Easterlily

4 hours ago, PCM said:

+1

Insurance issues?

Mechanical issues?

Your call of course, but I wouldn't... 

Maybe change the tyres, not the wheels

According to Swedish law you are allowed to have different size tyres than the recommendations if it doesn't change the wheel circulation distance more than 5%. (and some other rules about how it fits in the well etc.). I am certain a change of only the profile with one step would not give me any insurance or legal issues. 

Mechanical? That depends on if the slightly larger wheels interfere with steering or suspension which is kind of what I want to learn from you guys. 

Also if the slightly larger wheels would look stupid. Maybe it's just me who thinks the wheels have a lot of space around them compared to similar cars. 

4 hours ago, Mincey said:

As someone who has gone from a 17" shod IS250 to an 18" shod IS300h, I'd stick with your 17" wheels. 

Howcome? 

Hello fellas.
I am planning to purchase a new set of wheels - considering going for 18 inches to replace the standard 17. 225/40/18 is the recommended tire size for the car with a tire of this size (or 255/35/18 but thats overkill), but I was thinking about, would it be a good idea to get 225/45/18 for a little bit of extra rubber. The advantages in my mind is a slightly more gentle ride, slightly less noise and a bit more filler in the wheel arch as there is quite a bit of an air gap in there. Or am I a complete idiot and am ruining the cars looks and/or steering/suspension function by doing this?

Hello fellow Lexus'ers.
My summer tires are rolling their final miles this season and Im planning to buy a whole new set of rims and tires, and put winter tires on the 17" originals. Ive come to the decision to upgrade to an 18" for a little more sportier look. Ive gotten inspired from the F-Sport 18" from Lexus, but they are a bit too pricy for my liking so im searching for aftermarket lookalikes and have found a few thats gotten my interest. Before I make my decision I want to keep my mind open but have a hard time "imagining" how one tire would look at the car without seeing a picture. I was thinking if maybe you guys could post some inspiration of your cars or any rims that you see fit well with the IS.

Worth noting is that I have the Matador "Wine-red" color and prefer gray or brushed wheels. I usually dont fancy pure silver or pure black tires.
Cheers 

10 hours ago, Charlie Alder said:

Hello to you all and trust you are keeping well. A question for Easterlily. In your post you say the HV battery was replaced after 5 years. Why was this?  The life expectancy of the battery is much longer than 5 years or am I missing something.

8 hours ago, royoftherovers said:

I don`t think he means HV Battery, he means 12v battery.

The HV Battery is warranted by Toyota/Lexus for 15 years subject to certain conditions. 

Yes. My apologies I did mean the regular 12V Battery that all cars have even through i wrote HV. Its a typo.

I didnt knoe however that Lexus expects 15 years+ from their hybrid batteries. How can this even be possible. With the way batteries takes damage over time for being inflicted by heat, wear and constant charge and decharge it should lose a portion of its capacity each year. Its a NiMH Battery right? 

I understand that the hybrid system does make a good effort to keep the Battery lifetime as long as possible and makes sure it never pushes to a full charge and never reaches low capacity but damn 15 years thats a crazy amount of charging cycles!

On 4/15/2020 at 10:30 PM, solarpower said:

Thank you Colin- how does the car drive in snow? Do you need to change to winter tyres as in BMWs?

On 4/15/2020 at 10:48 PM, ColinBarber said:

It is rear wheel drive so you do need to be careful. Winter tyres do really help but I never bothered for the 4 years I had my 300h.

The car have a SNOW-mode that you can activate if you expect slippery roads. To my understanding It sharpens up the cars assistance systems like the ESC and make them trigger earlier than normal. Also it makes the car feel very cumpsy and slow requiring you to really floor the pedal to make a go, thus limiting the risk of you overaccelerating and slip down into the ditch. Living in Sweden and being forced to change to winter tyres during dec-april, id say this mode is not really that useful for me as the studded wheels do a great job on their own, its a good thing for those living in the more southern countries who make occasional trips up north, or have a month of so of snow.

Come to think of it, maybe not all european sold Lexuses have the SNOW mode and perhaps its a feature only found on nordic sold vehicles, but I figured id let you know anyway.

On 4/14/2020 at 10:06 PM, solarpower said:

Dear all,

I am considering buying Lexus IS300H and I currently have Golf 1.9 TDI. I am hoping you folks can illuminate me. My questions are:

1. I drive like 2-3 miles in start-stop traffic (max speed 30 mph) a couple of times a day. I am wondering would the IS300H batteries would last with this type of driving or they would die quickly? I I rarely do motorway driving, and my annual mileage will be around 6k to 7k miles. I tend to keep car for long time- historically ~8-10 years.
2. As I understand, IS300H drives initially in the EV mode. Is this true? Would I cover those distance in EV mode? How does this change in winter? What sort of mpg I can expect?
3. MPG is not my most important concern- I do not prefer usual cambelt changes, worn out clutches, brake pads etc. I assume they are negligible with IS300H. Right?
4. While I understand that a plug-in hybrid might be better for me but I hate the idea of charging car every day like mobile phones, and thus like the idea of self-charging hybrids (hence Battery concern in #1 above). I can't afford pure electric vehicles.

Thanks for helping me.

Solar

Without reading what the other members have answered I figured I'd give you my thoughts on the car and your questions.

First of all, the hybrid drive on the Lexus is very very clever. Its built in the way that you have to make very few actions on your own and makes its own decisions regarding Battery charge, temperature, mileage and fuel consumption. My regular daily drive is 2km road of varied 60km/h, 6km highway varied 80-110km/h and finally 1km of 50km/h, and the reverse when going home from work. Usually the final drive after highwaydriving is about 90% electric. I live in Sweden so during the winter season the car takes some time to heat up and you cannot drive electric during this process. My avarage consumption during the winter was 6.7L/100km. Now in the summer, the heat of the sun (15C ambient) usually is enough to drive electric from the start. The petrol engine only starts if you make a high acceleration or if the charge is low. (Occassionaly I guess it would start if you havnt used the car for a while just to make sure its good to go if you need to punch in). During the summer season i avarage 5.8L/100km. Note that both of these numbers have other routes included but id say 75% of the cars usage is according to above.

Now to your first question. I would say your driving route would most like make a good use of the Lexus hybrid drive. The thing to have in mind is that the hv Battery will probaby not have enough charge for doing electric all the time and the petrol engine will run more or less each drive to keep Battery level up. In my driving style I prefer to make a quicker acceleration up to the speed limit. If this limit is ~60km/h or less, once ive reached the speed i release the accelerator. This makes the car understand that you no longer need the petrol engine and if its not needed for any other reason it shuts down. Now I press the accelerator again and keep it withing the ECO zone of the tachnometer. This makes sure the car stays in electric mode. If bellow 50 km/h you can engage the EV-mode which forces the electric mode for as long as it can before the petrol engine have to take over, or you shut down the car. During this mode you can pass the ECO zone to some extent and you can actually accelerate quite fast without using the petrol engine at all. If the car thinks running EV mode would not be adequate due to low Battery or any other reason, it will tell you so and prohibit the mode. With this said, I think the car is smart enough to last you a long time with the type of driving you do. From what Ive learned the actual worst scenario for a hybrid is long way commute where speeds surpass 70km/h and higher. This eliminates most use of your electric motor and you would probaby do better with a diesel or a regular petrol and save the money the hybrid would cost you.

2nd question: When initiating the ignition button the car starts up all the electric components and the electric motor. It does not start in EV-mode per se and most of the time you cant select the EV-mode at this early state as the car wants to control this until the car heats up. With this being said, you can still, if the car is warm when started, make a long way without the petrol engine starting up. You mustnt expect a hybrid of this kind to make your whole commute completly electric as its not how the drive is meant to be driven. If this is what you are looking for, a plug in hybrid is more for the job. However, the Lexus hybrid will make the best it can to keep your mpg down and as said you will barely have to mind it at all. No external charging, no need to put it in certain modes etc. Finally, apart from the petrol engine, the hv Battery gets most of its charge from the ECB (electronic braking). This is probably the only thing you can do to help the hybrid do an even better job. Its hard to explain without trying it out but basically when you let go of the accelerator the car uses the momentum to regenerate Battery. Even more if you press the brake to a certain extent, the ECB takes even more of your cars momentum and slows you down while charging at the same time. To this point the regular disc brakes havnt been used at all, and you can deccelrate to 0 using the ECB if you start pressing the brakes very early before a traffic light for example. You can see this process on the technometer where there is a charge zone. If you keep pressing the brake after the technometer shows its charging at maximum, the regular wheel brakes engages and you slow the car down even further (although losing the potential charge you could have recieved and losing it as heat just as regular cars). Apart from this, i feel ive already answered this question above.

Your third question is about reliability and although i am the third owner of my Lexus and dont have a complete knowing of the cars history, I do know that the cars feel very sturdy and ive only noticed a few problems so far. You can check my other active forum topic regarding my two issues, one being a weird AC related noise and the other being a strange handbrake behaviour. However these are in my opinion only minior issues and dont bother me. Reading through the mechanics and service history, nothing strange has happened. The HV Battery was replaced when the car reached 5 years. I think the 300H is just as reliable as any other Lexus, or Toyota for that matter - but I guess only time will tell as im still quite new with the car.

I hope I could give you some insight with the car and please ask me if I didnt answer anything clearly.

55 minutes ago, Thackeray said:

..Incidentally, my air conditioning creaks too when the car starts up. I always assumed it was just making initial adjustments after registering current temperature and so on. I never attempted to have anything done about it.

 

Yeah. It seems to be a fair bit of people who have this 'issue' but neglect and leave it be. Maybe im just being picky although its a bit embarassing when new people enter your fairly luxurious car and and are met with fart noices. Maybe its just ironic. Anyway. Thank you all whove answered my questions and shared your thoughts. 

54 minutes ago, Thackeray said:

Don't put it into neutral at traffic lights - you'll be running down the hybrid battery while you're in neutral instead of charging it, especially if you have air conditioning etc turned on. At worst, if you kept doing this, it might not start up again from the lights - though I expect you'd see plenty of warning messages before it reached this low level of battery charge.

If you don't like keeping your foot on the brake you could put it in Park and ignore what the person behind thinks. But there's no wear involved in staying in Drive with your foot on the brake and that's how they're designed to be used, as are all conventional automatics. Just because you're used to putting a manual gearbox into neutral at the lights doesn't mean you need to do that on this kind of car!

Yeah i guess so. Youve teached me so much! 😄How about putting the car in drive and engaging the handbrake. My guess would be that this causes wear on the brakes as the car keeps trying to push? As i guess the handbrake and footbrake doesnt work the same way?

2 hours ago, Thackeray said:

As the video shows, there's a fair bit of play in the parking ring.. 

 

Interesting info. I didnt know thr car could take damage while being towed. This must be a big disadvantage. Although i guess towing a 2015 electric car would be rare and probably due to a fatal crash anyway.

My biggest interest with my question is to put the car Into neutral when waiting at the traffic light instead of holding the foot on the brake. I guess i could switch the car into park but this would briefly turn on the reverse light when shifting and would look rather strange to the person behind.

3 hours ago, wharfhouse said:

I have extended warranty so could have probably had it looked at but I had seen the post some time back about the whole dash having to be removed to fix it and so decided I would live with it as it wasn't bothering me just to have it happen sometimes at startup and who knows what other problems removing and refitting the dash might cause. 

True. I guess ill leave the issue as it is. Thanks for your insight.

10 minutes ago, Thackeray said:

That sounds normal. Here's a video about the transmission and this section shows what's called the parking pawl, which locks the transmission when you engage Park.

 

 

So you can see that it's normal that there would be a bit of movement when Park is engaged. (The video is actually about the P410 transmission which is for front-wheel drive cars. The equivalent is the L210 on the IS300h, which is a version used for rear-wheel drive cars but they work in much the same way.).

But when you use the foot-operated parking brake, there really shouldn't be much movement of the car - certainly not "a few inches". There might be a bit of movement but it should feel more secure than when you just engage Park on the transmission.

 

Perhaps i have a habit of not pressing the handbrake hard enough. I actually dont use the imperial system where i live so saying a few inches might be faulty. Id say like it feels the car moves more or less a dm.

Thanks for the good info about the transmission. Feels good to know its supposed to work like that. To be sure, there is no damage done to it when the shifter makes this wobble then? I usually try to sneak when i release the brake slowly so that the movement speed is as minor as possible before the transmission locks it.

I recently did the large service and i guess the different brakes are tested in this, but i recieved no feedback of any faults - everything was in order according to the mechanic. Maybe they didnt try the handbrake however.

As you seem to have good knowledge about this type of transmission can i ask you, is it recommended to hold the brake when changing the gear from D to N to R and/or vise versa or can you do these manouvers without engaging the brake pedal at all? given that the car is not moving if changing between D and R ofcourse.

Come to think of it. A whole different question. Ive found the handbrake to be rather strange in this car. So when I stop and just put the car in P and release the footbrake the car moves a few inches before making a stop and the shifter jumps as the wheels stop and i guess the cogs in the transmission causea the car to stay im place. Previously ive only driven manual cars and leaving the car in gear usually makes the car stay in place imidiately. Is the hybrid system causing this small gap and is it working as intended? I hope i explained good enough.

Now the same thing goes with the handbrake. If i stop the car put the transmission in P and press hard on the handbrake located next to the regular brake, the car still moves a few inches, although not as far as the scenario explained previously and the shifter doesnt wobble. Its like there is a gap between the actuall brake effect and the wheels moving. Once ive noticed when opening the door before releasing the footbrake the bottom of the car made a slap noice as the car made a small transfer before coming to a secure stop.

Is this also normal?

10 hours ago, Shada said:

Yes I've removed many air units when replacing heater matrix. And it's nearly always dash out. (had a few avensis out but not lexus) 

But to find the squeaking offender and possibly wd40 it may be visible with the side trims removed. 

Most flap motors we replace (not lexus as they don't usually break) are done with the side trims out sometimes glove box too. (usually vw) 

Okay. I guess its worth a shot. Ill try to find a manual on how to disasemble the side panels and glove box and see if the doodad is reachable. I havnt actually looked how the footwells surroundings look like, maybe this is an easy process that doesnt require a manual for a newbie.

12 hours ago, 200h said:

i believe the whole dash had to be removed from the car

if you think about it the face air vents are at the top ot the ventillation unit

and the floor vents are at the height of the drive shaft tunnel

so overall its a big unit to take out , you also have to depressurise the aircon

system aswell .

If this is the case its a no go. As wharf claims the issue wont neccessarily become worse the present state is absolutly livable. As i dont have warranty left i would bet this is an expencive repair. 

9 hours ago, 200h said:

i have had the same issue on my last IS300h the ventillation unit was replaced under warranty luckily for me

here is my video of the noise apparently the dealer had never heard it before.

i believe it is a worn pivot point that created the noise

 

What is a pivot point? I googled it but only found a bunch of charts and locations. Nothing car related 😄

7 hours ago, wharfhouse said:

My car (2014 IS 300h with 85,000 miles) makes that noise too - usually on start up first thing but I don't notice it at any other time - but I generally leave my climate control on auto and so don't make any large temperature changes once on the move. The car has always done this since I purchased it (at 2 years old with 40,000 miles on it) and so I just assumed it was one of the air con flaps going through a full opening when I first start the car so didn't give it any more thought. The noise hasn't got worse in the 3+ years and 45,000 miles I have had the car. 

Thats atleast a bit soothing. Was/is it always in the morning when you first start the car or have you had any other issues? 

19 hours ago, Shada said:

OK I hadn't seen the video before I first posted but now I have it definitely looks as if the heat/cold flap is the culprit. 

It's likely you will have to remove the side trims from the front of the centre console and look at the flaps behind the dash while someone else adjusts the temperature 

Do you know if this is an easy process or do i have to unscrew a whole lot of stuff to get in?

10 hours ago, chris1601 said:

That sounds like a flap in the ventilation matrix moving to adjust air between different vents. Probably just needs a little lube of some sort on what I imagine are rubber seals. I might be wrong though.

Do you have any experience or idea of how this doodad could be reached and checked/lubed?

9 hours ago, chris1601 said:

That sounds like a flap in the ventilation matrix moving to adjust air between different vents. Probably just needs a little lube of some sort on what I imagine are rubber seals. I might be wrong though.

Yeah sort of what i suspect. I have done a few car diy repairs before but as im far from an expert i would really like to get a bigger idea of what im supposed to do or look for. One of the major issues is that the sound both is rare and just lasts for a few secounds so even if i could open up some hatch iex by the cabindrawer i would have a hard time finding the problems.

Worth noting is the day i shot the video is the day this problem have been at its worst. Normally its just when i start the car and very rarely during ride. 

I usually run auto mode on the AC. Maybe i should stop doing this and try a few different settings each week to see if i can zone out if a particular setting is a factor.

9 minutes ago, Shada said:

You sure it's not the brake booster? Press the brake pedal 5 or 6 times and see if the noise repeats. 

Positive. As you can see in the video the noise appears deppendent on my AC inputs. The brake was not touched while filming. 

Thank you both for your replies!

Hello fellow Lexus owners.

I have owned my -15 Is300H for over half a year now and I am really satisfied and amazed over the complete packade that this car delivers. However I have noticed an issue that ive narrowed down to the AC of the car.

The sound is sort of rare and when heard only last for a couple of seconds. Sounds like the creak made when you sit down in an old leather sofa or like you let out a deep fart. Like 1 out of 4 times when i turn on the ignition (and the ac turns on) the sound is triggered. Occasionally this can also be heard when changing the AC temp between ca 19-21 C. Ill link a video showing the sound at its worst. Note that i normally can change the AC settings while the car is running without this noice - its occasional and rare and occurs more often as explained in the beginning - when i start the car first time in the day.

Now im not very car mech savvy so my guess could be completly wrong but i would think this could be some kind of servo or vent motor that is scratching against something or maybe needs lubricant?

Anyway. I hope someone can help me. I fear that even though the issue seems to be minor it could get worse im the future if i dont do anything about it. Ive tried to find answers and help but failed so far. Hopefully someone eöse have had this issue and has better knowledge 🙂

Video: https://youtu.be/J2wBfiLe2OI