ganzoom

Happy 2015!! Just downloaded the manual....should keep me busy till the car arrives :)

We considered the Mercedes C200 petrol before ordering the Lexus. I doubt very much the C200 will get half it's claimed mpg in traffic, which is what most of our driving will be in the IS300H. Equally the poor reliability of our BMW 3 series has made us very weary of buying another German car. I think most motoring magazine are very biased toward BMW/Audi/Merc. The main complaint of 300H is the noise on acceleration, but in reality it's no worse than any small capacity engine. Best bit of the IS300H....Since ordering ours in early December, in total I've spotted 4 on the roads, in contrast there's about of the 6 Merc C classes parked in various driveways on our street.....So I'm glad we didn't go for the 'commoners' car :)

For the last 7 years none of our family cars have had a spare wheel. 3 punctures over that time, all whilst at home, luckily I got winter wheels for both cars, so easily sorted. I can see the appeal of a space saver, but £175!!! Looking at the servicing costs of Lexus dealers I'm starting to get the feeling Lexus dealers have some huge profit margins!! The following website tells you what kind of wheels fit the IS300H. You can also use the website to work out how to covert wheels for other cars with larger central boers to fit the IS300H. http://www.wheelfitment.eu/car/Lexus/IS300h%20(2013%20-%20)/ I paid £200 for a set of 16 inch wheels WITH decent winter tyres for the Civic. Yes they were used but I personally wouldn't pay more than £100 for a single wheel....a quick look on a famous internet auction site shows plenty of Lexus space savers for around £100.

This happened to me recently, but third party was at fault. We sorted it all win your getting insurance involved....I thought even if you don't make a claim the insurance company will record it as an accident on your records, and bump up your re-newal costs?

One is for the 'business'/lower spec navigation, and one is for the 'professional'/top spec navigation. Regardless of spec, your getting a 15% discount, which helps to reduce the high first year deprecation of a brand new car. My local dealer (Leicester) couldn't get any where near 15% off the RRP, so I ordered through Drive the deal....From me submitting a order request, to the nominated dealer contacting me and taking the deposit too about 5hrs...ie: Order placed on website at 9am, car ordered by 3pm, I've never spent so much money so quickly :)

How you finance your new car is a very personal decision. I tend to try and plan financial things 5-10 years in advance. The IS300H will be with us for at least 5 years and most likely 10, so a cash purchase makes most sense for us :) If you want to change cars every 2-3 years lease deals is another option, where you have pay a small deposit and than at the end of the agreement hand the car back, although lease deals on premier models aren't really that cheap. Lease deal: £651/months for 23 months + £4000 deposit = £19k PCP deal: £270/months for 23 months + £12k deposit = £18k Either way if we than got a similar deal on the next car, at the end of a 4 year cycle we will have spent £36k on finance/lease payments, without a car to show for it at the end. Where as by buying with cash upfront now, in 4 years we will have a car that I estimate will have at least £10-15k of equity, and I certainly aren't clever enough to generate a £10-15k profit from a £36k investment over 4 years to make up the difference between buying with cash versus finance/lease. Ofcourse the lease/PCP deals mean a brand new car every 2-3 years, and I must admit that is an attractive thought. In the long run the additional financial cost of these deals means I highly doubt we'll ever try them....But do the maths your self, and pick the option that suits you best :).

Would be good to hear your feed back on the C class, it was the only other car on our shopping list before getting the IS300H.

You can tell the dealer how much deposit, max is 30% and the length of the contract (between 2-3 years), but the final payment is determined by Lexus. Our monthly payment is only £270 ish...but the final payment is £20K!! Regarding paying off early, I believe in the past they have been caught off guard by people cancelling almost straight away, and Lexus lost money. But these days they write stuff into the terms and conditions about early repayment penalty. My dealer told me 6 months worth of interest is the early penalty charge, but I'm pretty sure legally they are only allowed to charge 2 months....I haven't signed any paper work, and wouldn't till I get to read the full terms and conditions, if it's too complicated to cancel than we'll just buy with cash. The key is avoid been pressured into signing/agreeing to anything on your initial vist....trust me they will use every trick in the book to take a deposit off you before you leave the show room, but stand your ground, get all the details in writing than leave, and than go over everything at home......I speak from past mistakes, in younger days I fell for the PCP/sales pitch trap once, but I learnt from my mistake so these days just play along with the games, 'supra guard' paint protection is another well used cash generator, however no-one is getting a penny out of me unitll I've decided all the numbers work out when I've looked at everything in the comfort of my own home. Nissan, Honda, Seat, BMW, Lexus dealers, they might all be selling different priced products to different consumer groups, some talk to you nicer than others, some wear sharper suits than others, but when it comes to closing deals their tactics are all the same.

Humm...might just wait and see. The good thing is the winter wheels we have on the Civic will fit the Lexus. The problem with our jobs is that regardless of the weather not getting to work is not a option. A few winters ago when we had the bad snow winter tyres made the difference between been really stressed about getting to work/stuck at work/stuck on the road at the bottom of a hill, and what was essentially for us a 'normal' commute...Infact the roads were so unusually empty due to the snow, at the end of a 12hr shift I ended up taking the scenic route home on un-gritted back roads....I also might have also lost control of the car for a few minutes, which resulted in a few donuts in the work car park

PCP give you lower monthly payments, but there is a large final payment to pay off at the end if you wan to own the car. Dealers call the large final payment as the 'Guaranteed final value', and if your car is worth more than this value at the end of 3 years, you can use the difference on a new car/PCP plan. Dealers love PCP because they can sell to the customer on the basis of low monthly payments, and than entice you with the fact at the end of the 3 years you can choose not to pay the larger payment. I will bet my house/car ect they will 100% try to sell you the car with PCP, pushing the low monthly cost, and the fact at the end of 3 years you can use any equity left in the car as deposit for a new car.... But don't get fooled by all the sales talk, and don't sign anything on the day...they will try to perused you if you don't sign on the dotted line someone else is going to walk in and buy the car 10 second after you leave. Talk to the dealer, listen to all their sale pitch, push them for the best price, and than get them to print out the PCP agreement, make sure they include the TOTAL payments and APR% in the print out. Than go home, and get a calculator out and work out the numbers......PCP nearly always works out the most EXPENSIVE way to finance a car, especially if you plan on keeping the car beyond the agreement period. Occasionally it can work in you favour, for example we are buying our new Lexus on PCP, but only because Lexus is including a £1000 deposit as part of the deal to incite people into buying a new car....but even taking in the 'free' £1000 deposit, if we were to let the PCP agreement run its course (2 years in our case), and pay the final sum at the end of period to buy the car outright, we would have paid £3K of interest for roughly a £23K loan over 2 years. This works out as an APR of nearly 8%, where as most 'normal' high street loans of the same value is about 6%.....Which equates to £1.5-2K profit for the dealer/Lexus when you take out their PCP finance product compare to a normal loan. So you can now see why dealers love to sell you PCP, its nothing to do with helping you keep your capital or wanting to help you change cars after 3 years, its all about pure profit for the dealer/Lexus. We are going to pay our PCP agreement off as soon as the finance period starts, there will be an early repayment charge, but unlikey to the £1000, which is the Lexus 'contribution'. Still waiting for final paper work, if Lexus put too many conditions in regarding paying off early, we'll just pay cash up front, though that will add £1000 to the price of the car. Incidentally I'll be interested to see how much they want for the IS, we're paying just under £35K for a factor order premier with metallic paint and advanced safety kit....So for 12 months old car, I would expect at least £5-7K of deprecation, so may be 27-28K? Good Luck ..... We still have another 3 months to wait for our IS to arrive :(

I think I really just want something to sort out the winter tyre TPMS issue, once you've registered a second set of tyre pressure monitors do you need to re-register them every time you change, or does the car store 2 sets of monitors? We'll be keeping the IS for close to 10 years, it'll be my wifes main car, and she doesn't change cars often, current Civic 7 years, and she was quite happy with it till she started driving the BMW more often and got use to heated seats :). So re-sale value am not bothered about, and actually I'm more than comfortable with doing my own oil/brake pad changes on the BMW. Though my wife has already banned me from sticking the IS up on axle stands, or ripping apart the interior to wire in things like dash cameras till the warranty period is over.

Thanks for that, the software looks much easier to use than NCS and WINKFP for BMW, for a start its in English and not German :) As for servicing, I think I'll wait and see when the car arrives, and have a good look at the service book.....I'm very un-trusting of main dealers, I rather pay my local independent to do the same job.

Going to be ages before our IS300H will need a service, infact it'll be ages before we even take delivery of it...But had a question about servicing. I'm not a fan of using main dealers for servicing, have had problems from main dealer at Honda, BMW, Nissan all missing servicing items/not doing the job properly despite paying £££ rates. I currently use a local independent who I trust 100% with our cars, infact they have installed over £5K worth of mechanical bits to my BMW, and I have such good relationship/trust with them I often leave my spare key with the owner of the garage so that they can pick up the car/work on the car without me having to drop the car off etc. I know under the EU block exemption rule, that Lexus will have to honour any warranty claims even if I use a independent garage , and long as I use OEM parts, so I'm quite tempted to continue using my local independent for servicing the new car....though they have already told me to use Lexus to if I want to keep things simple regarding warranties... Short of the standard oil change and air filter change, which lets be honest probably takes 30 minutes on most cars, is there anything specific in the IS300H hand book about additional servicing items around the hybrid drivetrain that NEEDs a Lexus garage, because from what I read about the hybrid drive train, its all very self contained and pretty much maintenance free? For the BMW I've also learned to code/update the car software my self through the OBD port, and this has allowed me to do things like install various retrofits including OEM spec sat nav, disable fog-light checks (missing a fog light due to aftermarket oil cooler), error code reading, install Alpina gearbox software on my non-Alpina car....So I'm not scarred to rip apart interiors, and 'fiddle' with car software my self....One thing I would like to do is switch to winter tyres/wheels on the IS300H, which obviously would mean the Tyre pressure system would need re-programming, I much rather learn how to do that my self than rely on dealers.... Do anyone know of any resources on the web where people have done similar things with Lexus software, because I'm struggling to find anything??

Ours is in rare color combination (sonic titanium with ivory leather), plus we've order 17inch allows instead of normal 18inch that come with premier spec. So delivery not due till late March, so nearly 4 months from order to delivery providing no delays!!!

I got a 15% discount through drviethedeal on a factory order premier spec....Cannot wait for it to delivered.

If your doing long high speed and long distance commuting I think your wouldn't beat a diesel for economy. For the last 18 months I've been doing a 100 mile daily commute in our 2.2 diesel Civic, longterm average mpg currently is around 55, so about 23 km/L? The Civic is also far less efficient than the turbo 2.0L diesel units from BMW/VW group, so if I was still doing massive commutes daily a turbo diesel unit would be the only engine I would consider for the commuter car, especially if your going to be doing 600miles+ a week!! Although the most annoying thing I found with doing long commutes was having to fuel up mid-week, so I always tried to make a tank last till end of the week, which meant some fun trips playing the 'low fuel warning' game....probably wasn't the best idea but I found out the fuel gauge needle actually still works below the red line . Though 40-50mpg in the IS for the same trips I would find quite acceptable. When I use our 3l petrol twin turbo petrol BMW to do the commute I spent about £120+ on fuel in one week alone, compared to £50 for the Civic. £70-80 of fuel in the BMW got me less than 300 miles range. You could see the fuel gauge needle dropping every time I accelerated to do an overtake....though I did do ALOT of overtaking, which probably was part of the reason why my fuel bill was so high for the BMW weeks .

Last night whilst just chatting my wife mentions she will miss driving the BMW 335i which she apparently calls the 'zoom zoom machine', and her only complaint about the Lexus is that it doesn't zoom everywhere like the 335i does when she accelerates. This is after I told her the 335i is costing £1.3/mile to run, more than double the running costs of the Lexus, even taking in the massive new car deprecation of the Lexus!!! I was fully expecting a lecture about how pointless the BMW is, instead she praises it!! Ahhh!!!!....She tells me this after we just order a £35k car which we are buying primarily for its economy and primarily for her driving needs/demands....I knew I should have made her test drive a supercharged 3.0 V6 supercharged Jaguar XF petrol...Women I will never understand them ;)

I run Vredestein Ultrac on my BMW 335i on the rears (275/30/R19s). I have no complaints about them, just as much grip as Michelin Pilot sports RFTs, plenty of grip in the wet, decent wear rate and when it does let go, very progressive, so you have plenty of time to correct. Infact even though mine are now down to 3mm, they still feel very safe in the wet, much more so than Bridgestone RE040s did on my old Nissan 350Z at similar tread levels. I'll be going for the same brand again in the summer, the fact they look different is another selling point :)

Drivethedeal was great, my local dealer couldn't get any where near close the price quoted.

We decided to order a new IS300H to replace our trust Civic diesel in November, but thanks to 2 (two!!) family weddings in India, and than not been able to decided on spec/colour, we've finally got it all together and the order has gone in.... So hopefully in around March 2015, we'll be taking delivery of a brand new IS300H premier in Sonic Titanium with Ivory leather and 17inch 10 spoke wheels, at the last minute I couldn't resist in adding the safety pack....so basically all the toys expect the sun room which neither of us have ever wanted in any car. Thanks for the guys on the forum on advice regarding colour/spec, and especially for recommending drivethedeal. We got a 15% discount with minimal hassle and stress. And it's meant we've ended up with the top spec model with all the toys for the same price as what we would have payed our local dealer for 'just' a Luxury spec car B) We've never taken delivery of a new car before so cannot wait till March 2015.

Be interesting to hear how much Lexus charge for tyre changes. I use a local tyre shop for changing tyres on our cars. They charge £40 to change all 4 corners, rears are 275/30/19 so pretty low profile, takes them 30-40 min, and not damaged my rims yet.

So is this issue common on UK cars? Or is isolated to a small number of cars due to manufacturing intolerance?

Used prices are very strong at moment, if your after a premier car with around 5k on the clock they are only £1-2k cheaper than buying brand new from a web based source like carwow or drivethedeal. We normally go for 12-18months old cars when buying but with the IS300H, because the colour combination my wife want is so rare, sonic titanium with ivory leather, and strong residues we're going to buy new instead....only complaint is having to wait ages for build than shipping from Japan. But that's a complaint :)

I still don't understand why the OP is comparing the 300H to a 135i?? People in the market for a car likes 135/335 will be looking at S4/M3/RS4/Focus RS/Golf R/Impreza STI....all cars I looked at when I bought my 335i. Yes the IS300H is slow in comparison but none of those cars will get near 30mpg in real life driving (longterm average for my 335i is currently 24mpg), £200-400/year+ road tax, and associated insurance/running costs for brakes, tyres - The way I drive the 335i, I get through a set of rear tyres and front brake pads every 10,000 miles on the 335i. Most people who buy these cars will be looking at the ISF or RCF from Lexus NOT a IS300H. How many IS300H owners would even entertain the thought of running at 5.0 V8 as their daily drive ?? The IS300H should be and is most often compared to things like the 320d/Merc 220d/2.0 turbo diesels from VW group. Compared to those cars the 300H offers a much nicer driving experience for similar performance level....Hence although I find the 300H too slow and frustratingly un-engaging as a drivers car, I cannot wait to get one on the drive way to use as a daily drive/general family ferrying machine....which to be honest accounts for 90% of our driving needs. So for 90% of the time I would actually say the IS300H is a better car than our 335i for our needs, and hence as my wife keeps on telling me our 335i is really is just a pointless money pit....But hey we all 'waste' money in different ways :)

We're set on Sonic Titanium with Ivory interior, I know not to everyone's taste by my wife loves the combination....still on holiday for another 8 days before we can be back to the UK so I can get a deal done....at least one good thing is that used values look stable...12 months old cars with under 10k on the clock aren't that much cheaper than brand new with a decent discount :)