Rabbers

Peter, I'm surprised you've not put the RC fully through its paces before now. I agree with everything you say, particularly as regards the car's marked personality changes according to the selected drive modes. In fact, I'm constantly tempted to switch around according to my own moods. I seem to be getting slightly better fuel economy than you, having averaged 15.5km/l (=approx. 44mpg) over the first 6500km, with a noticeable recent improvement attributable to warmer weather. I am also looking forward to switching back to summer tyres, having been on winters after the first 500km. I have yet to fully assess the car's ability to perform on long motorway drives, though my experience of relatively short ones of 50km or so makes me optimistic. I have a drive of 1600km (of which 1100km autobahn) scheduled for June, and if I will be feeling as fresh and relaxed at the end of it as I used to be in my IS300h I will be more than happy.

Considering that the height of the floor-fixings/depth of the eyelets makes it impossible to secure a second mat on top of the first, assuming both to be Lexus originals, the driver mentioned in the OP has only himself to blame. The ribbing on Lexus rubber mats makes them pretty slip-proof but, in my own experience, you need to momentarily take care if you bring in bits of slush and/or compacted snow and maybe salt when wearing deep-tread soles. Also, the opacity which develops with time and wear in the area of the rubber around the heel might tempt you to apply tyre or plastic dressing in order to bring back the gloss. Some of these dressings, especially cheaper high-gloss ones, can cause slipperiness, at least initially until the effect wears off.

I think you'll find it on the inside of the front door frame of your car on the driver's side.

Maybe they'll offer a good trade-in price if you switch to an LC500! ... !!!

The J.D. Power 2017 Vehicle Dependability Study, just published, has Infiniti second from bottom. Lexus, not unusually, came top with an almost perfect score, albeit in a tie with Porsche.

I saw a Q60 200T only last week in Switzerland similarly displayed in a shopping centre. It looks better in real life than in pictures, and the quality impression is undoubtedly high, but the design is clumsy compared to the RC. As far as I could ascertain from the advertised figures in the absence of a sales person the performance is no better than that of the RC200t. What was impressive, though, was the fact that the car is offered, in Switzerland at least, with a 10-Year warranty.

The improvement in head-light performance that is leading Lexus and other manufacturers to drop front fogs from new models will translate into an automatic enforcement of the rule contained in the highway codes of most (or maybe all) European countries to the effect that front fogs and dipped head-lights should not be used at the same time. This is a good thing, but there are some die-hards, especially in areas where the visibility can sometimes be zero, who would argue that front fogs may not necessarily improve their view of the road but enable their car to be better seen by other motorists and pedestrians.

F-Sport trims are intended to widen Lexus' prospective customer base to include younger age groups. That Lexus persists with the strategy means that it has probably been successful. Aesthetically speaking, I think it is a good strategy for most models in the range, though somewhat ridiculous in the case of the LS600, where the F-Sport version available in some countries looks like an attempt to pass a sumo wrestler off as a sprinter.

The current safety features add up to a generally convincing package. While open to correction, I am unaware of any way to adjust the sensitivity of the Lane Departure Alert (LDA), at least on my 2016 RC. It merely switches off or on. As safety features go, its usefulness is largely limited to stopping you from completely nodding off during long and boring drives and, in my personal experience, to warning you to get back into your lane if a twinge of vertigo has caused you to drift inwards on high bridges or viaducts where the view from your side-window is a huge void. It can also be confused, and you along with it, by the presence of residual lane-markings within provisional ones as, for example, in road-works. Fortunately, being located right under your thumb on the steering-wheel, it is the easiest of all switches to turn off if you so wish. So far, touch wood, I have not needed to test the effectiveness of the Pre-Collision System (PCS). I have, however, been startled by its activation in several high-speed tight-curve situations, usually uphill, where it seems to have interpreted approaching roadside walls and/or guard-rails as obstacles prior to my steering into the curves as per the intended trajectory. It can also be activated when you brake in good time but perhaps a bit over-suddenly upon closing in on a large vehicle turning off the road ahead of you more slowly than anticipated. The Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is a great aid to safety but one whose reliability you need to trust without question, and this may not be easy if you are the sort of person who likes to feel completely in control in all situations whether you are or not. You are, in effect, entrusting the system with the lives of yourself and your passengers, and this can take some getting used to if the thought of a failure lurks - as it certainly must - somewhere in the recesses of your mind. As regards the distance settings, anything more than the single-mark at low-to-normal speeds does indeed invite leap-froggers, and this can be very irritating, but, whatever your speed, the best setting will always be the one you are most comfortable with in the given conditions. My only criticism of the ACC is the slowness of the re-acceleration back to the set or re-set speed after slowing down, which can cause you to lose patience and press on the gas to help it along. The Rear Cross-Traffic Alert (RCTA) is useful when you are reversing out of a space anywhere but just about indispensable in crowded and badly-lit places where, besides cars, it is also usually capable of detecting single pedestrians and cyclists as well as, perhaps most importantly, people pushing prams.

Congratulations on your new IS. Looks great. I too had OEM Turanzas on my IS (now replaced with an RC that came with Dunlop SportMaxxes), and although I have never been fond of any Bridgestones because of a greater tendency than most to get noisy with wear, I was nevertheless impressed by the ability of the 255/35 rear size to offer some protection to the rims against kerbing by virtue of the unusually wide and deep channel in the inner circumference. This channel is narrower in the 225/40 fronts, so remember to be even more careful with these.

I don't know why or how it's supposed to work, but the caller's name shows on the display (usually but not always) only when my iPhone (an ancient 4S model) is connected via one of the USB sockets and not via BT. Failures to show some names might have something to do with how you have entered or arranged them in your directory.

The temptation to try out any of the many superb car detailing products on the market is always great, and the results after using them can be highly enjoyable, especially on a quality car like a Lexus. In fact, to stand back and gaze upon a newly detailed car is one of life's pleasures - visual, tactile and olfactory. However, it could be argued that the temptation to apply "superfluous" chemicals to a car's surfaces is best avoided except in the case of identifiable and strict need. Generally speaking, this need, as far as I'm concerned, starts when a car's shows its first signs of age and loss of factory bloom - e.g. increasingly visible micro-swirls, dulled plastics and rubber, dry leather etc. - and, until these appear, I try, admittedly not always successfully, to make do with simple shampooing outside and mild soapy solutions or just plain water inside. I suppose an appropriate comparison would be between cars and good-looking women who wisely avoid too many cosmetic potions and lotions before the appearance of their first wrinkles.

Having now had mud-guards on the RC for a few weeks, I am, on the whole, pleased with them insofar as they do what they are supposed to do. They mar the car's appearance only slightly while significantly lessening the accumulation of dirt on the rear wings and numberplate area in wet or even slightly damp conditions. Splashes on the door-skirts are also much reduced. The deflection and dispersion of spray away from the car can be seen in the side-mirrors, and is bad news for pedestrians and cyclists. The main negative regards the unavoidable improvement in forward visibility for wet-weather tailgaters who, especially on motorways, now seem encouraged to come even closer.

There is no question about the likelihood that if you park your Lexus in a near-empty car-park you are going to find a car in a neighbouring space on your return. In fact, my wife and I used to have a running bet about this, with me getting a point every time there was a car and she getting a point if there wasn't. We stopped keeping score after I was so far ahead that it was no longer fun. Also, I have noticed that in a full or full-ish car-park, the car replacing one of your original neighbours after you made an effort to find suitably well-kept and undamaged ones is likely to be a semi-wreck or, worse, a semi-wreck with baby- seats.

There is so much specialist information and advice available to us today that it has become difficult to tell if it is accurate or free of vested interests or misleading or misguided or simply wrong. So, unless we make a habit of questioning everything we read, see and hear, which for some of us would quickly lead to mental exhaustion or a permanent state of indecisiveness, we need, whenever in doubt, to set a limit on the economic damage and personal aggravation we would be willing to tolerate after acting on information that might prove wrong even if purveyed by entities who, justly or unjustly, have acquired a guru-like status. To suggest that tyre pressures should be set lower than those recommended by a car's manufacturer is a case in point. In order to find out if the advice is unsound you would need to constantly monitor the outer-tread wear that will normally result from under-inflation and then re-inflate in order to stop further wear before you are forced, hopefully not after a suffering a blowout, into the not inconsiderable expense of buying a new set of tyres. If you are not bothered by the potential expense and risk to yourself and others and possibly your car, you should by all means go ahead and experiment with HJ's advice.

Purely for curiosity's sake, since I am not likely to ever need to find out for myself, is anyone able to report on how Lexus Navigation copes with Welsh-language town- and street-names? I ask because Voice Guidance in any language other than that of the country or region being navigated almost inevitably contains mispronunciations that can be quite amusing but are sometimes so incomprehensible as to make you miss an exit or a turn. Voice Control, I imagine, would be useful only if you can manage to get your tongue around the names sufficiently well to get a serviceable list of prompts, though the absence of Welsh from the system's linguistic repertoire might well mean that any attempt to do so would in any case be a non-starter. This query was prompted by recent posts in the SatNav Map Updates thread which mention, albeit for reasons that presumably have nothing to do with language, unwanted tours around the back streets of Cardiff.

As far as I know, I'm sure you are right about VC improvements and software updates, at least in theory. Personally I have never done an update. However, I recall my dealer doing one, unasked, in my IS300h early in 2014 (I'm afraid I have no record of the version numbers concerned), and I detected no improvement in the VC - or in anything else, for that matter. As regards the VC being worse in an IS, my comparison was not between current models of each but between different generations.

He might be Honest but he can also be Wrong.

On 1/4/2017 at 5:38 PM, NemesisUK said: I was impressed with the Lexus VC, worked 'straight out of the box'... The VC in a 2016 RC300h has been considerably improved in respect of its equivalent in a 2013 IS300h, which, presumably, was an earlier-generation version. Where the latter correctly recognized my commands five or six times out of ten if I was lucky, I now get far more first-time hits than misses irrespective of the application - and despite the fact that my voice is no less croaky or my enunciation any less slovenly. As a result, I find myself appreciating the system more and more having previously almost entirely given up on it. Although I occasionally still used it to command the Navigation to guide me home, any attempts at other more complicated Navigation entries or the Audio and Telephone functions were abandoned long ago because I could feel my blood pressure going through the roof every time I was asked to repeat myself. In short, although I am far from considering the system to be indispensable, I do find it reliable and effective, as well as valuable in helping to avoid distractions otherwise inherent in manually operating the infotainment when the car is in motion. For this latter reason alone, its use should be encouraged.

The contents of the multi-information system are always useful, often indispensable, and can sometimes offer relief from boredom on long drives or when you are stuck in traffic. The AL-TPWS is a good addition, and will impress and edify anybody who, like me, has never previously driven a car that simultaneously shows the pressures of all four tyres, thus providing, at the touch of a button, figures that might not get checked as regularly as they should and whose fluctuations in day-to-day driving would otherwise not be visible. I never before realized, for example, how parking parallel to a high wall, as I do in my garden at home, results in significantly lower pressures in the tyres on the exposed side of the car, where, for the same reason, frost will also tend to be thicker after a cold night. Depending on how cold the night was, I have seen readings as low as 2.2BAR (32psi) front/2.3BAR (33psi) rear, which, in my experience, require you to drive for at least 15km before you can heave a sigh of contentment at the sight of all four tyres re-aligning themselves to the recommended 2.5BAR (36psi)/2.6BAR (38psi), thus allowing you to proceed on your way with the happy feeling that everything is ship-shape and under control. Not that the pressures will necessarily remain constant, since long curves taken at a brisk speed can momentarily raise the pressure of the front tyre corresponding to the direction of the curve by 0.1BAR while a series of tight curves on a winding uphill climb involving frequent braking and/or use of the paddles will sometimes similarly affect one or both pairs of tyres. It will be interesting to see what effects potentially very high ambient and surface temperatures will have on pressures during summer driving, and I suspect these may be quite dramatic - or, depending on how you look at it, quite entertaining. Of course, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on how one should drive and park, the sole practical value of the device being its ability to conveniently identify possible serious deviations from set pressures in specific tyres. What I am saying, before anybody scoffs at the child-like wonder such a device inspires in a non-technical person like me, is that the AL-TPWS, beyond its usefulness in potentially saving your tyres and maybe your bacon, has a role as the provider of yet another bit of entertainment within the car's bag of tricks.

After much tapping and listening and examination under a lens, I have come to the conclusion that "Wedge Metal" is a thin machined- aluminium shell as described in the .kw link provided by Stephen, sandwiched, in order to protect it from dents and scratches between a thick layer of varnish (which detracts from tactile pleasure) and a solid lining, presumably of moulded plastic.

Agreed. I once compared consumption in NORMAL v. SPORT (not SPORT+) modes in my IS300h by noting how far the approx. 56 litres available between filling up and the appearance of the fuel reserve warning took me in each of the two modes at much the same speeds over much the same routes and with no deviations from my habitual driving style. I managed 948km in NORMAL mode and 917km in SPORT, a difference of only 3%. Some time later, I made a similar comparison, albeit on a half-tank-per-mode basis, in a CT F-Sport loaner, and while I don't remember the km totals, the "saving" in NORMAL v. SPORT was also around 3-4%. I haven't made the comparisons in the RC300h, and probably won't unless the purely academic urge to do so again creeps up on me.

Does anyone know what the material Lexus calls "Wedge Metal" for its F-Sport trim in some countries (i.e. mesh-like finish on aluminium) actually consists of. Is it real metal, plasticised or varnished, or is it all-plastic, or is it plastic film on a metal or plastic moulding, or is it something else again?

A graphic and no doubt appropriate analogy but one that gives me the creeps. I hope Lexus sales people don't pick up on it and risk losing business....

So, Peter, having duly mulled over the second couple of pictures of the RC in Titanium, for which my thanks, I have, without further ado, ordered a set of mud-flaps at the price of €220, fitted, which is cheaper than the £250 asked in the U.K. They will probably not be delivered before the end of the month, which means that my RC may well be spending a dirty Christmas but a clean and happy New Year. Again, thank you for your advice.