Linas.P

First of all - no they don't... secondly their new engine in practice (8AR-FTS in particular) is neither more fuel efficient, nor emits less emission. So even if you statement would be true - they still have failed miserably. I am telling you - IS200t is literally less fuel efficient than IS250, if it is less fuel efficient then it means it emits more as well - more fuel burned = more emissions. The 300h is a bit of joke as well - unacceptably slow and fuel consumtion is just mediocre. If they are trying to make half hearted "compliance car", then they simply failed to deliver - look at what BMW is doing - 5/330e are both fast and fuel efficient, merc are doing the same thing with E/C350e. I cannot comment on driving pleasure, but certainly it cannot get much worse than 300h/200t. So Lexus "effort" is just not enough. There are plenty options in between bottom feeding entry-level compliance vehicle and V8, yes indeed the roar makes the driving an "occasion", but more powerful V6 as well could suffice. Again in comparison with 350, the 200t consumes just as much fuel, but is nowhere near as powerful/fast - yes I guess on paper 200t emission are lower, but that is not true in practice. As I said before - Lexus had an option to deliver something truly good or just follow the regulation by the letter to deliver something "compliant" but 💩...

As I have said already (and it seems we agree here) - larger, more thirsty, simpler and older engines makes more economical sense for LPG conversion. I am not really that worried about performance, especially considering that it is possible to make so that performance is not lost - the simple fact is that LPG is cost saving measure. If LPG does not save the cost considering original installation, then it makes no sense. Again - the more economical and complex the car is, the less it will benefit from LPG, and once it goes into figures of 10s of thousands miles the questions should be asked - are you planning to keep the car forever? What if your annual mileage? How many years it will take? Prius example is just silly - what is normal claimed MPG on it... something like 97MPG? Obviously, I appreciate that "real" MPG is going to be like 60, but still the question remains - how many miles you need to do just to cover cost of LPG system. Further prius is relatively simple car with small 4 banger - not comparable to larger and more complex v6s. The diesel stinks?!. ohhhh yes.. because the LPG have a smell of the roses... If one cares about driving please, then certainly straight petrol is least offensive option.. I wanted to say electric, but there are other issues with that. So my point remains - considering average vehicle if one does so many miles that LPG makes sense over petrol, then the answer is - diesel. If one does not do many miles, then system will never pay for itself which defeats fundamental purpose of fitting it. I guess there are always exceptions - like city taxi using diesel is not great, even if it does a lot miles - so perhaps hybrid or electric is be best option. Further how about: Reduced size of the boot Potential risk of fire - yes I know "properly" set-up LPG is "safe", but no one can deny risk is higher than factory fitted petrol... or indeed factory fitted LPG. Difficult to find filling station Difficult to fill Reduced reliability... in general, you adding complex fuel system on another complex fuel system which is not factory installed The smell of farts... and yes I know every LPG owner will say "properly" set-up system doesn't leak and there is no smell, but that is like cat or dog owners saying their pet does not have any smell... yes it does! Just a nature of the thing. In summary it is very simple - there are cars which can benefit from LPG, but IS250 is not one of them. Perhaps the answer is - choose the right size/engine displacement and fuel type car for your needs, or even have multiple cars to get best of both options.

I wish Lexus had improved on what they had instead of this half-cooked hybrid/turbo non-sense.

Consideration is fairly simple - how much fuel your car use, how much it will cost to install the LPG kit + complexity and how many miles you do. IS250 is already fuel efficient car for displacement, most gains are when you equip non-injected car with DI LPG - it is no so much difference in fuel, simply leap in engine injection technology. IS250 is already DI, so not only there isn't much saving to be made, but as well there is additional complexity. The cost of LPG kit varies, but for IS250 it will be complex and expensive + as mentioned it cannot even properly run on LPG or it will cause damage to injectors. How much miles you do - if you do enough miles to justify cost of the kit then you already better of on diesel and if you do not do much miles, then the LPG kit will never cover it's own cost... so why bother. Finally, I appreciate there are cars which can really benefit from LPG (mainly do to option of having DI in older car), like LS400, 430, GS430... they have very strong and still relatively simple port injected engines. So not only the car will run better, but it might even use less fuel + because they use quite a bit of fuel the breakeven point could be much sooner. In car like IS250 LPG is just waste of time and money... and why would anyone even consider it on GS450h is beyond me... or logic.

I believe head gasket and bolts are still the same part number for both new and revised parts (sort of Lexus deying there ever being issue), but Lexus had several "overhaul kits" PN:04111-0R070/71/211 etc. which overtime made engine more reliable - you need to check which is the latest to make sure you get improved parts. There were speculations whenever bolts are new or just replaced as standard i.e. stretch bolts are single use. I never owned IS220d as it does not make sense for my use + Petrol/AT is in any possible way better. The only real benefit (as for any diesel car) is motorway fuel consumtion, but one needs to do a lot of miles and long to take advantage of it. For low annual mileage diesel does not make sense and isn't even that much more economical on short journeys. Just check this forum alone and you will find endless list threads about all issues mentioned.

a. the amount of income tax is higher now than it was in 70's - so I don't know what you talking about. Further, things like fuel duties, VED, Insurance premium tax and mandatory insurance itself has skyrocketed in prices. Government has plenty of revenue to spend if they would be efficient, but obviously they are corrupt instead. b. this is true - nowadays the bigger is the business the less tax it pays... kind of strange. But as pre previous point - there are no shortage of funds... they are just simply wasted via defunct and corrupt system our government is running on.

No... 200t still sounds 💩 what you expect from 4 banger turbo? Below is like £2000 worth exhaust system... I might be spoiled with sounds of V6, but I just don't see how it is worth it? Yes it made it to drone more - wow! Actually, if look to below video then consider 300h sounds twice worse both before and after, then you can get a picture of what can be achieved.. sorry to disapoint.

I would call it simply - Number plate holder. Have you actually tried Lexus, sometimes you will find that their prices are more reasonable than you thought. Yes it is rare but sometimes smaller plastic bits are cheaper new from Lexus than it is from scrap yards.

What you even mean? Yes it is very unreliable by any measure, just look to the forum - there is thread every day with same issues over and over again... For a long time now if anyone comes saying "I want to get Lexus IS mk2" the first response they will get will be "just don't buy IS220d - it is ticking time bomb". To be fair is not that uncommon for modern diesels, especially if driven in short distances. Compared to other diesels - EGR, DPF and Turbo issues are standard on any of them, but head gasket and injectors issues are Lexus specific. Further, IS220d only came with manual gearbox which itself is not great unit. In short IS220d has one of the least reliable engines in existence + not the best gearbox. The service history largely does not matter, because service does not include anything to do with the issues mentioned. Service won't change stretched head bolts and blown gaskets... even under warranty they used to fit entire new engines and the car would comeback few years later with identical issues. First thing to note - they are not designed for short journeys or small distances (like any diesels)... so basically any sort of city commuting is out of question if you want it to last. That said low mileage of your car works against you - this means that the car was driven on short distances and that explains why it already had EGR issues in the past. If you had a car with high motorway mileage you would be more in luck. The people who don't have issues with this car are the ones who commute like 50-80miles every day on motorway and do not stress engine too much + do standard routine of EGR cleaning. Now neither of standard diesel issues really matters if you looking into the tuning - they are caused by people using the cars wrong, not letting engine to warm-up properly, not doing enough miles, long enough distances and not letting DPF to regenerate + due to stupid gearbox ratios keeping the car in too high gear on motorway and preventing DPF regen again (even if they are doing long miles). Your issue will be Lexus specific weaknesses - head gasket and injectors. Both of them are already not up for task and you going to bring more pressure on them. It is basically like acknowledging the car has weak point and saying - "bring it on.. lets see you if blow-up!". So... yes - it is unreliable, 95% of faults with Lexus cars on here are to do with IS220d for one of 5 reasons mentioned and none affect petrol variants, proper service does not help, because neither of the issues are in service schedule. EGR being change in the past means nothing - even if they fitted new one it just gets clogged-up again, so you simply need to clean it routinely. As I have already said, Lexus looked into the issue and fixed most of it in IS200d - they did completely changed the head gasket (which is by the way available for 220d as upgrade), changed head bolts and detuned the engine to 150hp instead of 175hp. IS200d still has all normal "diesel issues" like DPF and EGR, but no longer have issues with head gasket. I have not heard of IS200d having issues with injectors either, so perhaps they improved them as well.

I agree it would be "right thing to do", but sadly we are living in times where police operates like "for profit organisation" and enforcing all the laws are not profitable. However, it is profitable to focus only on those laws which gives best profit margins and that is what they do. Police now treats the laws like toy company treats their lines of toys - some toys sells well, are popular and cheap to manufacture - so they will make more of those. Some other are more complex to make and are not as popular, so they stop making them. How it works with laws? - some are broken more often, are easy to prove and are cheap to enforce. Further you can even artificially make people to break them more often. Perfect example is speeding - requires little investment and almost no maintenance, does not require real officer at all and with new "dumb motorways" they can now change the limit at whipm and crack few thousand more tickets even when people are not actually speeding. Enforcing violations like you mentioned, would require thousands of officers in the fields and hundreds processing files etc. Yes it would make roads safer and driver more compliant, but the cost of administering the whole shabang is much higher. Again - one would think police should have safety and law and order as their priorities and the cost of enforcing it should be more of justified necessity, but that is just not the case. I reached conclusion that believing in police caring about public safety is rather naive concept... and I mean police as an institution - I am sure many individual officers are great people and truly caring..

What is "fun" or "nice" to drive is really subjective, but there are certain objective measurements to compare how well the car behaves. However, I am not surprised that IS250 was more fun and nicer to drive. What I am saying is literally that the car with more hp/ton is slower... it does not "feel" slower - it is slower in 80% of situations compared to IS250. The only real place where 200t is faster is sort of 40-90MPH, which isn't exactly practical.. and yes from stand still to 60MPH would be faster, but just barely and IS250 would still be in front most of the way to like 45-50MPH - this should not be the case considering power/weight ratio. This tells me is that car is not well tuned, the engine and gearbox does not work well together and the car is not optimised to use the power it has efficiently. In itself it is not that surprising - different engine/gearbox options in same model will vary in how refined they are. What is surprising however is that in UK across entire Lexus range (bar LC and F-marque) we only have 2 main engines and both are terribly refined for driving. It seems as if Lexus said - "well those brits are lost cause, they care more about co2/mile and their screwed car taxation system, so let's scramble something passable together - they won't understand the difference as nobody cares about driving there anymore". As for turbo engines being laggy - that should be the "past"... at least according to manufacturers and journalists. It will never feel as "natural" and lineal as NA, but it should not longer be a noticeable issue... or at least that is what they are feeding us to make it easier to swallow downsizing and turbocharging - which seems to be clearly inferior to the engines we had even 10 years ago.

Yes and many other things, which people do all day.. everyday. Plus - who are there to ticket them?! I have seen on several occasion where driver creates a dangerous situation (almost literally crashes into police car) and police just drives away... because they were MET and not highway patrol/traffic police. That is just dumb.. This is why I hate - "policing by automated cameras" system in UK. People now literally drive from camera to camera - comes camera they drive properly and then they drive anyway they like in between! Further, cameras only work on some specific simple to prove offences like speeding and red light, but are completely blind for more nuanced things - like lane hogging, tailgating, cutting off, indicators etc. And it is getting increasingly worse - at least that is my experience driving 12 years in London.

In supermarkets I honestly don't mind - I mostly park in reverse, but sometimes it actually makes sense not to. For example if you planning to load something in the boot sometimes it is difficult to get to it etc. so I am not overly judgemental about others not doing it. However, it drives me mad when people park front forward in their drives or parking spots on the the side of main road and then reverses back into traffic to get out...The latest trend now is not only to reverse into traffic on your side... but reverse across entire road into opposite direction. That is outright moronic and it is seriously dangerous. Obviously they cannot see at all, so they simply reverse slowly and hope that somebody going to let them in and not crash into them.

The chances of getting mint IS-F or any car "cheap" have always been "very very very very slim". Further, what ones considers "mint" and "cheap" is kind of subjective and changes from time to time. However, getting IS-F for £9000 is completely possible, in fact one is listed now at this price on FB marketplace. Whenever that is good car or not will depend on many circumstances and one's perspective. The cars which hangs around are those "where price does not meet the condition". It could be low mileage car in "mint" condition for simply too much, or high mileage car in poor condition for very little... it does not matter in what condition the car is - as long as the price make sense in given market conditions it will sell.

I think there are two parts to this story and that creates sort of mixed feelings. Form one side it is ridiculous that somebody could not park the car without rear camera. This is actually wider issue in UK - driving is very inclusive and a lot of people who should not be behind the wheel ended up driving and not losing their license. Pretty much as long as one is slow and careful - that is "good enough" even if they are creating traffic jams by constantly driving far too slow and could not park car properly.. it is fine just "take your time". The story linked plays on the same line - "if she cannot park without aligning the lines on the camera, she should not be driving at all!". To be fair that was my first thought... However as @Shahpor said - if the camera is genuinely not straight that is a fault. Why should anyone accept to live with that in their car?! Even though I don't need camera to "align" when parking it would drive me nuts seeing that and living with it. I would raise it with Lexus as well and would ask it to be rectified. I think the important part of this story is that Lexus seems to have admitted to the fault but just fobbed off the owner - this in itself becomes more of an issue than her skill or even whenever the car is faulty or not. If the camera where straight, then why would they provide the credit for upgrade etc?! and if it not straight then it is kind of embarrassing Lexus was not able to do such as adjusting it. So in summary, by focusing of the driver inability of ... well driving. We kind of sideline genuine fault with the car - which may be small, but still a fault and should have been fixed. Actually, think about this - what if you steering wheel would be not dead straight? I had it once and it would drive me crazy... the tracking was fine, car would go straight, would not pull, but the wheel was maybe 3mm to the side. One could say it is not important... wheel is round if you leave it alone the car go straight and no function was impacted by this, but still it feels wrong! I find this very similar - one could adapt to wrong lines, or use the mirrors, but this does not change the fact lines are not straight!