re - driving through water

[barry mason]

My thanks to everyone who took the time to post .   Sadly the insurance company have declined to cover the damage.  The car did come with a full service history from Lexus Hatfield.  However my local excellent garage, Holbrook in Bisley , Stroud did find , after its first MOT after I purchased the car, that it was actually missing an anti- roll bar bracket.. (They replaced the rubber bush itself, but found that the metal clamp that holds it in place was either missing or was never fitted!   If a Lexus main dealer engineer can miss something as obvious as this, may be they didn't change the transmission oil either - resulting in my £6,000 bill ..  I will be asking Lexus Hatfield to check their service records, as from everything I've learned so far, a mechanical breakdown of this sort is extremely rare, and that it was just co-incidental that it failed just after driving through the water... !?!?!? 

[olliesgrandad]

Barry,

All the service records for your car should be available via the Lexus Link phone app. It should tell you all the repairs that a Lexus Dealer has performed. If you've not used it before you will Need your V5c to hand. 

Regards Les 

[Passerby]

The only link I can magine is that driving through the water caused a rapid cooling of the diff casing and diff oil which (somehow) exacerbated a problem that was already brewing.

[stringbender]

I've always wondered how you'd cope if you had to drive through a flood in a hybrid. Years ago ( when the Golf Mk4 came out ) I had to do just that. I was able to slip the clutch and keep the revs. high and I got through - Just !  About 6 cars died there that day. You can't control the engine like that in a hybrid so if the engine cuts out and water is sucked back in then isn't that the end of your car ?

Alan

[Zotto]

Huh? In a hybrid yon can cross flood in EV mode, engine off.

[Passerby]

7 hours ago, stringbender said:

I've always wondered how you'd cope if you had to drive through a flood in a hybrid. Years ago ( when the Golf Mk4 came out ) I had to do just that. I was able to slip the clutch and keep the revs. high and I got through - Just !  About 6 cars died there that day. You can't control the engine like that in a hybrid so if the engine cuts out and water is sucked back in then isn't that the end of your car ?

Alan

Water in the electrics can be an issue, cant see keeping the revs high will help. The guidance for land rovers is to create a bow wave which helps to keep the level lower inside the engine bay; something similar but at a lower level might be viable for a Lexus but I would prefer to try it out in someone else's car. The one thing you don't want to happen is for water to be drawn into the air intake and hydraulically lock a piston.. bent or broken con rods and other pain results, probably a new engine. Most likely to happen when the engine is running, can't easily see how slipping the clutch and keeping the revs high will avoid that, just encourage a more spectacular failure.

[stringbender]

10 hours ago, Passerby said:

 can't easily see how slipping the clutch and keeping the revs high will avoid that, just encourage a more spectacular failure.

The cars that didn't get through were all scrapped. I always thought that if the engine stopped and the exhaust pipe was submerged then water would be sucked back into the combustion chambers.  I got through OK. I'd be scared to death to drive through deep water these days even though I could try EV mode. More often than not the system says EV unavailable as hybrid Battery is low. I rarely bother using it.

Alan

[m4rkw]

It's not a good idea to drive through high water in any car. A car coming the opposite way can create a wake and drive water over the engine. A few drops in the transmission vent pipe and it's game over.