donkmeister

Thanks for that - I can see they allow generic cables vs the Mongoose / Fap-off one so I'll investigate that and when the time comes dust off my old laptop.

Thanks all. Any reports of people "breaking" anything with a non-genuine jobby? In case that sounds paranoid, I've done that on another car! Once upon a time I had a Vauxhall and there was a spate of cloned diagnostic tools bricking modules due to corrupt files (I broke my stereo, the chap who fixed it had seen people make their cars completely undriveable).

From what I can see on the EPC (and backed up by Amayama), 28800-31500 is the correct battery, so none of those would be correct. Toyota and Lexus OEM batteries are actually labelled as Toyota and carry a Toyota part number regardless of who made them - looks like yours is branded Yuasa. A fine battery manufacturer, but not OEM if it doesn't carry a Toyota part number. If nothing else, asking the dealer for a price (assuming you don't want to do the long drive) you can at least ask for the correct part number and details. ETA speaking of using AGM batteries for anything but cranking, and noting you are a Kiwi and therefore a shed owner and handy (am I wrong? 😁) I used an old 110Ah AGM battery from a Merc, in combination with a small solar panel and controller, to rig up 12V power for lighting in my old shed. Even got a load of 12V tools and accessories like soldering iron, shopvac, USB charger and so on. Lasted years until I got a new workshop and didn't transfer it over.

I've actually found Lexus and Toyota main dealers decently priced for batteries. 28800-31500 is the OEM part number for the LS500h but it isn't showing as available on Amayama (delivery cost of a battery from Japan could be interesting!). Definitely worth a call to your nearest dealership.

Does anyone rent out genuine Techstream? I have Carista, but want to do a full brake flush this summer. I replaced the rear calipers on my LS460 a couple of years ago and the bleeding was a mare as I was having to clear fault codes with every squirt.

I am planning to rent a few hours on a two post lift to do some jobs on one of my other cars. Whilst there I thought I would change the oil on the LS460... Not strictly a ramp job but I've never been a fan of clambering under cars despite never dropping one. Whilst there I thought I would have a good poke about the brakes, steering and suspension to see if anything looks like it should be renewed in the near future. What other jobs would you do whilst you have an LS460 in the air?

For comparison, I averaged 34MPG in the 460 last week on a 120mile run from the south coast. Bit of slow driving through the New Forest and A-roads, motorway cruising between an indicated 80-90 (kph, of course 😜) when conditions allowed, stuck in traffic at various times (M27, M3 and M25). The car was loaded to the gunwales, 3 people in the car, ac blasting as it was 31 degrees, fridge full of cold drinks and bum-coolers doing their business. Not bad for an almost 400bhp, 2 tonne car. (Although a bit more boot space might have been useful!)

Sorry for late response. No idea about the codes I'm afraid, the original remote was still with the car when I bought it.

Be aware that ultrasonic deterrents are not truly ultrasonic... My parents had one that they couldn't hear, but was very unpleasant, nay maddening, to younger ears to the point that I opened it and chopped the power lines out before reassembling. It also drove dogs mental when they walked past, which confused elderly owners who couldn't hear the screech.

Hiya, I've found that eBay is best for items like this, from breakers. With our cars being uncommon you may need to order from overseas. However, if it's any comfort I've ordered parts from Japan, the continent and the US for my Lexus and never had anything go missing. I'd strongly advise checking the part no on the old one and matching this before buying, to avoid the heartache of ordering an incompatible part. In my experience of non-lexus cars, the mirror glass is attached by a little leaf spring that latches over some lugs. You need to get a small thin screwdriver or trim removal tool to flip it up to remove the old glass, then detach an electrical connector or connectors. If you are very lucky you may find "new old stock", but it won't be cheap. I paid £300 for a heated electrochromatic glass for my Merc, for a car that had been out of production for about 8 years. It came from Lithuania, despite being RHD specific.

You can easily check if it has SBC - the pump actually has SBC on the casting, and there's a little pressure sphere (like an old Citroen hydropneumatic sphere) with a warning label ("this has got loads of pressure inside, just don't muck about with it" IIRC) attached. Front driver's side of the engine bay. The SBC Stop mode is a one pedal drive mode that is pretty cool. SBC Hold is essentially the same as Hold on the LS.

I've found eBay a god send for this sort of thing - I've even ordered parts directly from Japanese sellers and the cost/shipping time was better than I expected. I have a vague recollection of engine bay plastic parts for my LS arriving in less than a week.

Which bodystyle is your E-Class? I always thought the E-Class wagon with one of the V8 options was close to perfect as a do-all car. Much as I love my LS460 the boot is smaller than what I really would like... Fortunately I have another car for load lugging but it's not a luxurious V8 waftmobile. Noting that your new Merc is a 2010, thankfully by this point they had dropped the SBC braking system! It's a great system, but as it was new tech and longevity was unclear Bosch took the (understandably) risk averse step of building in a pre-defined life. When I had my pump replaced the quotes varied from £1500 at a good Indy up to £3000 at the dealership. They're good cars, the E-Class of that era - I think they get a lot of flack because of the 90s quality issues and the Daimler-Chrysler merge but TBH that seemed to be more about Chrysler benefiting from Mercedes tech than Mercs being rebadged Chryslers.

Frustrating though it is, sometimes you have to concede these jobs to physical maladies; I have an old back injury that meant I struggled to do much in the way of DIY for a few years (doing wheel bearings would have crippled me for a couple of weeks after). Remember, you're helping to keep someone in a job!

Anything can be retrofitted if you can source the parts and code it in. However, retrofitting power tailgates (to any car, not just Lexus) involves quite a few parts that are different to the non-powered version plus a lot of dismantling and reassembly of the car. What that actual cost would be for your car... One way to work it out is to do a side by side comparison of the EPC to work out which parts are different, you can get the parts costs from a lexus parts desk or your online auction site of choice. Once you add in a couple of days labour for retrofit you may find it more cost effective to trade in against a car with power tailgate from the factory.

Today I replaced an entire front door on my LS460. Recently Mrs D had a bollard run into the side of the car when she was in a supermarket car park... She took it to a well-respected bodyshop nearby who (being a well-respected bodyshop) couldn't fit it in for 3 months, and couldn't give a full quote due to not being able to get Lexus to quote for a door. So, with a quote for several £k plus an unknown amount for the parts, I went on eBay and found a breaker had a door in the right colour for under £200. Yes, it will be only 99% the right colour when I look at it in certain light, if I find it noticeable I'll have it blown over to match. It took me about 8 hours to strip the old door, remove it from the car, refit the new door and get everything back together. The biggest ball-ache was the exterior door handle and lock/softclose actuator... That seems to be a common issue with cars I've worked on, so may be down to my sausage fingers. The door itself is lighter than I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't about to start juggling with it, but I was surprised that I could hold it with one hand while getting the bolts in from the hinges with the other. One interesting detail was that there are small plastic structures bolted to the door that appear to be there to prevent resonance... At first I was looking for the cables to detach as they looked like electronics units!

How many degrees do you have, that despite being an engineer, you cannot count them? 😜 The problem (for me) is twofold: firstly, some people point at The Environment as a reason for doing something when the reality is that particular thing won't really help. Secondly, people seeing that sort of thing and declaring "well, if that one bit is hogwash then it is ALL hogwash". You need to look at each thing on its own merits. Manmade climate change is there. We know what we've been burning since the Industrial Revolution, we can predict what the likely effects are on the climate and have been doing so for decades, and there has been a measurable change. However, slowing the motorway down past a massively polluting steelworks is ****** in the wind (although I suspect that particular one is more to do with local air quality. Still ****** in the wind though!) Some idiot coming up with that as an idea, or putting a buslane on the M4 etc does not invalidate the fact that man-made climate change has been happening and will continue to happen so long as mankind carries on with the current set of industrial processes. Climate science throws up some interesting stuff from time to time; I remember reading a paper demonstrating an increase in lead levels in Arctic ice due to a sudden increase in silver mining across Europe (particularly in the British Isles) in the middle ages. It's not just grumpy people telling you you aren't allowed a V8 anymore.

Hi Ross - as it's been a week and no-one has come back with a precise answer, the rule of thumb used by hyper-milers (for obvious reasons they like to compare the total drag of cars) was to multiply the width without mirrors by the height, by 0.85. This takes into account that cars are not square, but cant inwards top and bottom, plus have air (albeit turbulent air) underneath. So, width of an LS460 without mirrors is 1.875m, height is 1.465m. Therefore frontal area would be ~2.33 square metres, and CdA is ~0.61 square metres. Obviously not precise numbers, but close enough for most things. What's the plan then; working out how much power you would need to crack 200mph? 😀

Update: I fitted a Blue Music adapter today (thanks @BigBoomer for the steer!). I went for SKU 2720, which is the version without telephony as the LS460 already has handsfree built-in. I also needed the Y-cable (see screenshot for the items I used.) Fitting was surprisingly straightforward - I didn't take pictures as there are already quite a few YouTube videos showing how to remove the LS460 head unit however, the basic process is: unclip then slide the trim pieces either side of the trans tunnel out of the way unclip the piece of trim between the gear selector panel and the armrest unscrew the gear selector use a socket to undo two 10mm hex screws on the driver's side of the trans tunnel (recessed) unclip and lift the gear selector panel, then carefully lay it down (I didn't bother disconnecting the wiring) unclip and lift out the ashtray (again, I didn't bother disconnecting the wiring) undo a 10mm hex screw on each side of the head unit (these are hidden and must be accessed from underneath... and removing/replacing these was the fiddliest part of the job) use a trim tool to lever out the head unit use the Y-cable to connect the bluetooth adapter check it works try 3-4, maybe 5 times to get the cables into a position where you can slide the head-unit back in, then reassemble the trim around it. Total time: 30 minutes. Seriously, I'm impressed at how the interior goes together. Not a single broken clip either. Total cost: €47.23 delivered ( £41.51 at today's exchange rate). Sound quality... the Blue Music adapter, like Grom and VAIS, doesn't do APT-X of any flavour, nor LDAC. So, you get "standard" bluetooth audio. Whilst I would have preferred a higher-quality codec, it's perfectly fine once you are on the move - even in an LS460 there's enough wind and road noise to mean that you probably wouldn't hear any benefit of such a codec. Functionality: it shows up as CD Changer 2 automatically (no configuration required). The track forward and back buttons work on both dash and wheel. The track names don't show up on the screen however that may be a limitation of the audio player on my phone (I use Plex to stream from my home server and didn't think to try anything else). Any foibles: none identified as yet. The volume of the adapter seems to be the same as that of the radio and CD player, so you shouldn't find that one input is exceptionally loud or quiet (this is a detail that is missed by quite a few aux adapter makers!)

Yes, I was surprised at how little trans fluid comes out when the engine is off - it only pumps it round when the engine is spinning the transmission. The amount lost is not enough to warrant an ATF change as it's within the "margin of error" for trans fluid capacity. What I DID do after disconnecting each pipe was to immediately cover each pipe with a rubber glove held on with a rubber band to ensure no grit or grot got into the system.

I did the rad on mine - it was a surprisingly straight forward job as I had very little in the way of corroded fasteners (the only one was a screw holding the rad to the a/c condensor at the bottom). I replaced the water pump, hoses and ATF cooler lines at the same time, and Toyota even helpfully explain the fill/bleed procedure on a sticker (on the header tank IIRC). Even with fiddly clips it was a summer Saturday's effort. Lexus quoted me £1k for the labour alone, hence the interest in doing it myself. If I were you, as a first step I'd refill the coolant then run the engine whilst watching to see where coolant/steam appears from. If it turns out you've just got a split hose or leaky rad then you'll spot that fairly easily. It's not impossible to have more than one leak at a time, but as you would need to fix them all anyway you may as well do the easier/cheaper ones first! Also there is a YouTuber called Car Care Nut (who is a Toyota / Lexus mechanic of many years standing) has done a few videos on the LS460 when he has had them in his shop for various leaks... Suggest you look up his LS460 videos and see if you can correlate anything he shows with what you are seeing. I'll warn you in advance that he doesn't seem to rate the reliability of the LS460, don't take it personally 😁

I replaced the rear calipers, discs and pads on the LS460 late last year (which was fun as I was recovering from COVID... Had to take a lie down on the drive a few times!) I was impressed with the OEM set-up. The standard rear discs had details such as being left and right-handed, with the vanes between the two surfaces curved to ensure airflow through the disc. Obviously the person who had last been in there had them back to front (confirmed by part number and the big "L" and "R" on the castings). The quality of the machining on the disc face was better than any other I've seen. The only downer was that bleeding through is a pain in the backside as you need to go through the rigmarole of resetting codes every time the pump realises it's losing pressure (I don't have a Toyota-specific scantool), but Lexus are far from the only manufacturer to do fancy brakes that get in a hissy without dealer tools or awkward workarounds (Mercedes, I'm looking at you). So, OP, £140 for fitting AND a fluid flush sounds like a very good deal indeed. Also the brake fluid spec is DOT3... Which I think is what Fred Flinstone was using in his brakes. But, fortunately DOT4 is fully compatible (I've genuinely never seen a bottle of DOT3 in 20+ years of spannering modern-ish cars)

I'd be interested to see what you think of it after you've used it a while. I used to have a Mercedes E500 and the American owners saw the "Sprint Booster" (same type of device) as a must-have mod, I presumed they had sloppier throttle mapping for their market as the UK ones were pretty nippy. Given the LS460 seems to communicate throttle inputs via telegram I can imagine the SC430 may have similarly "relaxed" response out of the box (i.e. quite quick once the engine wakes up, but you have to wait for it to read the "full power if you would be so kind" message, put down its tea and then open the throttle.) Does it have any modes besides altering the throttle pedal response? E.g. a speed limiter

Has anyone added any circuits to the blank slots/ways in any of the LS460 fuseboxes? I have done this on other cars in the past to avoid using fuse-taps, but for the LS460 the fused power goes out through multiway connectors and I've not been able to find info on which slots are connected to which pins (nor what pins I'd need to buy to populate the blank parts of the connectors). I'd rather avoid having to buy a set of used fuseboxes on eBay to test! Specifically I'm interested in the boot fusebox and either of the passenger compartment ones. It's not to add anything particularly exciting (towbar wiring and a dashcam) but it saves having to piggyback off something else or having to leave the fusebox cover off for a fuse-tap.

Brilliant video demo, thanks!