Thackeray

Poorer countries? You mean Germany and France? Or perhaps Austria! Oh, I know, you must be talking about Italy!

I had the same problem. The phone would connect to the car but the phone's navigation voice did not come over the car's loudspeakers and also no longer came through the phone's loudspeaker. I turned off the phone's bluetooth before starting the car and then I could hear the directions from the phone. Turning off bluetooth after starting the car didn't work. I've never managed to get the phone directions to play over the loudspeakers. And I didn't want to always have my phone disconnected from the car on long journeys. So I managed to find a setting in Waze to play the sound through the phone rather than whatever the default setting was. That allowed me to turn the bluetooth back on so I could receive phone calls. And the navigation voice came over the phone's loudspeaker, which being just next to the steering wheel was fine for me to hear even while the car's audio was playing. I don't know if there's a similar setting in Google maps. But as a first step you could try turning off bluetooth and see if you get voice directions from the phone. If Google maps doesn't have the necessary setting you could try Waze instead.

Whatever decision you make, unfortunately you're never going to be able to tell whether it made any difference to the longevity of the car or the fuel consumption. But that doesn't mean it's of no interest to think about the theory! So here are my thoughts on your dilemma. On a conventional automatic, every time you move the gear selector there are clutches in the transmission which are engaged and disengaged. Although they should last for many years, they will nonetheless wear slightly every time you do this. For this reason, on automatics I've owned I've always adopted the policy of leaving it in Drive for short stops. As for releasing the brake pedal, I would have thought the impact this had would be extremely small. The clutches are still engaged and disengaged producing the same amount of wear. And the power from the engine has a torque converter between it and the wheels, so I would have thought the impact of the drag from the engine on the transmission will be little different whether you have the brakes on or not. As for the hybrid transmission, when you shift from Drive to Neutral or any other selection, nothing mechanical actually happens to the gears in the transmission. (Except in Park the parking pawl is engaged). So there may be a little extra wear on the gear selector from moving from Drive to Neutral. But nothing happens in the transmission itself.

This is exactly right. I used to think that the key was brought back to life by unlocking the doors. But, of course, it's also brought back to life by opening the boot. Any button will reactivate the key. I used to think it was very convenient to be able to open the boot with the key because the boot would automatically lock when you closed it. No need to press the key again to lock it and a steady red light in the middle of the dashboard confirmed that the car was locked. But what I didn't initially think of was that although the car was all locked up when you closed the boot, the key had been reactivated. So you would have to turn it off again if you wanted to avoid thieves being able to pick up the signal and take the car away.

Many thanks for mentioning this. I'd never heard of M+S or the 3 Peak Snowflake symbol. (See below). For anyone else who hasn't heard of this, M+S means Mud and Snow. And the 3 Peak Snowflake symbol means the tyre meets the requirements for driving in snow (but not for driving on ice, which Nordic countries need.) Cross Climate tyres have both the symbol and the letters M+S on the sidewall, which is useful to know if I need to drive in France in the winter.

And in Geneva airport car park they have an indicator light in the ceiling over each bay. If the light is on it means the bay is free; if the light is off the bay is already occupied. Makes it much easier to find an empty bay when looking down a long line of parked cars.

As usual a very helpful explanation from Herbie on the voltages. And he's absolutely right in pointing out that they are not intended to be electric cars. All the power the car uses, at all times, has been generated by the petrol engine. While the car is cruising or accelerating, most of the engine's power is used to move the car. The problem is that when a conventional car brakes, the energy that the engine has generated is thrown away as heat. This is the problem that the hybrid tries to deal with. Instead of throwing away the energy, a generator turns it into electricity. Next problem - what to do with this electricity if it isn't needed at that moment. Answer - store it in a battery. (Incidentally, this is why the system keeps the battery about half full in general; it needs to have enough space to store the captured energy.) But you don't need a very big battery to store the energy you get from braking. So then after storing this regenerated electricity, the system has to use it or the battery would fill to capacity. So the battery is used to help acceleration. Or to cruise at lowish speeds for short distances. But the system's goal is not to be an electric car. Instead it aims to avoid having the battery too full or it wouldn't have space for saving energy which would otherwise be wasted. If the UX doesn't seem to allow electric-only cruising as much as earlier hybrid versions, then that must be because the regenerated power is being used to a greater extent to support the engine. But it makes no difference to the overall goal, which is to avoid throwing away energy by braking when it could be saved in the battery.

If you've got a fibre terminal box on the wall, this generally has a phone socket as well as an internet socket for the router. There's a plan to phase out the 100-year-old copper wires in the next couple of years, so landline phones will use this connection instead. Edit: Herbie beat me to it. As he says, you could also use the phone socket on the router. If you're lucky you may have a wall-box with a rechargeable battery so that the phone will continue to work during the power cut caused by everyone trying to recharge their electric cars. This battery takes the place of the roomful of 12v batteries at the telephone exchange. (Cue Herbie's fascinating picture of the roomful of batteries which he included in a thread a year or two ago.) Or if you have a newer terminal box, there will be no battery and you'll have to use your mobile to call 999 if there's a power cut.

I don't see the point in getting a so-called "smart meter" while its only value seems to be to tell you that using an electric kettle consumes a lot of electricity. Like many people, I already know that. But what is more interesting is that there is a wholesale market in electricity. Here are some quotes for Nordic prices tomorrow, hour by hour. By using this information, I would have thought that an electric car designer could set up software in the car that could control when the car was charged and at what price. So for example, if you drive home at 5pm in your electric car and plug it in to start charging immediately, the wholesale price in the chart shown at the above link, would be 107 euros per MWh. But if instead you could programme the car to tell it that you would need a range of 50 miles by 8am the next day, the car could then download the forecast prices and charge from midnight when the price would be 66 euros per MWh. I have no idea how long you would need it to charge. But the car could calculate how long it would need to be charged to achieve a range of 50 miles (plus some leeway, perhaps) and then time the charging to be done at the times when the price was best. In that way, it wouldn't be the supplier controlling when or whether the customer could have the electricity. Instead, the customer would be buying when the price was best.

Quite right to question this! Glad to see you lot at the back are paying attention! There is no EU flag according to Wikipedia. To quote: " It has been in wide official use by the EC since the 1990s, but it has never been given official status in any of the EU's treaties."

What's the caveat? If I had to guess, I'd suspect that strictly speaking you're not allowed to conceal part of the number plate with stickers. We're talking about concealing the EU flag by sticking a Union Jack over it, not the other way round!

Here are some stickers you can buy to cover up the EU stars and the GB on your number plate. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Signs247-Number-Stickers-United-Kingdom/dp/B098PGHWMT/ This is an easy solution. But does anyone know if it's legal to put stickers on your number plate? I suspect it wouldn't be allowed on the number area. So would it be legal on the flag area?

I don't see how the claim that it can be driven without the hybrid battery can be made. The hybrid battery starts the engine. I wonder what ebay's position is on claims like this - maybe there's a way to alert them to claims that might mislead people? Or maybe the hybrid battery still works to some extent but generates error messages.

Exactly so. This is what I was interested in finding out about. I was wondering what MG2 does to back up the brakes. In fact, it seems to take over from the brakes and hold the car on a hill indefinitely after the system has released the brakes. Below are a couple of charts created by Hybrid Assistant which show what is happening. The first shows the progress of the car up the hill. The blue line shows when MG2 is turning and therefore when the road wheels are turning. At all other times the car is stationary. There are four short advances up the hill along with longish stationary periods in between. The second chart shows in blue the torque MG2 is outputting over the same period. This shows that even when the car is stationary, MG2 is outputting around 30 ft-lb of torque to prevent the car from rolling back on the hill. At the steepest point of the hill, the torque goes up to around 40 ft-lb but the car is still stationary. The temperature of MG2 rose from around 26C to 30C over this period, even though it was scarcely turning. I didn't leave the car stationary on the hill for longer than 15 seconds, as I imagine too much heat without any rotation might not be good for the motor. It was also interesting that at the steepest point of the hill, the car's energy monitor showed that the battery was feeding power to MG2 from the moment the car was shifted into Drive, even though both the parking brake and footbrake were both applied. I expect this is aimed at making the start as smooth as possible. There must be a sensor monitoring how steep the hill is for the car to know when to apply more power to MG2 even though the parking and footbrake are both holding the car stationary. Perhaps this explains the difference between the 30ft-lb most of the time but around 40 ft-lb at the steepest point.

I've often wondered how the Hill Start Assist feature works and mentioned it in a thread a couple of years ago. I initially thought it must work by battery power being fed to the MG2 electric motor to prevent the road wheels turning. But then a couple of years ago I drove a diesel Citroën which also had the feature. So I realised that the Citroën must be working by holding the brakes until the car started moving. This made me think that this must be the way the IS300h worked too. But recently I thought it was time to do some experimenting. And the answer seems to be that the IS300h (and maybe other models) uses both methods. This is what I found. I parked on a hill facing uphill and held the car in Drive using the footbrake. Then I released the footbrake and waited. The car didn't roll backwards. Checking on the energy monitor there was initially no power flow from the battery to the motor. So the car was being held by the brakes and this was confirmed by Hybrid Assistant. But after a couple of seconds the brakes were released and simultaneously power began to flow to the motor to keep the car held on the hill. There was a slight movement of the car, which I've often noticed, as the brakes were released and the motor took up the strain of holding the car. This slight movement (just a couple of millimetres probably) has always made me slightly nervous and I've always hurriedly pressed the accelerator to get the car moving. I then did a second trial, this time on a much steeper part of the hill. Same procedure as before. But this time on the steep hill the electricity flow comes on immediately even while holding the brake. This means that when the brakes are released there's no perceptible movement of the car at all because the MG2 motor has been holding the car stationary, along with the brakes, right from the moment the car stopped. I didn't time it but this stationary position, held by power to MG2 and to the road wheels, seemed to continue indefinitely, though I probably didn't try it for more than about 10 seconds. So the answer is that both the brakes and MG2 are used to keep the car from rolling backwards. And the slight movement backwards you get on less steep hills is just the transfer of the load from the brakes to the motor and does not mean the Hill Start Assist feature has stopped working. I hope this helps anyone else who's interested in how this feature works.

So for comparison, that would have been six shillings and eightpence (6/8) in pre-decimal currency. That's pretty much in line with the AA records which put the 1969 average at six shillings and sixpence. What's more interesting is whether you managed to pay with decimal currency two years before the country went decimal in 1971! I expect you're converting to decimal for the benefit of those readers who don't understand pre-decimal.

2/9 a gallon. The last time petrol was two shillings and ninepence a gallon seems to have been in 1950, according to the AA. That's 71 years ago! And before that it was 2/9 or more during the First World War.

That must have been a lot of tax. I remember buying petrol in Tennessee at 22 cents a (US) gallon in the early 70s. That's $2.20 to fill the tank with 10 gallons. I thought that was cheap. Working it out now, at around $2.45 to the pound (as the rate then was) it was equivalent to about 2p a litre. So there must have been a lot of tax in the UK, even in those days. Shortly afterwards OPEC took the world-changing decision to quadruple crude oil prices. There was a big impact on the US where the price at the pump reflected the crude oil price. Less impact in the UK where much of the price at the pump was tax. One other result was a half-century of military action to protect oil supply security. When oil is phased out in favour of battery cars, it won't be necessary to fight wars to protect oil supplies any more. The question then will be, where are the critical areas in the world that supply the raw materials for batteries, and will military action move to these areas to protect supplies?

When you started the thread, I found a Toyota page listing cars affected, including Lexus 2018-2019 IS and other models. Now, of course, when I want to find it, I can't! But here's another link to an American news item about it.

In rural America, there's no legal requirement to pick up people who are walking but often cars will stop anyway and offer a lift. They regard it as so bizarre for anyone to be walking that they stop to ask if there's something wrong.

It's certainly true that the French government mainly uses French cars. It also used to be the case that small ads in newspapers were grouped in four main sections: Peugeot, Citroën, Renault and Foreign. But I remain to be convinced that white was obligatory. Here are some pictures in a newspaper review of Chirac's cars. Half way down the page is a shot of several cars in what looks like the Elysée Palace courtyard and not a white car in sight.

I have the third generation hybrid system on the IS and the UX has the fourth generation so there may be differences. That said, I have found that if the car is stationary in the Ready mode and the engine warm, the battery will go down as far as 40% charge (two bars on the dashboard display) and then the engine will start. When the battery reaches 50% (three bars) the engine stops and the battery charge starts to decline and the process repeats. By contrast, if I have cruise control on at 70mph the car computer keeps the battery charge at almost exactly 60% (I think that will be around five bars) if the road is flat and I don't press any pedals. I've only ever seen eight bars a couple of times (this represents 80%) and it tends to happen on very long downhill stretches where regeneration is continuous for several minutes. But the computer will take action to prevent it going above 80%. Initially, the engine may be off as you start going down hill. But to avoid excessive charging, at some point the engine will start to spin without fuel. It sounds as though it's running normally but it's actually acting as a load to draw excess electricity from the battery. On one of these occasions, when I got to the bottom of the hill I stopped at red traffic lights and was surprised to hear the engine start up while the car was stationary. Usually, the engine stops when the car is stationary. In fact, the electric motor was spinning the engine as a load to use up excess power from battery and keep it below 80%. It sounded as though the engine was running but in fact no fuel is used when it does this. You might be interested in this discussion on a Toyota forum. Someone is asking why EV mode can't be engaged. It's about the third generation hybrid system but the main principles are likely to be the same.

Interesting to read these comments from Yuasa about the difference between a starter battery and a "micro hybrid" battery. Certainly, the high voltage battery operates in a range from 40-80%, which shows as one to eight bars on the dashboard, and which Lexus Customer Relations seems to have mixed up initially with the 12v battery. But it seems from what you've been told that the car computer also aims to charge the 12v battery to no more than 80%. It's certainly been my experience that you can start the car to the Ready state with the 12v battery at around 11.5v, which is in line with the Yuasa chart.

The year round average seems to be about 44 mpg. The trip computer shows this optimistically at around 47-48 mpg. It's worse in winter, better in summer. The website spritmonitor.de shows the following figures for the IS300h: You need to sign in to change litres/100km to mpg. This is pretty much in line with the examples of other people's experience above. You can check fuelly.com too but I think it has a smaller sample of cars.

Most beeps are explained in the manual but there's one that isn't mentioned. This is the warning beep you hear when you're approaching a speed camera. This has baffled a good many new users and it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. Mr Vlad's reference above to changing the 12v battery is good advice and worth bearing in mind for the future. If the 12v battery is the original you may need to think about changing it when the winter comes. This is the thread where it's discussed. The key point seems to be that if your radio has a shiny finish this may be one of the early vulnerable ones that might fail when the 12v battery is disconnected. But if it's the replacement version with a matt finish, it seems that it may not have this potential problem. Either way, if you have any doubt, it's probably best to get Lexus (not Halfords or Quickfit) to change the battery, warning them in advance that if there's any potential problem with damage to the radio it's their responsibility.