Hello fellow lexus owners. Ive just bought myself a 2nd hand IS200 S from a car supermarket (availablecar.com). The advantage was that the price seemed OK - £9500 (exactly 3 years old with 47K on the clock and no service history) :D . The disadvantage was that the car was not serviced (appart from oil and filter change) before passing it on to me, they don't like to bargain, and Ive only got a 1 month warenty .
Once I bought it, I took it down to Lexus Nottingham, who did a visual safety check free of charge - thanks Lexus :zee: . I took the list of faults (including leaking water pump) back to availablecar, who have booked the car back in to be fixed.
Even with these fixes, my baby still needs a 40K service. The prices Lexus gave me was £340 - even with a 10% LOC gold card discount, that over £300. Given that my car has no service history, getting it serviced by Lexus at this point is not going to increase its resale value this late on, so £300 sounds a bit steep.
I thought about taking it to the local toyota garage - after all a Lexus mechanically is a toyota. Apparently Lexuses (lexii?) and Toyotas have the same kind of service schedule, 40 K being a big one. They quoted me £255, and offer car pickup/courtesy car like Lexus. Apparently the rate for a lexus engineer is £80/hr, where as toyota cost £60/hr. Also, Lexus use fully synthetic oil, whereas Toyota only use partly synthetic oil, hence the price difference. They said they would get the check list faxed over from Lexus.
(forgot to mention that the toyota price of £255 included the use of fully synthetic oil - they originally quoted £240, but upped the price by £15 to include the lexus oil)
The last alternative would be joe-bloggs garrage down the road. They want about £150 to do the same thing. Obviously no courtesy car involved. They have done a good job for me before, but probably don't do too many Lexuses. Im not worried about how their stamp will look in my log book, just whether they will know how to treat a Lexus right
Who to take it too? I was wondering if any of you out there have had a similar conundrum, and what you decided on.
Cheers
Daniel
