Rabbers

After more than 18 months and 37K km it is vexing as well as a little embarrassing to find myself sometimes needing a second attempt in order to park my 300h perfectly straight without the assistance of the rear-view camera. While not losing too much sleep over this, I was nevertheless relieved to learn from some recent posts (see Parallel Parking) that others may have the same problem. Of course, any issues involving parking are generally likelier to be the fault of the driver than the car, but I sincerely believe this may not be entirely true in the case of the present-generation IS, which, speaking for myself, I find demands greater care in manoeuvring than any other car I have ever driven (excepting a Lamborghini Countach which I surprisingly managed to leave undamaged after its owner let me take it around his private car-park for a nerve- racking couple of minutes). This, I believe, is partly due to the relative absence of straight vertical lines in the driver's forward vision, which makes it difficult to judge the car's centre and therefore its width, but mostly to the design of the door-panels, which, especially when you are aiming to park parallel to a real or imagined line, can deceive you into thinking you have straightened the car when you might actually have been guided by the angle of the tapered sill. When thinking about this, it came to mind that one or two passengers have remarked, as my wife regularly still does, that I often seem to be driving too close to the side of the road. However, on the evidence of my habitual practice of aligning the central headrest with the middle of my lane in the rear-view mirror, this cannot be true. So, ever mindful of the opinions of others, I thought I would spend a day with my long-suffering wife at the wheel and myself as a passenger, and indeed, I did get the quite strong impression that the 300h was not keeping to its lane or was too close to the side. My knuckles were whitest in long shallow curves when I thought, completely erroneously, that the car was going straight and needed to be steered towards centre. Again, as in the aforementioned parking situations, I felt that my impression was based on the tendency of the eye to follow the line of the sill rather than automatically identify and immediately adjust to the car's real directional angle. Before asking whether anybody else has similar issues, I should add that I drink only in moderation, do not take hallucinatory drugs, and regularly have my eyesight tested.

Ever since I have had the 300h I notice that I do not always perfectly align the wheels to parallel lines as I aim to do when driving straight into a marked parking space. The difference between back and front is never big, maybe 10cm at the most and usually greater at the front, but it still occasionally surprises me. Initially I used to attribute this to simple carelessness on my part but, over time, I have come to believe that the sweep of the design of the door panels with its tapering volumes and contrasting colours (ivory/black in my case) has the effect of deflecting the eye slightly away from centre in the course of any parking manoeuvre.

I agree that the vertical-parking camera feature is both easy and reliable. Indeed, I seriously miss its presence in other cars. On the other hand, the parallel-parking feature cumbersomely described (and somewhat alarmingly illustrated) in the owner's manual requires a bit of practice before the sequence becomes second nature, although the dipping mirrors alone are a sufficiently good quick aid to judging kerb distance. I must admit, however, that I try to avoid parallel-parking in tight spaces if I possibly can because I worry that the 300h's low nose could make it difficult for the vehicle in front to keep enough distance if it needs to reverse.

Ross: That's what I call a weird experience! I once used to park in the vicinity of a neighbour's cabbage patch and routinely each morning needed to pick four or five large snails off my car before throwing them back over the fence whence they came, but as far as I ever noticed, they never ventured under the hood. Your post reminded me of this and a cartoon called Turbo I recently saw as an in-flight movie and which, after your experience, you might want to check out. The main character is in fact a snail which dreams of becoming the fastest of its species in the world and which, after accidentally getting inside the motor of a drag racer, acquires miraculous powers of speed. Scripted from the point of view of snails, the plot entails them having to face everyday dangers from traffic, lawnmowers, birds etc., but not being roasted alive inside the hood of a car. Presumably this would have been too disturbing for a kiddy audience!

Geoff (Bluenose1940) and I recently had a brief exchange of thoughts on how to reduce the risk of damage to our cars when parking in public places (see IS300h As Family Car). Any advice on the subject additional to the following would be much appreciated: 1. Whenever possible, park between quality cars and/or preferably ones that are new, clean, and scratch- and dent-free; 2. Don't park next to spaces for the handicapped, occupied or not; 3. Don't park next to vehicles with baby-seats, folding prams, folding wheelchairs, large packages or large dogs in the back; 4. Don't park next to cars with prominent door-protectors, since owners tend not to care about others; 5. In supermarket car-parks choose the outer perimeters where trolleys are unlikely to be wheeled between cars; 6. Whenever possible, prefer spaces with a wall or fence on one side, thus halving chances of damage; 7. Don't park under trees, thus reducing chances of bird droppings, wet vegetation etc.

Rayaan: You are right about the tendency of participants in consumer-satisfaction surveys of premium products, whatever these may be, to vindicate or justify their original purchase decision by means of positive responses. Conversely, customers for lower-priced products tend towards indifference and are less likely to participate in surveys at all.

To be perfectly frank, having owned a 300h since 2013 and having clocked a highly pleasurable 35K km in it, my reaction to surveys and reviews that tell me that the car is a good one and satisfying to own is one of boredom. In fact, I'll go even further and say that, after a brief moment of narcissistic contentment upon reading that I made a good choice when I bought the car, I find such opinions patronising.

I have to agree totally with these comments. They are precisely me. If you could hear my wifes comments when I am parking my car! I am so fussy, even to the point of moving it again if I think I need to. If I should ever be cajoled into going to the supermarket in my car, I always park as far away from the entrance as possible, much to my wife's annoyance. If I have to park amongst the many, then I always look for a space between other quality motors. I always keep a bottle of Bird Dropping spray handy too, the seagulls round here enjoy Bomber Command status! Rabbers, I would be interested to know what cloths you keep available. Geoff: There is nothing particularly noteworthy about my set of cloths. It consists of three high-quality microfibres in different colours and densities of pile with the words "glass", "paintwork" and "dashboard" embroidered into them, to which I added a fourth suede-type one for the display and instrument panel. Each is reserved for its own specific purpose and usually moistened with plain water or the 5% soapy solution I also keep on hand in small cosmetics-size spray-bottles. I bought the cloths online some years ago from a German company called NIGRIN, and they still rinse out like new. I too always aim to park between two quality motors or, failing this, ones that are clean and dent- and scratch-free. The trouble is that when I come back one or both seem as often as not to have been replaced by semi-wrecks that are inevitably parked too close. I also try to avoid parking next to cars with baby-seats and fold-up prams, and am equally wary of vehicles with prominent door-protectors since I have noted the tendency of owners to swing the doors open with little thought for neighbours not similarly endowed. You have my sympathy with regard to seagull attacks knowing full well that you are talking serious kilotons. My own problem is with content rather than volume, consisting, as it does, of a well-nourished local pigeon population which appears to eat gravel as a laxative supplement to its normal diet. Once baked on to the paintwork, the droppings require a long soak or sterner treatment with e.g. Dodo Juice Born Slippy in order to reduce the risk of a permanent scratch.

If a "family car" is defined, independently of considerations of space and adaptability, as one capable of withstanding a certain amount of abuse from its junior occupants, then the 300h does not IMO fit the bill. I have always looked after every car I have ever owned, but none has ever inspired the same level of fastidious- ness in me as does the 300h. The tiniest speck of dust or the merest suspicion of dirt somewhere in the cabin makes me reach for one of the four special-purpose cloths (for glass, leather, plastics and screens) I keep close to hand, these being additional to another set I keep in the boot for the car's exterior. The mere thought that the car's occupants could ever include kids in age-groups up to and including late adolescence with the concomitant risks of dirt and grime, solid or fluid, organic or otherwise, being deposited on any of the car's sleek and perfectly sanitized surfaces is therefore wholly abhorrent to me. Not that I am particularly fond of most adult passengers either, but this is not pertinent to the Topic under discussion.

Gang & Rayaan: I know it's election time in the UK, but couldn't you pick some other forum to air your thoughts about the NHS!!!??? :megaangry: :luck:

Steve: Interesting that you should mention South Wales. Some years back I had occasion to drive from, I think, Brecon - or maybe it was Abergavenny - to Swansea on the Head of the Valleys Road. I remember innumerable stretches of ups and downs of approximately equal length that would have made it perfect for monitoring the relative fluctuations in consumption. You should maybe give this road a try if you haven't already!

Attitudes on this Forum are changing rapidly..... Last August, which is not so long ago, I was good-naturedly taken to task on this Forum for asking the simple question of whether anybody knew of an arithmetical formula that enables you to figure out how far you need to drive downhill in order to recover the increase in fuel consumption you get from driving uphill, the difference being so big as as to have surprised me (as it does still). Before someone provided a link to a scientific paper so incomprehensible to any non-physicist as to illustrate my own naiveté in believing my query to have been a simple one, various other replies included the suggestion that the Forum - and presumably myself - needed to lighten up and that my query was too advanced for their schoolboy-level maths. All of this came back to me this week as I waded through several detailed, lengthy and infectiously enthusiastic posts about EVs with various levels of price and performance. However, try as I might, I have so far merely come to understand that petrolheads are quickly evolving into electroheads or maybe even hydroheads and that I seriously need to scramble to catch up before I and my poor 300h are left stranded way behind the current technological curve. :eerrrmm:

I must say that I like 18" wheels on the 300h for the simple reason that they look better, the car's impression of purposefulness ("it looks like it's moving even when standing still") being accentuated by them. And while the fat and low 255/35 rear tyres, in particular, improve the car's appearance from most angles, they also heighten the feeling of stability, very noticeably on long fast curves, even in the wet. Whether or not 17" or 16" tyres give a more comfortable ride is a matter of opinion unless, of course, any of the car's usual occupants are abnormally sensitive to bumps and uneven surfaces. Again, my own belief is that 18" tyres on the 300h offer at least as good a ride as 17" ones did on the previous-generation 250, although this may have less to do with the size of the tyres than improvements to the chassis and suspensions. Really, it seems to me that the only disadvantage, apart from price, is the higher risk of damage from kerbs and potholes, as well as rough gravel - and, unfortunately, there is no remedy for this except to chose brands with demonstrably good rim protection. As regards price, although the cash outlay for a set of new 18" tyres, if you consider them preferable, will be higher, the difference amortized over the many km you are going to drive on them is really very small.

Not that I was in any way a potential customer, but I had the chance to test drive a Q50 3.5 litre Hybrid when I had already owned my 300h for some months. The test, such as it was, lasted maybe 30 minutes and included a bit of motorway while consisting mainly of driving round the block a few times. The drive was offered by my Lexus dealer to occupy my time while I was waiting for my own car, the Q50 having been on loan from a colleague to whom he had in turn loaned a 450h for what was, I understood, to be a friendly private comparison - and probably a more appropriate one than with a 300h. On the positive side I remember (1) the punchiness of the Q50's response at all speeds - not that I got beyond 130kmh, (2) the quietness and remarkable cocooned feeling of the cabin although noise from the 19" tyres was not entirely absent, and (3) the very high precision of finish, inside and out. On the negative side, I found the car (1) bulky in feel and lacking in agility, (2) the steering over-light and strangely sensitive to bumps and uneven surfaces, and (3) the cabin a bit flashy, perhaps even vulgar, with the real wood and leather managing to look false, the general appearance being more American than European. Except for these last two points, my conclusions were that with familiarity, essential with regard to the abundant gadgetry and somewhat confusing dashboard, I would have grown to like the car very much. The list price at the time, early 2014, for a full (or almost full)-spec version was way beyond that of a 300h Premier, I believe upwards of €65K against €51K, and since the discounts were in both cases in the region of 12-14%, the price differential remained intact and has probably not changed. To get around the problem of small dealer numbers (only five or six in the whole of Italy) and the policy of of keeping the marque separate from Nissan for both sales and servicing, Infiniti were offering a free pick-up-and-return service/equivalent courtesy car for all maintenance needs irrespective of location. According to my Lexus guy, though, the cost involved was absorbed into the prices for servicing and spares which, since he considered them extremely high in his professional opinion as a Lexus dealer, must to say the least be eye-watering!

Gang: "Unexpected Consequences" is a good title for what has got to be one of the most convoluted, albeit interesting, pieces of thought in automotive history. I hesitate to claim that I understand your drift but, unless I am completely off the track, you are saying that ownership of a Lexus 300h has provided you with the motivation to replace a BMW335i with a Nissan Leaf (via an economic comparison with a SKY subscription) to which you would have preferred a Tesla which is a car you hope Lexus will emulate and improve upon. No doubt there is some commercial and technical logic here but my first reaction was to commiserate with car marketing people wherever they and whoever they may be since they must sometimes despair of getting a simple buy-my-car message across to their prospective customers!

No doubt Mat has the sympathy of all followers of this Forum, although this cannot be much of a consolation. That the repairs should have cost something like a tenth of the price of a new 300h, without this and the time they took having been quantified from the start, makes for a bad experience indeed - not to mention the added aggravation of having to deal with people who obviously need straightening out. Before reading Mat's OP and talking to the German couple mentioned in mine of 4 March, I certainly did not know how potentially expensive repairs to the pop-up hood can be, and I imagine not many other owners of cars with one do either. More specifically, did any of us attach much importance to this particular feature when we we considering buying the 300h? And in the unlikely event that we did, would any Lexus salesman have been able to provide detailed information about it? As for myself, I certainly felt the car's overall safety rating to be important and would have thought twice about the purchase were it to have been less good, but, to be honest, until pop-up hoods are made obligatory on all cars I would be happy enough to do without. Why should I take the responsibility for pedestrian protection when vehicle regulatory authorities and manufacturers do not? Also, it would be interesting to know just how interdependent the single items of work and replacement parts needed for a complete repair are. Mat lists a few of these, but could some be excluded thus reducing the potential total cost? Or could the feature be eliminated altogether from the car's combined safety package?

Geoff: If you set your screen to show the speed camera icon, and leave it on this setting, and the icon is not present on the screen when you hear a beep, this means that the beep you have heard has to do with something other than a speed camera. If, on the other hand, you do not set the screen to show the icon and so rely solely on a beep to warn you that you are approaching a speed camera and this beep has to do with something else, then, if you reacted by slowing down, you will have done so for nothing. Thanks for letting me exercise my own old grey matter by providing a 100-word explanation when I thought much less was enough! :eerrrmm:

.... and it should be kept in mind that the Cameras in question are only the ones present at the time of any given map update, and that it is best to set the corresponding icon as permanent so as to know whether any other beeps you might occasionally get are extraneous. Also, if you take the car across the Channel, the Lexus programme complies with individual national regulations concerning the incorporation of speed camera warnings into SatNav by simply excluding them where necessary.

Contributors to this Forum who, like myself, came to the 300h from a previous-generation 250 have reported a halving of their fuel consumption and thus an approximate doubling of their tank range. Therefore, while drivers coming to the 300h from a diesel will clearly be less impressed, it still surprises me that they could ever be disappointed unless, of course, they mistook Lexus' declared consumption figures as having a bearing on reality rather than simply permitting, as Scoops says, a comparison with other cars from other manufacturers tested with the same parameters, this being the limit of their usefulness. In my view individual owners should decide what level of consumption they consider satisfactory and realistic according to their own driving style and mix and then set themselves the objective of habitually achieving or getting close to it. My own experience is that, with perseverance and when circumstances permit, you can achieve figures you originally thought unlikely. Some weeks ago (see Tank Range Targets, started 8 February), I posted the results of a first successful attempt at not allowing the combined Range and Trip distances after filling up, once reached, to fall below 1000km before the low- fuel warning light comes on again. Success would mean that you have consumed something like 56 litres (=12.3 gals) at a rate approaching 18 km/l (=50.8mpg) and still have 10 liters (=2.2 gals) left in the tank. One day I hope to be able to achieve this as a matter of course, but have so far managed it only three times out of six completed attempts. To my credit, though, I have not once fallen below 950km, and this is a figure with which I would once have been more than pleased. Since I have not changed the driving style I adopted, not always successfully, when I first had the 300h (i.e. try to drive smoothly, brake gently, think ahead, use cruise control when appropriate etc., etc.), I can only attribute my growing success at the 1000km game to a reduction of the margins by which I formerly exceeded speed limits. In other words. having acknowledged that I will never rid myself of the habit of exceeding them whenever I think I can do so with impunity, I now consciously try not to exaggerate. For example, where I once might have driven at 70kmh+ in a 50kmh zone, I now aim for 60kmh or thereabouts, and, of course, it is proportionately less of a problem to keep closer to a 90kmh limit where I customarily once did maybe 110kmh+. Both scenarios yield considerable benefits in terms of overall consumption with the result that, in order not to completely wipe them out by exceeding the 130kmh motorway limit for significant stretches as I usually did, I now tend to stay within or close to it. In short, while the 1000km game is certainly motivating me to drive less fast (and maybe a little less dangerously) than before, this does not necessarily mean that I have taken to driving abnormally or irritatingly slowly, and I am enjoying the 300h as much as I ever did.

There is an Italian product called TREMILLIMETRI which is probably available online somewhere. This is a non- abrasive paste used in tiny amounts as an alternative to jeweler's rouge (i.e. iron oxide) to manually polish minor scratches off most smooth surfaces, and although it is advertised as effective mainly on metals and plastics, I have used it successfully on car and even wrist-watch glass. As a rule of thumb, if you can feel the scratch when passing a fingernail across it, it will be too deep for this particular product to work.

The "welcome light illumination" feature works only as a function of the light sensor and provided that the lights switch is left on AUTO. It is the default setting and can only be de-activated as a dealer customization (perhaps at the behest of owners who do not like to be seen creeping around during the night).

Steve: Except for the calipers and other areas of corrosion having been cleaned, as, on the evidence of your pictures, they clearly needed to be, I haven't really understood what has been happening with your car. Only you can know the truth of exactly how hard you have been driving the car and thus too frequently activating the safety systems. But so what? That's what they are supposed to do, is it not? Your statement that "we will see" sounds a bit too fatalistic, and if I were you, I would get a second opinion from another Lexus workshop the next time you are in the neighbourhood of one.

I must admit I have never played a CD, but I do get the option to terminate the traffic message dialogue box when I am using BT or USB and the screen is set at 25% Audio, which it also habitually is with me.

You guys were clearly already quality-oriented future Lexus owners in your privileged youth since you are talking about a car that had real chrome bumpers unlike a real gritty tin-can item such as the Ford Popular which had them painted to look like they were!

INTERIOR Dashboard and Other Plastic Surfaces Dusting, weekly, followed by wiping with microfibre cloth dampened with a 5% mild soap solution, as necessary, maybe fortnightly. Screens and Mirror Smooth microfibre cloth dampened with plain water, as necessary. Windscreen and Side Windows Microfibre cloth and plain water immediately followed by a second dry microfibre cloth, as necessary. Rear Window Water with few drops of all-purpose cleaner on Stoner Invisible Glass Reach & Clean Tool, monthly. Carpets Vacuum only, weekly. Rubber Mats Shampoo and sponge, as necessary. Seats and Other Leather Dr Leather wipes, twice yearly or as necessary. Denim stains: 5% mild soap solution on cotton wool. Steering Wheel Microfibre cloth soaked in plain water, monthly. EXTERIOR Body, Plastics and Lights Two-bucket shampoo (Mer High Shine on noodle-sponge), weekly. Dry with Kent XL Yellow microfibre cloths. Harly Wax, twice yearly, after preparation with Dodo Juice Square Sponge Clay Pad+Born Slippy Lube+Lime Prime Lite. Wheels Shampoo, same as above, weekly, brush if necessary. Windscreen, Side Windows and Mirrors Microfibre cloth and plain water followed by second dry microfibre, detergents only if necessary. Tar, Resin, Bird Droppings MyCar Tar Remover/WD-40 Oil/Dodo Juice Born Slippy, undiluted.