The Famous ''Throttle Body Mod''... What is Sacrificed?

[Sluggo]

To you who have done this mod to your is200, please tell me about your experiences with this mod.

To fill everyone in, the is200 throttle body is a bit more complex than some other from the same era. This throttle body has two levers on it's side, one for input and one for output. The outermost lever is connected to your acceleration pedal via cable. This is your input, where you tell the car how much you wish to open the butterfly valve. Rotating this lever alone (car turned off) will not affect the valve in any way though. The second lever however, is connected to the valve, but also to an electrical motor. This motor is what decides how much the valve will actually open, and at what rate it will do so. There are videos on youtube showing how the valve opens significantly slower than if you were to, say, floor the pedal to the metal. Accelerating can feel sluggish because of this. To put it shortly, the car decides how much air goes into the engine, not you.

This does allow for some comfy features though. Putting the car in SNOW mode slightly decreases the pedal sensitivity, making it harder to loose grip on slippery surfaces, by decreasing the amount of air going to your six blasty bois. You can test this yourself if you cruise steady speed and engage the SNOW mode, you will feel the car looses a slight of it's power, and then regaining acceleration as you switch it off. 

The traction control is also the throttle body's doing. Besides ABS, if the car senses skidding or irregularly spinning wheels, the throttle body will carefully close, choking the engine and making drifting/doing Kasumi things very difficult, basically killing the throttle until the wheels are stable again. But our lord and saviour Lexus thought of this and blessed us with the TRC OFF. With this mode engaged you can have as much fun as you want skidding and spinning without the little motor having it's own way with you. Allthough, the sluggish opening and closing of the butterfly valve still remains, since the valve can only open as fast as the motor can motor (yes)

Now to the modification, which (as of what I have understood) means that you either tie or weld these two levers together, giving your acceleration pedal, and the input lever, full control of the butterfly valve. Now I imagine this as putting it in permanent ''TRC OFF'' but it's his cooler uncle this time if you know what I'm saying. And having full control must make the car way peppier and more responsive, but I have also thought of what is sacrificed. After all, the motor is responsible for keeping the engine at the steady idle it always has, calculated by temperatures and wether the AC is on or not. The SNOW mode will no longer work but eh, nobody liked it anyway, maybe some nan out there. If you happen to have an automatic, it helps with smooth shifts by slightly closing the valve during shifts. Let's be honest though, if you're looking at this mod you probably don't care about smooth driving anyway! 😝

Been thinking about doing this mod, but I also like the thought of having a car with all it's functions intact. That begs the question for convincing me, are the gains of this mod worth more than the losses? How does the engine keep it's idle after this mod has been done to it? To you who have done this mod to your is200, please tell me about your experiences with this mod. How does your car behave? I would be ever grateful.

Cheers, Jacob