Rabbers

Flush-fitting cups without the embossed lit-ciggy symbol would certainly look better, though personally I would prefer not to pay £80 and keep the two empty holes. If you really want, you can fill the holes with your own choice of some very nice designer travel mugs at maybe half the price or less.

Further to my OP and maybe also Zayd's, I have been having a small but irritating issue. My Bluetooth functions are set as PHONE CONNECTED/AUDIO PLAYER DISCONNECTED for the iPhone and, correspondingly, PHONE DISCONNECTED/AUDIO PLAYER CONNECTED for the iPod. Although these settings are obeyed by the system, both the phone and the audio player cease functioning whenever the local phone signal disappears and then start functioning again, with a slight delay in the case of the audio player, when the signal comes back. Does this mean that the two devices do not function independently of each other?

Last week my iPod Classic 160GB suddenly died on me, and after several attempts to revive it, its death was finally officially certified by an Apple dealer. Having debated with myself about meeting the asking price for an iPhone 6 128GB, which is capable of incorporating all the functions of a high-capacity iPod and would therefore have met my requirements in a single device, which would have been nice, I decided to stick with my puny but adequate iPhone 4s and buy a newly-launched iPod Touch 128GB (this capacity available only direct from Apple) for about half the price. So, once I had filled the new iPod with about 112GB of Music etc., and looking forward to using the BlueTooth function not available on the Classic, but dreading possible problems with the 300h's sound system, not only with regard to connectivity but also to a long wait while the system fully "digested" the large amount of data as occurred when I originally connected the Classic via USB, I nervously settled into my seat and went through the motions of connecting the new device to the system. To my amazement and delight, the connection was instantaneous, stable and error-free, and complete with original album or other Apple-supplied artwork. Like a child with a new toy, I scrolled up and down the 9500+ songs in the iPod arbitrarily stopping and starting here and there and fiddling with the settings etc., and not once did the system fail me. Whether this is due to the goodness of the 6th Generation iPod Touch and/or its use of the latest BT (Version 4.1), I don't know. What I do know is that the Lexus sound system handles it very well indeed (having read criticisms on this Forum I have never seen fit to update the firmware beyond "D"), so much so that it is at long last a pleasure to submit a post in praise of it.

Steve: I hope you're still enjoying your holiday despite the high temperatures. Based on twelve years' experience of driving across fair-sized chunks of Europe, mainly I, F and D, I agree that you can go for thousands of km and several weeks without clapping eyes on another Lexus. And even today, whenever I spot one, my reaction is still one of mild surprise. From time to time you might get a friendly wave or a flash of headlights from another equally surprised owner, and you are expected to reciprocate as a member of the same select community. Not surprisingly, because they live in the Land of the Big Three and therefore feel especially lonely and proud, the most frequent wavers and flashers are, in my experience, German. Of course, the rarity of sightings is not all that strange if you keep some broad statistics in mind. Lexus' total European sales since 2005 , excluding the U.K., have barely exceeded 200,000 units (against 100,000 in the U.K.), and even if we assume for argument's sake that all of these cars are still on the road (thus giving them a longer life than the 8-9 years' European average), this represents only 0.12% of all cars currently registered in Western Europe. In other words it is not likely that you are going to see more than one Lexus for every 1000 cars that cross your path.

DAB reception wherever I have driven the 300h (I, CH, A, F, D, B, NL, DK) has been excellent and I cannot imagine that it would not be just as good in the U.K. I have experienced momentary weakening of the signal because of interference, and, very occasionally, the system automatically substitutes a station with another with a stronger signal, but this only happens on long-distance drives - and sometimes with disconcerting suddenness - when signals nationally or regionally overlap. I was a little worried about DAB reception when I bought the 300h because, at that precise time, I was having issues at home with a Ruark (then known as Vita) R4i audio system, reputedly a premium item, which depends on a strong DAB signal to automatically regulate various timing and tuning functions and had previously been working beautifully. To cut a long story short, after a number of unhelpful suggestions from the importer and the U.K. parent company over a period of several months, the issues resolved themselves as quickly as they had appeared when a huge crane on a building-site about 3km from my home was dismantled and removed. The strange thing was that while the crane had been interfering with my signal, as confirmed by another radio in the house, reception in the 300h sitting outside the house was unaffected. Admittedly I am no technician, but I take this to mean that the aerial in the 300h must be a good one.

I think Tony is right. When you delete messages from your phone (mine is an iPhone 4s), they will (or should) also be deleted in-car simultaneously with the next connection and therefore no longer appear.

I thought all 300h's regardless of trim come with carpet mats as standard, and unless you get the dealer to throw them into the deal, you have to pay for a set of rubber ones. Going back to the subject of a depression developing in the driver's mat because of the absence of a heel-guard, the problem can be mitigated or delayed if, by way of reinforcement, you glue a square of thin rubber or carpeting on the reverse side of the mat in the position where a guard would be on the upper. I forgot to do this when I took delivery of the car and will therefore be needing a replacement set sooner than I would like.

Tony: I'm afraid Lexus have us over a barrel with the price of their cloth mats, their only virtue being a proper fit. I find them rather thin, and their quality is not great considering the tendency of the driver's one to quickly develop a sizeable depression where your heel swivels between pedals.

It could be argued that bird droppings (and dirty catpaw-prints) are God's way of punishing you for the sin of excessive pride in your car, and there is nothing you can do about it. Some neighbours and I have been developing the theory, for which none of us are equipped to seek scientific proof, that some species of birds, mainly pigeons in our case, are likelier to target some colours of cars than others. Of four cars regularly parked in close proximity to each other, mine is white, another is silver, and the two others are dark shades of blue and grey. Regrettably none is red like Geoff's, so this colour would require separate research. Quantity-wise mine is the car that takes less hits, which is not to say I don't get a fair share. The car hit most is the blue one, with the other two coming somewhere in between. These observations have nothing to do with the obvious greater visibility of light-colored droppings on dark paintwork but are based on our readings of frequency and quantity. The imagined aerial view is, of course, the significant factor in this survey insofar as darker colours must present the birds with clearer targets against the almost white gravel surface on which the cars are parked. The implications are pretty sinister inasmuch as they suggest a capability on the part of the bird population to consciously discriminate between targets and strike them with possible malicious or mischievous intent (and, indeed, not fictitiously as in the Hitchcock movie).

Geoff: Having asked my dealer exactly the same question after the 300h had been on the market for about a year, I got a very precise answer: the average age of private customers for the 46 units he had sold or leased up until then was 44.3 years. The area we are talking about is in Northern Italy, mid-to-high income and mainly industrial. Not long afterwards, I mentioned this figure when chatting to a Lexus dealer in the Paris area who said it sounded about right for him too. I wouldn't think the overall European figure inclusive of the U.K. differs much. Another comment was that customers for the 300h tended to be younger than for the rest of the Lexus range but not by so high a margin as to have met the company's promotional aims at launch, which were to extend its traditional aging customer base to lower age-groups, meaning, I would guess, <40.

Rayaan: Looking again at your pictures (externally the car is the twin of mine), I noticed that the top of the rear bumper is fitted with some kind of covering in black. I was previously only aware of the existence of transparent protective film but not of this device. I'm not sure I like the look of it. What do you think?

There is no doubt that you need to test-drive a car before you buy it. What continues to surprise me, though, is just how far ahead the 300h objectively is in respect of any or most of its closest competitors in terms of ride comfort, materials and build quality, good looks and also, in the case of high-spec models, price. All in all, I cannot fault any of Rayaan's conclusions. As a Lexus loyalist, I was already pretty much sold on the 300h on the strength of claims made for it at the pre-launch stage but, before signing on the dotted line, I dutifully tried out some other cars in and around the same price range. These included a Mercedes C250 and a 220d 4Matic, and an Audi A4 3.0tfsi, but even though I would have been happy to own any of them (despite one of the inside door-handles of the Audi coming off in my hand, no doubt a freak occurrence but a worrying one nonetheless), my broad lack of enthusiasm has been consistently confirmed every time I have again driven any of them or others in the same ranges, usually as hire cars. My opinions have less to do with adequacy of performance, by which I mean the cars' ability to get you to your destination as speedily as you might ever desire, than the simple all-round refinement and ease of handling that makes every drive in the 300h something to look forward to. My only concern, which I have so far managed to keep far back in my mind, regards long-term maintenance costs when the mechanicals start going wrong.

Richard: Which part and into what language?

Depends on if OP is referring to s*x or gender - both different things The author of the OP was and remains completely indifferent to any biologically- or behaviourally-based distinctions individual readers may or may not make or semantically or terminologically prefer.

Depends on if OP is referring to s*x or gender - both different things The author of the OP was and remains completely indifferent to any biologically- or behaviourally-based distinctions individual readers may or may not make or semantically or terminologically prefer.

That's possibly the most chauvinistic post I've ever seen... But to kind of answer your question, I've changed three IS300h windscreens, and two of those were owned by women. Strange. I thought I'd chosen my words sufficiently well not to appear chauvinistic, my intention having been to encourage any lady 300h owners, whom I suspect are few and far between, to post their thoughts and comments. Replies so far have not shed much light on what remains something of a gender-specific mystery, although some food for thought is provided by the reported existence of at least one wife of independent mind and high intelligence who believes that car forums are a waste of time.

There are occasional mentions in this Forum of wives driving a 300h, and, perhaps wrongly, I imagine that in many cases they are permitted to do so only by courtesy of their somewhat unenthusiastic husbands or when circumstances might require it, which usually means as little as possible. Since LOC Forums are gender-anonymous, there is no real way of knowing whether a post was written by a woman, but even so, it has never once crossed my mind that any could have been. Surely there must be ladies out there, married or single, who, for good and sound reasons, have bought a 300h or had it bought for them, it matters not, and are perfectly capable of forming and airing their opinions. But if so, why don't they?

In some previous posts (see Tank Range, started 8 February 2015) I described a self- motivational game I like to play whereby, after filling up, I try to get the combined Range and Trip distances up to the nice round target figure of 1000km (=620miles), or better, and then stick to it. Success means that when the low-fuel warning next comes on, real consumption will have been 18km/l (=51mpg) at worst, and, of course, there will still be something like 10 litres (=2.2 gals) left in the tank. Considering that this was at least twice the range/half the consumption to which the two 250s I previously owned had accustomed me and 5-10% better than I was getting with the 300h itself, I was naturally very pleased with myself when I first achieved the target, all the more so because any appreciable impact on my style of driving and enjoyment of the car was limited to early in the game when I was obliged to seriously moderate my speed in order to bring the displayed Range+Trip figure up from the 920km (=570 miles) I had hitherto been averaging. Since then I have bettered the target for eight consecutive tankfuls and even touched 1080km (=670 miles) on one occasion. Consequently, my displayed range after filling up has stabilized comfortably above the 1000km mark, and this can only mean that whatever changes I adopted in respect of my original style and behaviour at the wheel have to all intents and purposes become second nature. And while it occasionally crosses my mind that I could maybe try and raise the target to 1100km (=685 miles), I feel no great compulsion to do so. I am, in other words, finally content to rest on my laurels, self-awarded though these may be. I wish I could draw any single lesson from this experience that I could pass on to anybody who suspects, as I originally did, that they are not adequately exploiting the 300h's potential as a remarkably economic drive as well as the extraordinarily pleasurable one they already know it to be. All I can say is that the 1000km game has made me acquire a measure of self-discipline sufficient to allow me to do a number of small things and observe a few rules which in their totality have clearly paid off: instead, for example, of habitually exceeding speed limits by, say, 15-20%, I now tend to exceed them by only 10%; and instead of slowing down and/or braking 50m before a light or junction, I now do so at maybe double that distance; and, if I was once wont to race away from lights, I now immediately kick myself on the increasingly rare occasions when I do. Essentially, I have taught myself to let the 300h do all the work in any given situation and at whatever pace familiarity and experience tells me is consistent with the car's relaxed but far from sedate character.

Ross: Clearly, there are sinister forces at work in your neighbourhood . Maybe it's time to call in an exorcist ....

Richard: You are absolutely right. This topic, like many car-related ones, is of the sort that often falls prey to eristic argument, the wish to have the last word being its own reward even at the risk of inconclusiveness and probable OT deviation. This, in some cultures, is part of a long and noble debating tradition and has been described by the philosopher/economist Amartya Sen in his The Argumentative Indian, 2005. Less nobly, its supreme exponent in car-related debate is (or was) Clarkson when closing his dialogues with Hammond & May.

I prefer Citalopram ??. So do I ....Before :megaangry: and After

In this time of declining standards, the wish to park "properly" is a good thing and a matter of pride. The problem is whether it is possible to reconcile this attitude with the need to protect yourself from the increasing number of fellow drivers who do not share it. Certainly, parking at an angle is a viable protective stratagem when spaces are unmarked since any new neighbour will almost certainly duplicate your angle and keep an acceptable distance. To hog more room than you are entitled to when parking in marked spaces, perhaps straddling two of them, might, apart from other considerations, not discourage prospectively unwelcome neighbours but have the effect of inviting them to teach you a lesson by getting stupidly close to your outer extremities thus forcing you to wriggle around when you come to drive off. Or such has been my own experience on some of the few occasions when I have been tempted to occupy more space than I should. All in all, I believe vertical parking to be generally a bit safer than parking parallel to the kerb. In this latter case, apart from needing to watch out for the kerb itself, you have no control whatsoever over who or what you may find behind and/or in front of you or how close they were to your gleaming paintwork when they arrived. Nobody said anything about straddling lines? I did, having noticed that a lot of people do, and, to my shame, have occasionally done myself. Im just saying - what is the need for parking perfectly straight in a parking space? The main point about parking straight is that it reflects a desire for tidiness and orderliness that I personally consider praiseworthy, not least because fewer and fewer people appear to share it. Also, car-parks and parking areas have parallel lines painted on the ground not only so that you should stay within them but also so they can help you to position the car straight. But does it really matter if you park straight or not as long as you're in the lines? Literally speaking, of course not. Nothing bad is likely to happen if you don't. Still, some would argue that a conscious and habitual unwillingness to park straight when you are formally encouraged to do so by the presence of parallel lines may be symptomatic of a mild form of sociopathy.

Adrian: In actual fact the central of my three dashboard speakers has a slightly raised fin-like fold presumably designed to indicate the centre of the bonnet, but whether it is present only in models with ML audio I don't know.

In this time of declining standards, the wish to park "properly" is a good thing and a matter of pride. The problem is whether it is possible to reconcile this attitude with the need to protect yourself from the increasing number of fellow drivers who do not share it. Certainly, parking at an angle is a viable protective stratagem when spaces are unmarked since any new neighbour will almost certainly duplicate your angle and keep an acceptable distance. To hog more room than you are entitled to when parking in marked spaces, perhaps straddling two of them, might, apart from other considerations, not discourage prospectively unwelcome neighbours but have the effect of inviting them to teach you a lesson by getting stupidly close to your outer extremities thus forcing you to wriggle around when you come to drive off. Or such has been my own experience on some of the few occasions when I have been tempted to occupy more space than I should. All in all, I believe vertical parking to be generally a bit safer than parking parallel to the kerb. In this latter case, apart from needing to watch out for the kerb itself, you have no control whatsoever over who or what you may find behind and/or in front of you or how close they were to your gleaming paintwork when they arrived. Nobody said anything about straddling lines? I did, having noticed that a lot of people do, and, to my shame, have occasionally done myself. Im just saying - what is the need for parking perfectly straight in a parking space? The main point about parking straight is that it reflects a desire for tidiness and orderliness that I personally consider praiseworthy, not least because fewer and fewer people appear to share it. Also, car-parks and parking areas have parallel lines painted on the ground not only so that you should stay within them but also so they can help you to position the car straight.

In this time of declining standards, the wish to park "properly" is a good thing and a matter of pride. The problem is whether it is possible to reconcile this attitude with the need to protect yourself from the increasing number of fellow drivers who do not share it. Certainly, parking at an angle is a viable protective stratagem when spaces are unmarked since any new neighbour will almost certainly duplicate your angle and keep an acceptable distance. To hog more room than you are entitled to when parking in marked spaces, perhaps straddling two of them, might, apart from other considerations, not discourage prospectively unwelcome neighbours but have the effect of inviting them to teach you a lesson by getting stupidly close to your outer extremities thus forcing you to wriggle around when you come to drive off. Or such has been my own experience on some of the few occasions when I have been tempted to occupy more space than I should. All in all, I believe vertical parking to be generally a bit safer than parking parallel to the kerb. In this latter case, apart from needing to watch out for the kerb itself, you have no control whatsoever over who or what you may find behind and/or in front of you or how close they were to your gleaming paintwork when they arrived.