for free replacements unless the rust is superficial or simply attributable to "normal" heavy road-salting in your part of the world.

I don't know how true it is but I have heard somewhere that Lexus and Toyota lowered the seat heating temperature in all their models because of concerns, particularly in the Far East, that overheated seats could pose a health risk in very young children and pregnant women.

Steve: Touch wood, I have so far managed not to kerb my wheels. This I attribute as much to my good luck as to having taken normal precautions such as keeping an adequate distance from kerbs, avoiding abnormally high ones and, generally, forcing myself to take a proper amount of time when parking despite possible irate honks from other cars (and resisting the temptation of showing them a finger, which would be unbecoming for a Lexus driver). The self-dipping mirrors are also a great help. Be this as it may, my satisfaction with the Bridgestones in terms of rim protection is based on the observation that on the several occasions when I lightly but perceptibly grazed a parallel kerb, for example when passing stationary turning vehicles on the inside, and fearing the worst, I was always relieved to find that the vertical geometry of the tyre walls was such as to have prevented the area of scuffing from extending from the rubber to the metal.

I too will be taking the 300h for its 48K miles (=60K km) service within the next couple of months or so, and will coincidentally be needing a new set of tyres having already discarded the OEM Bridgestone Turanzas because of serious - indeed alarming - wear to the rears at 38K km (= 24K miles) discovered when I routinely changed to winters back in November. I am thinking of ordering a set of Goodyear Eagle Asymmetrics, having heard nothing but good about them in terms of quietness, durability and rim-protection (this latter factor being the only positive thing I would attribute to the Bridgestones), but have not yet made up my mind. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I have noticed that the sluggish response on cold-weather starts does not always occur, and if and when it does, I have always judged it to be the result of lower-than-usual temperatures during the period of inactivity (e.g. overnight freezes), and, like Steve, I believe it has more to do with the coldness of the transmission and engine fluids than the batteries - though it is difficult to tell one way or the other. In any case, I place my trust in the hybrid system's reassuring beep into life and the manual's recommended non-observance of any warm-up time.

Like Ross (see #42 above), I confirm there is a problem of wear to the rear tyres. Since I had never pressed my head to the ground in order to look, the wear was only discovered when I changed to winter tyres. Alarmingly, the metal was visible on parts of the inside treads of both the OEM Bridgestone Turanzas (255/35/18), which had then done 33,000km (=20,5K miles). Because the front ones were still looking good with a remaining tread of 6mm, I had been expecting to do at least another 5,000km. The winters (Yokohama W.Drives 245/45/18) had done 18,000km (=11K miles) and all four were still looking good and evenly worn with plenty of meat left on them. They have now reached 22,500km (=14K miles), and I will almost certainly get one more winter out of them. What especially disturbed me when I was shown the extent of the wear to the Bridgestones is that I had not felt any decline to the car's road-holding and performance. This presumably means that I am either not a sensitive driver or that I place too much reliance on the 300h's driveability - which could also mean that the car has lulled me into a state of false security. According to the Lexus mechanics, relatively quick wear to the 300h's rear tyres of whatever brand is not unusual, though they had not previously seen any as bad as mine.

Rather than use classic clay, I use a Dodo Juice Square Sponge Clay Pad for both the front and rear windows and get the same excellent result with fine or medium grades, though I prefer the fine for the bodywork. The product is not only easy to use but can be re-used over and over again. I think I paid around £17 online.

I often drive on long stretches of motorway with lots of tunnels where daylight and relative darkness alternate in variably quick succession, most notably in Switzerland. More often than not I turn on the headlights and leave them on, but I sometimes let the auto function do its work and must say that the factory default light sensitivity setting has always proved effective enough, by which I mean that the lights come on practically simultaneously with entry into a tunnel at normal speeds. If you are driving significantly over the speed limit there is a slight but noticeable time lapse which, if it worries you, could no doubt be eliminated by customising the sensor's sensitivity.

This happened to me on a hot day last July when I was stuck in a long queue at roadworks and a huge and flthy earth removal caterpillar went past on a parallel lane covering us all in a thick layer of dust. The inappropriateness of the ice crystal symbols provided a bit of amusement in an unamusing situation.

The possibility of getting ripped off when any car I've ever owned has gone in for scheduled servicing at a dealership has always given me a bad stomach, the reason being that you can never be 100% sure that everything that should be done will be done - and done properly - despite the higher bill in respect of an independent workshop. And, given my mistrustful nature, so it will always be. However, I have to some extent factored my stomach pains into the cost of ownership, and, as specifically regards Lexus, I take comfort from the fact that, after religiously following the recommended service schedules, I have had remarkably few reliability problems with any of the five ISs I have bought from, and had serviced by, three different dealerships. How much of this has been attributable to the cars' intrinsic reliability and how much to the regularity and goodness of the specialist servicing I don't know. And since I have no basis for technical and financial comparisons, I never will. What I do know is that after buying my first Lexus I have kept going back.

If you drop the car off at 8 a.m., it would be unacceptable to have it back later than 11 a.m., and not unreasonable for you to show up around 10.30 and start pacing about impatiently.

Unless you want to analyse your consumption in detail, or your driving mix and conditions vary a lot from one tankful to the next, you can get a convenient and accurate indication of how economically (or not) you are driving from the range distance figure shown on the multi-information display immediately after refueling to the brim. This tells you, based on your average consumption, how far you can expect the next 56 litres (=12.3 gals) to take you before the low-fuel warning comes on leaving you with 10 litres (=2.2 gals) or so still in the tank. Just how satisfactory the range may be depends entirely on you and your style of driving. As for me, I am disappointed nowadays if I see less than 950km (=590 miles), which would mean that I have been achieving worse than 17km/l (=48mpg). However, when I remember that I was customarily seeing a figure closer to 800km (=500 miles) for a consumption of about 14km/l (=40mpg), or worse, when I first had the car, I am today well enough pleased to think that I have learned to drive it more efficiently than I formerly did.

My first job, many decades ago, was as a trainee in the Supply & Distribution department of a major oil company which shall be nameless. Whenever any of our filling stations were at risk of running dry and we were unable to supply them in time, we simply contacted one of our competitors to help us out by sending tanker trucks of their own and would return the favour when they themselves had a similar problem. In other words, not all customers were putting a Large Striped Cat in their Tank all of the time while others sometimes did without knowing it. This was in France and Benelux but I think it happened everywhere in the world. No doubt advertising ethics have improved since.

Earlier this week I had a chat with my insurance broker, who originally trained as an actuary, about the influence of safety devices such as pop-up hoods on vehicle insurance. He confirmed, without going into too many technicalities, that when a vehicle is first put on the market, insurers supplement official safety ratings with other data, if available, about the effectiveness of factory-fitted devices and systems, and once quantified and statistically projected, an overall assessment of safety is factored into the calculations on which premiums are based. Because the weighting of the data in the calculations is not disclosed, there is no way of disproving the claim that advances in safety technology help to prevent premiums from rising too much and too quickly but are insufficient ever to reduce them. Or, to put it another way, we have no means of knowing if and to what extent insurance companies exploit those advances to improve their profit margins. Which, of course, they are perfectly entitled to do. Personally, however, I would like to see more transparency and find the lack of it to be sufficient to annually conquer my laziness and shop around for alternative quotes, any significant differences between companies for similar cover for the same cars having always struck me as mysterious or illogical or even suspicious. On broadly the same subject, I was intrigued to hear that whereas insurance companies like "passive" safety devices (such as pop-up hoods), which purport to limit the extent of damage from accidents, there are some concerns about the increasing popularity of "active" ones such as active cruise control, rear-view cameras, blind-spot monitors etc., which purport to limit the chances of accidents happening in the first place. According to one school of thought the latter devices may have the effect of reducing a driver's overall perception of danger and thus give rise to excessive complacency with potentially dire results. Again, one is left wondering what impact, if any, this might have on the science of risk assessment.

Craig: I am unable to offer you an explanation, but something not wholly dissimilar once happened to me. Very early one icy morning I started the car and, not wanting to wake the neighbours, immediately pressed the EV button. When I took my foot off the brake the car did not gently move off as usual, and nor did it do so when I pressed on the accelerator. When I put my foot back on the brake, it felt loose and inactive. Having checked that I had not accidentally put the car in N, I turned the power off. Satisfied that I had done nothing wrong or out of sequence, I gathered my thoughts and re-started the car. To my relief, it moved off normally and drove perfectly thereafter. All this probably took less than half a minute. Nothing similar has happened again, including when I move off after pressing the EV button, and I still wonder whether I may not myself have suffered some kind of momentary cognitive lapse with the car being blameless.

The presence of a pop-up hood on the 300h as a means of doing pedestrians potentially less harm in the event of a collision is a desirable thing on ethical grounds alone. No question about it. However, until pop-up hoods are made compulsory on all cars, hopefully at an acceptable cost, their presence needs to be reconciled with considerations of a practical and economic nature. For example: * Why should my insurance company have the benefit of a prospectively lower payout to a pedestrian because of a reduced amount of harm while having charged me the same premium as for a car without the pop-up hood? * Why is the pop-up hood incorporated into the car as a fixture and not offered as an optional? In other words, how much lower would the price of the car be without it? Does it constitute an element of profit that Lexus would be unwilling to relinquish? * Why does the pop-up hood not have a switch-off option useable, for example, where danger from pedestrians is relatively low (e.g. motorways) and that from animals specifically high (e.g. animal warning areas)? * Why, as appears to be the case, are Lexus dealership personnel not in possession of ready information about the potentially very high, indeed alarming, repair costs consequent to the pop-up hood's activation?

I used to think that Shell V-Power or similar brands of high-octane fuel might yield a combination of better economy and performance but have never found objective proof of it. As regards performance, I liked to think that the 300h accelerated better and was generally perkier in its responses, but have concluded that clever advertising claims may well have been fooling me into pampering the car, of which I am very fond, with "better" fuel in much the same way as premium-priced pet foods are supposed to give your dog a wetter nose and your cat a glossier fur. As regards economy, I occasionally make motorway journeys of 1500km+ on identical routes with fewer variables of speed, traffic etc., than you might get in everyday motoring. On the couple of occasions when I started out with tankfuls of V-Power I found myself pulling into exactly the same filling station as I customarily did with normal petrol. In other words, after 900km or so the V-Power did not get me to the next filling station 50-60km further along the route as I hoped it might. Certainly, I may have needed to put a bit less petrol into the tank but, if I did, the amount was nowhere nearly sufficient to have justified the price difference.

IMO the 300h is far more rattle-free than previous generations of the IS, especially the 200, which was bad from this point of view. I've only ever had one rattle in the 300h that was not attributable to loose keys, coins, Tic-Tacs etc., and this consisted of a noise that came and went according to the roughness of the road surface, sometimes intermittent, sometimes continuous, not unlike chattering teeth, and "plasticky" rather than metallic. Strangely, passengers in the back thought it came from the front of the cabin while the driver and front passenger thought it came from the back. It is interesting that Rayaans should have mentioned a stethoscope earlier in this thread, for, in a final attempt, after many, to trace the origin of the rattle, two mechanics, one in the back and and one in the front, took turns at running a stethoscope along the dashboard, door-panels and sills etc., while I drove. Thus did I learn that some high-class car workshops consider a stethoscope an essential tool for detecting the source of rattles. Not that it proved effective on this particular occasion, a consensus of six unaided ears having traced the possible source to somewhere in the area of the boot. To cut a long story short, the rattle was finally discovered to come not from inside the boot itself but from one of the two numberplate-light covers that had come loose as the probable result of the boot-lid being slammed too hard. That the rattle should have been audible as far forward as the front seats seems to defy any acoustic law, but the fact that it ceased when the cover was clicked back into place is proof of it.

....... There's a good reason why you should use it, not that I can remember what it is! I'm told that habitual non-use of the parking brake can increase the chances of it seizing up when you really need to use it.

In my experience, the compass can be helpful if used in conjunction with the map-scale setting in rare situations when your map is out of date and you are driving on a long stretch of newly-built road not shown on it, the car itself being depicted as moving within a featureless landscape. If your destination or your route towards it can be identified on the map, or you are vaguely aware of where they are, a compass bearing may help you take a correct exit and keep you in the right direction, especially if the previous roads no longer exist or have been closed.

Presumably the model is integral to Lexus' advertised policy of encouraging craftsmanship through sponsorship, the aim being to reinforce its own image for quality. I imagine that the only practical value the model has for Lexus is as a display piece at shows and selected dealerships, and it is pretty impressive for this purpose. The publicity value for the small Bermondsey industrial design firm that constructed it is both higher and more direct.