Herbie

I installed a GPS tracker in my car (under £45 for the tracker itself and £60/year for the cellular service) so I can easily prove where my car is/was on any given occasion. Plus 'Big Brother is watching us' with phone tracking and so on so it shouldn't be too difficult to prove some ne'r-do-well has cloned your plates and that it was them, not you, who committed any offence.

Oh dear - worms, can, opened! All the cars I've ever owned have been run on nothing but standard supermarket petrol when they started selling it or standard forecourt petrol before that. No problems whatsoever. Super-duper petrol in super-duper engines that have been tuned to make use of it - great. Super-duper petrol in ordinary engines that have not been tuned to make use of it - complete waste of money. Now I'm just going to get the popcorn so that I can sit back and watch the battle

Well the image below is taken from that website and is of a GB-plated car and I have to say they don't look out of place at all; in fact I think they look great:

I could never understand it either. How many hundreds of people see them as you drive along each day? Some people, like Steve above, say that it's to stop criminals cloning the plates but surely, if you have the original plates then any hassle will be borne by the criminal, not you?

WBAC = We Buy Any Car

I have to admit that I've never been able to afford a 'weekend toy' so there is perhaps a touch of the green-eyed monster at play here, but I've just never understood people who just buy cars to store them. "Oh I never take it out in winter. I don't even take it out in summer if it's raining." "Oh I never do more than 2000 miles a year in it." And so on. I just feel they need a good shaking and telling that this life is not a rehearsal for the next one and that they won't be able to take their pristine car with them

Just for the sake of clarity (because Mark, the OP, is new to hybrids) - Steven is probably talking about the 12V battery, not the traction battery

No, it can't. Three things are needed for the car to run - 1. 12V battery 2. Petrol engine 3. High voltage traction battery. These things all interact with and need each other. The startup sequence is: The 12V battery boots the computers and gets the hybrid system into READY mode, which is basically the equivalent of a conventional car sat with the engine idling and alternator spinning. Hybrids don't have a conventional starter motor to crank the engine. When the hybrid system wants to run the petrol engine it energises Motor/Generator 1 (MG1) and uses that to spin the engine at 1,000rpm before applying fuel and a spark to fire it. MG1 is a 650V AC motor which is controlled by the hybrid system, so you can see that if there's a fault with the hybrid system, you can't even start the petrol engine. Hybrids also don't use a conventional alternator and anything that would normally be driven by a belt from the engine, such as aircon compressor or power steering for instance, are instead driven by electric motors and are again controlled by the hybrid system.* The voltage of the hybrid battery (more properly called the traction battery) varies by model but for the 4RX like mine, it's 288V. The hybrid system uses DC/DC converters and inverters to get the various voltages required for the various systems. The 12V systems are run, and the 12V battery is charged, by means of a DC/DC converter that decreases the 288V from the traction battery to about 14.5V. The aircon compressor is a 500V 3-phase AC variable frequency motor; the power steering is, if I remember correctly, powered by a 48V motor and MG1 and MG2 are both 650V 3-phase AC. *The hybrid system decides when to run or when to turn off the petrol engine. There are no belt-driven devices because of this - imagine losing power steering in the middle of a turn, and so on. So you see, no hybrid system means no car. Equally so, if the petrol engine goes faulty you can't just drive on battery power; you may get a mile or two but that would be it and if the traction battery went completely flat you'd need a Lexus dealer to deal with it - the AA/RAC/whoever don't carry a 288V source to jump start it. EDIT: Just to say, don't be put off by this - there are many thousands upon thousands of people driving hybrids daily.

Sorry, yes, you're right. It let me select a non-nav but then returned something other than a Vline. I can't imagine that many people have tried to do this so you may be the pioneer, going boldly where no man has gone before You've already got the replacement so I would suggest that the best thing is to take out your existing unit and compare the connectors on the back. If they match, try it. I'm guessing that most of the wires will be signalling lines so there shouldn't be any chance of blowing anything apart. NB: I'm no expert and I take no responsibility if you decide to try it and something goes wrong. You do it at your own risk

TPMS or not?

According to http://gromaudio.co.uk they do a Vline for both Nav and Non-Nav IS cars but only from model year 2010 with nothing for a 2006 model, so what you've bought may not work at all anyway.

If the compressor is producing air but the suspension refuses to rise then logically there's a blockage somewhere in the piping that's stopping the air getting to where it's needed?

All depends on age, I think. I've reached that stage in life where I need all the light I can get, so they're perfect for me; I love the clinical white, makes things so much easier.

I'm not sure what a "reverse polarity" bulb is, but all LEDs are polarity conscious. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode and all diodes only allow current to flow in one direction - if you plug them in the wrong way, ie, with reversed polarity, they won't light up.

You're welcome

This is where I buy my LEDs from and they've never let me down yet https://www.auto-lighting.co.uk/eng_m_LED-Bulbs-1272.html They probably still originate from China but they're a better class and more reliable than the Fleabay ones.

They certainly have to be fitted to the indicators unless you change the flasher unit for one that can cope with LEDs but I'm not sure about the other lights, although it would be logical to assume the answer would be yes. In other situations that I've heard about, if the car is equipped with a 'bulb out' feature then this is often triggered but that's all; I certainly wouldn't expect all the lights that the OP mentions to come on.

I think Keith means Ebay or Amazon, although why he couldn't just say that or even link to the resistors, I don't know You could also get them from http://cpc.co.uk or RS Components. I'm not sure resistors will solve the problem though. It's true that because of the lower wattage the CANBUS system will think the bulbs have blown, but that's all - it shouldn't light up all those. To have so many on at once is often a sign that the 12V battery is low or on its way out, so it may be worth just sticking jump leads on to see if they go out before spending money.

That's the aircon condenser if I remember correctly. I'll send you some info by PM that may help you.

I'm glad they don't. Inbuilt things tend to go out of date or maybe aren't very good in the first place. If it went faulty, probably the whole roof lining would need to be dismantled to get at it and so on - and it would no doubt cost a fortune. No, I'm happy to have my own choice on dashcams It's more about being small and unobtrusive, which a lot of the Nextbase range definitely are not. Something like the Viofo cams that I've got (see above), and indeed the Nextbase 380GW, can be mounted so that only the lens is visible from outside, so there's no temptation for a passing thief or yob to break in and nick it. I leave mine insitu 24/7.

Hiya Kay, just sent you a PM that may help you.

Any of the Nextbase range (possibly any other range of cameras as well). As you quite rightly state, the 380GW is aimed at the fleet market, but only in the context of security. It doesn't have better lenses, better sensors, better electronics or anything else, except for physical security of the microSD card and the recorded footage on it (presumably to stop fleet drivers doing something silly and then destroying the evidence).

The one and only difference is that it has a cover and security screws so that no one can take out the microSD card and tamper with it. There is absolutely no difference whatsoever in the workings of the camera.

The main problem I had with this unit is that it didn't completely isolate the two systems. It's difficult to explain properly but let's assume that I wanted to play some music using Android Auto. Pressing the 'Play' button would indeed start the player so in that sense it worked, but the button would also have an effect on the Lexus OEM side as well at the same time, such as turning off the aircon or something like that. It was very weird and not something we could sort out so out it came, to be replaced by the Vline.

Strangely, I've gone the other way. I got one of these units but after months of trying to get it working properly I finally gave up on it and got a Grom Vline 2. The Vline isn't working properly yet (I'm waiting for a replacement video display cable from Grom HQ in the States, which is currently being held back by Customs at Stansted ) but even taking that into account I've already had much more success than I did with this unit.