reeac

You will have seen from my contribution that my 12v battery failed at just under 3 years ( first reg. December 2015). The owner for the first 2 years only used the car at weekends, covering 6,600 miles in just under 2 years and I, since purchasing in lasted Jan. 2018 have covered under 3,000 miles which is unusually low useage and might account for the premature battery failure. The AA man who came to my rescue said that, even when locked, the battery drain is 0.5 amps which will soon drain a battery. He said that when unlocked or with a window left open the drain is 4.5 amps. If those figures are true then the car can't be left unused for many days. As has been pointed out earlier, with traditional cars the driver gets an early warning of a tired battery from the sound effects when starting whereas with a hybrid it's simply go or no go. I shall take care to use the car more often from now on and leave my old Jazz on the drive more often.

Had my car again fail to achieve "ready" condition. Again had the AA man out .....his meter said that the battery had failed. Jump started the car and took it to the nearest Lexus dealers who charged it and then agreed that the battery had failed. They loaned me a new NX300h for a day, fitted a new battery and washed and vacuumed the car ....all free of charge as the car was just under 3 years old. From now on I shall use this car more often (once or twice a week at a minimum). I have to say that I found the NX to be unrefined and lumbering and it made the IS feel like a true, nimble sports saloon when I drove it home.....why do people buy those SUVs?

Are those compact jump starters rechargeable either from the mains or from the car? The photos don't appear to show any mains or other plug. I used to have a bigger sized mains rechargeable jump starter on my boat and carried it around for years, never needing it and eventually it's battery failed due to old age.

Just had the problem of failing to achieve "ready" status. Tried connecting to my Jazz battery for 10 minutes ...no joy. Tried charging using my CTek charger ....wouldn't play ball. Called the AA who found that the 12 volt battery was displaying 9 volts. That might be why the CTek wouldn't play ball. He jump started the ICE and we watched the voltage rise eventually to 14 volts and then the ICE started slowly cycling on and off as the battery voltage rose and then fell. The AA man's instrument pronounced battery condition as "good" so he left and I let the car cycle on/off for 30 minutes as he recommended. Next day all was fine and we did about 2 hours daylight driving. Recommendation was to use the car for at least 30 minutes every week. I had left the car for 13 days as I had been doing lots of load carrying using the Jazz with its larger luggage space (seats down). I will now make sure that I use the Lexus at least once a week but it does raise the point, already mentioned, of for example leaving the car at the airport for 2 weeks while on holiday. My old Jag. had the same battery for 15 years, was quite often used less than once a week, and ALWAYS started first time. I only joined the AA just a year ago as part of the deal when I transferred my car insurance to them ...better keep the membership going.

A friend of mine always used to include the under bonnet area in his car washing routine ....even to the extent of rinsing with the hose. Personally I'd never risk that but I do wipe around with a cloth to remove dust etc.

I don't think that the dog food comparison is a valid one. There are some very poor quality cheap dog foods made using very dubious ingredients. They are favoured by owners of habitually greedy dogs like labradors. Even if you buy expensive food you can get caught out as I did when our dog developed pancreatitis due to his dried food, which was prepared from human consumption grade chicken, virgin olive oil and rice, turned out to have too high a fat content. Given the magnitude of veterinary bills it's wise to check these things quite apart from the dog's welfare. Petrol, on the other hand, all has to meet quite narrow specifications and although I believe that some supermarket own brands barely meet additive specs., 95 octane of a big name brand ( I always favour Shell) will be fine for an IS300h which isn't that highly tuned at 72 bhp/ litre. I owned a much loved Jaguar XJ8 for 16 years and always used 95 with never a hint of trouble from the engine.

Finally I realise that as that motor generator charges the traction battery then ,when starting the ICE it's bound to be powered by the same battery and the 12 v battery isn't involved. Been rather slow in catching on!

I'm aware that any starter motor takes very little energy in terms of amp hours but does the energy required for starting an IS300h come from the traction battery albeit via a dc to dc converter or is it direct from the traction battery?

I'm intrigued to see that the Yuasa battery says recommended charge rate 3 amps. Elsewhere I recall reading 4.5 amps. Either seems ridiculously low for in-vehicle charging - you'd need to drive a long way to recharge a depleted battery.

I own a 1958 MGA sports car which has two 6 volt batteries in series to power the 12 v system. After restoration between 1981 and 1983 the first pair of batteries lasted 11 years and the second pair 10 years. After that I started having trouble with batteries which was eventually cured by converting to using a single 12 v battery. I believe that the problem was that the more recent 6 v batteries were intended for use in golf buggies and so were deep cycle and couldn't supply enough current for cold starts. I expect that true car type 6 v batteries are still obtainable but it's a possible pitfall if choosing deep cycle batteries. So called leisure batteries provide enough CCA (cold cranking amps) and have reasonable deep cycling ability and I always used them on my boat, finding that they lasted about 10 years.

That oil certainly doesn't look clean enough. Possibly they didn't leave it draining for long enough or drained it when cold. I assume that the level shown is after the car has been standing for an hour or more .... if so then that level is too low. I used to do all my own car maintenance but apart from my tractor I leave it to garages now....either my local or else the appropriate dealer , and I've never seen evidence of such shoddy work.

Given that the seats reportedly met or exceeded Federal requirements I'm surprised at the verdict. What, then, is the point of having these design/performance requirements?

I seem to recall reading that it's connected via a DC to DC converter to reduce the voltage from 230 to a suitable level.

Swapping to a new battery would be the easiest test. Might just be that the charging circuitry which feeds that battery from the high voltage traction battery has failed but that's unlikely.

We've covered this earlier. I showed in a post of Aug. 29th that the variation from new to worn out tyre will be about 2 percent on diameter and hence on speedo reading i.e. 0.6 mph at 30 and 1.4 mph at 70 and I was claiming to be able to read the speedo to 1mph at best. I got the feeling though that I was being boring.

My experience to date has been overwhelmingly with conventional rather than hybrid cars. I believe that the Lexus hybrid 12v battery is charged from the high voltage traction battery but I don't know whether it is given priority so as to always be fully charged. Even so, if it eventually fails it might just discharge the traction battery causing damage to it. On the other hand there may well be built in safeguards against this happening. Probably with such a complex car it's best to err on the side of caution and replace the 12 volt battery after around 6 years. The Toyota Hybrid Drive system has been around for about 10 years now so dealers must have some experience of 12 volt battery behaviour.

There is a downside ..... cost. If you want max. reliability then it's a good policy. My recent experiences with batteries have been one that did 15 years with no failure and no charging from an external source (and on an annual mileage of only 3,000) and one that did 10 years before it started showing some problems but never failed to start the car. My sister in law got her car battery changed at 6 years and I thought that for her, aged 75, that was sensible policy. Horses for courses.

At least we agree that calibration of digital instruments is possible. I suppose that as a retired scientist I'm used to precision in measurement as a basis for drawing sound conclusions. Also I assume that we all like perfection in paint finish so why not in other areas? Re boating, it's a big subject but we're talking sailing boats and speed through the water as measured with a mini paddle wheel and speed over the ground as measured with GPS (satnav in motoring terms) and wind speed and direction which enable you to judge efficiency of the sail trim, speed of tidal currents ,expected time of arrival and so on. Whilst there are sometimes speed limits through mooring areas speeding is very seldom an issue with a sailing boat.

Update. My IS300h had its 3 year service today at the local Lexus dealers. They said that they couldn't recalibrate the speedo. which reads 30 mph at an actual 27 mph. This surprises me, it being a digital instrument, as way back in 2006 we were able to calibrate our new set of boat instruments using the satnav and following instructions which came with the instruments. Seems that I'll have to live with this error and the fact that my 13 year old Jazz speedo is dead accurate and my cheapish quartz watch has an error of less than 30 seconds a month.

New engine makes me wonder if it hydraulicked. Must check the location of the air intake on my IS.

My experience is that on our local roads you can't estimate the depth of water unless you see another car go through ahead of you and also the depth can increase rapidly with time as water flows off surrounding fields. If it looks serious then I use first gear and go very slowly but keep the revs up by slipping the clutch. The biggest hazard is water ingestion into the engine so you need to know how high up the air intake is. In my Jazz it's pretty high up in the front wheel arch and reasonably protected from inflow due to forward motion. I would be a lot more cautious with the Lexus.

It's a good question. I recently got caught in a flood in my Jazz and it was deeper than the front ground clearance so I could feel the drag on the bodywork. Got through ok but then measured the clearance on the Jazz and compared it with my IS300h. Surprisingly they had the same ground clearance at the front but the Lexus exhausts were about 1.5 inches lower than that of the Jazz which could have been a "show stopper" apart from any electrical problems. The whole electrical system must be splashproof but immersion could be another matter.

I believe that I saw somewhere that the IS300h top speed of 125 mph is a deliberately limited speed.

Kickdown has been a facility on conventional torque converter autos for decades but I didn't realise that the Lexus ECVT had it. If so then maybe that's what switches in the motor generator to give maximum power. I'm not sure that I've tried max power on my IS300h yet ...used it plenty for overtaking when I had the Jag. It seems not in keeping with the computer-intensive hybrid system to use the driver's foot pressure to do the switching.

When you pay for it don't bother to count out the money, just give them a handful of change ...life's too short.