Linas.P

I can pass mot by giving £50 to the questionable tester or just taking car to questionable garage where they simply not bothered to test the car and just give passes for everyone... So yes - technically car with valid MOT is road legal - the way you pass the MOT is question of your own morale.

Some cars are easy to tune and very rewarding, so it is possible to find car which let's say has "conservative" tune from the factory and with little bit of tinkering add 30% of power. BMW B58 engine good example - it is turbocharged petrol which could be found in various different power levels from something like 280hp all the way to 376hp from factory. As such if you get model with 280hp (say BMW M240i) it is easy just to get it chip tuned to nearly 400hp without making any other changes. And there are loads of such examples of TD and turbo petrol German cars... But Lexus is not such car where gains can be made easily or cheaply. So whereas on BMW or Golf £300 can buy you 100 more hp, on Lexus £1000 will get you 20 more! It is absolutely not worth tuning Lexus, just not the car which is "tuner friendly". Now I would fully agree with John - if you want more power just get IS350... but wait... they never sold one in UK 😞

One... is the clientele - as you said it is not a sports car, but secondly it is 100% illegal and immoral to do that on road car.

Interestingly I received call from Lexus regarding service as my old car is now do for it, but they have not updated detail (to be fair I have not told them to update). It seems they are calling everyone who is due service and who would benefit from Relax it. Now interestingly, I kept chatting with the lady about Relax and she claimed it is exactly like manufacturers new warranty. I said "but it is not as good as previous Extended warranty" , but she insisted that everything is covered as before. So what is happening - Lexus advertising the Relax Warranty as like for like replacement and customers will be none the wiser unless they compare T&Cs... I would imagine 3 years later it will be very difficult to find old T&Cs or to do anything about it. This is little bit dirty as I am sure majority of customers will not notice that it is reduced service and Lexus seems is not willing to be transparent when offering it.

It is 100% protective film... it being your car from new I guess you would be the one who forgotten to remove it 😄 I would not expect dealership to remove protective films as this is sort of thing they would leave to the owner to experience "unboxing of the new car". Mine had ML and had exactly same film - bought with it, sold with it. The good thing, you could only see that fill when opening the boot and now you find out why it is not removed - because it is **** to get to!

True, but GS250 is even rarer!

Taking NA cars to tuner is a thing which is far over blown... there isn't much to be gained from engine like 4GR-FSE, especially on stock engine without substantial mods. Sure if you supercharged it or turbocharged, then taking new set-up to the tuner will matter a lot! When it comes to racing cars and where keeping car "road legal" is not required I imagine there are more gains which can be made. Again - claim was "take seats out and sound proofing and your car is 2s faster to 60". As I said that is just around 100kg, and removing 100kg in the car won't matter much on 0-60. If we go step further and gut the car entirely to bare shell (say -250kg) and then do other track mods, light wheels, slicks, lightened flywheel (on MT), different ratio diffs etc. Sure with such extensive modifications you will shave 2s, maybe more. But clearly that is not what was said, that is not just taking the seats out! As for lightening the car for track use - I absolutely agree, reduced weight will make massive difference over the lap, even if just standstill accelerations does not change that much. But we talking cross purposes here - the OP wanted to gain few HP on IS250C, nobody is making bare rolling shell for a race car from it. That "cold air intake" makes no difference I agree, certainly not as sole modification. For what 4GR-FSE needs the standard airbox is more than sufficient and even if one gains 1hp, this won't be noticeable. F-sport airbox is again - absolutely the same + little tube which transfers some intake noise to interior if properly installed. That is all!

GS250 are certainly rarest, because they were sold only for couple of years before facelift. GS450h are rare because they were very expensive when new, but not as bad as GS250... and for GS300h - they choice is quite decent and price is not bad, even in comparison with say IS300h, which is nowhere near as good car. As for eCVT - I think it should be least of anyone's worry, it is far better than CVT in older hybrids and it has "fake" steps which are surprisingly enjoyable to use on the twisty roads. Now obviously - if you floor it from the stand still it will get locked at something like 3000-4000RPM and causes disturbing drone, certainly does not make car feel very sporty when accelerating. Yet there is not other way to put-it - that is the most efficient way to accelerate as it keeps the engine always in perfect power band. The only down side is perceived noise, which I admit is not as nice... especially in 300h where engine sounds dull as well, but not so much and issue in 450h as V6 sounds fairly good even at said 3-4k RPM.

Just a coincidence buy perfect video to prove my point was uploaded recently by ChrisFix. So indeed the seats weights ~80kg and what is or isn't "sound proofing" is little bit move vague, but generally things which just unclips or can be removed easily wasn't that much more ~56kg... So as I said total weight saving around 100kg... for this beemer in particular it was 136kg. Later he stripped the car almost to bare shell and even that was just around 200kg, he had few more pieces to remove... so say "bare shell" would give you 250kg weight saving at most... And result - 0.8s... so as you can see just seats and sound insulation out would never get you 2s faster acceleration.

mean to say can't... I guess some info could be useful i.e. if cat was previously stolen just to see if it was properly replaced... But I don't think knowing insurance claim history is necessary for that - simply take car for pre-purchase inspection and they should check it. Even MOT nowadays checks whenever cat is fitted.

But that is only if car was deemed write-off or if entire car has been stolen and then recovered. Neither would help to check if the cat was stolen, unless the entire car was written of because of it (which is quite unlikely). As John said - you can check such info in UK and (hopefully) in most countries in the world. If you could, then I could see quite a few privacy issues arising from that.

That sounds like contradiction to me... because the reason I justified taking car to dealership was specifically their knowledge about the car. As I alluded in my pervious post I would get them to do inspection on the car outside of standard (fluid and filters change) and thus I would get good indication if anything obvious is wrong with the car. Once I know what exactly is wrong, I no longer need dealer to do the work. As for the service itself, Lexus service is quite cheap, especially if you get discount of service plan (not sure if they going to continue discounting now when "relax" came into picture). Not much money can be saved servicing car elsewhere.

Not sure what is long term benefit of such monitoring for Lexus... I agree with your point that people who knows little bit about the cars and maintains them outside of what is provided via dealership service will have cars which lasts longer. I tend to think I would be John in your example 😁 I used to do Lexus service every 12k miles, but I used to have oils/filters changed by myself in between. As well I always tricked dealer into investigating issues for free during service hoping that they can get bunch of money from me, but I have never fixed any of the additional items they recommend via Lexus. So my car was basically services twice a year, every 6k miles, but once by dealer and once by myself or by independent. And all recommended items during the service I would do separately, because it is less than half the price e.g. callipers + pads + discs from Lexus would be more than £1000, yet I done it myself for something like £480 and on top of that I got them power coated and thus much more resistant to rust and looking better. At that rate I don't think it is surprising car lasted easily to nearly 200k miles without any major faults and if not for small accident and getting written-off, I probably would still drive it.

Just to note here - F-Sport intake adds absolutely no power and it is identical to standard intake, bar breather tube which sends some intake sound into cabin.

Customs SS headers can certainly be made for £500/650, however I am not confident they would be better flowing than even terrible factory ones. And that is for what? 8hp maybe? My £1000 claim was for HKS/Greddy headers which were properly engineered and have some graphs suggesting this "8hp" gains. To be fair they cost more than that and you won't find them anywhere anymore anyway, so it is moot point... and even the gain is easy to fake even on dyno. What I am saying is that in - in theory it is possible, in practice is quite unlikely and certainly it won't matter. Weight of the car obviously contributes to acceleration, however I doubt that removing seats and sound proofing would give you 2 second advantage. We are talking about like 100kg here... I have no such chubby friends, but having 2 people in the car certainly does not add 2 seconds to 60, so I doubt removing equivalent weight would make such significant difference either. Just to be clear what we are talking about - official IS250 0-60 is 8.1s... holding the brake for little boost before launching achieves ~7.5s already. So if what you saying would be true, then IS250 should be 5.5s to 60 with -100kg? No I don't think that is realistic... That is faster than IS350 with 306hp which only manages 5.7s and it would be just a second slower than IS-F with 470hp. Sure it would make car faster by maybe 0.2s, but not 2s! Even if you strip the car to bare shell, with engine, wheels and single seat.... I doubt IS250 would ever do 0-60 in under 6s. Just not enough power, not right gearing etc.

I am fairly confident that there are no IS250 making anywhere near 240hp. The standard mods like less restrictive air-intake and exhaust... that at most gives 5% of extra performance... so we talking 10hp at very top of rev range making it maybe ~214hp... probably single most effective mod would be new headers, because factory ones are really puny and bad flowing... but here we talking £1000 for custom headers for few hp gain. So after spending £3000 on all these mods one may expect ~220hp. Unless you enjoy the process of modifying car so much, I really see no way how one could justify wasting so much money for no gain. Not only that, but this isn't even straight gain, it is compromise and is delivered at loss of low end torque which to be fair is much more important day-to-day than top end hp. The only way to push IS250 past ~220hp mark is supercharger/turbocharger and then the sky (or rather rods) are the limit.

Most likely remanufactured refurbished OEM callipers.... It is very unlikely to find new callipers to buy. In other hand - why wouldn't you just refurbish your own? It will cost about the same and as added benefit you can get them in colour you want which will protect callipers from rusting at least visually.

I admit I am keen to try hair dryer next time, because if it works then it will be 100 times easier to remove stains - "just hold hair dryer for a bit and it is gone"... sound a lot easier than polishing at very least entire panel on the car... because let's face it - if you just polish the place where the poop was, then there will be one shiny spot on the panel and it will stand out as well. Other idea which came into my mind - if hair dryer works, then in theory just driving the car in summer should be enough to remove stains or at very least reduce them significantly, because sun get's the panels really hot as well. Cannot say I have noticed this effect much...

I had IS250 without warranty very long time and without many issues either (126k - 192k). However, new Lexus cars are not build the way they were built in the past and very few cars comes with no-nonsense petrol engines like IS250. I was quite happy to run IS250 without warranty and would do it again, but that was because the biggest risk in car I had was engine/gearbox and those only cost £800 to buy assuming replacing the engine is even economically viable for such car. That said I would not be as "relaxed" on new Lexus cars... not only because of hybrid systems, but overall I don't feel they are build as well as in the past. Back in the day when IS300h came out I felt like older IS250 was more solid overall, and this theory was kind of reinforced with my experience on RC200t - seat motor replacement was eye watering £4k (covered by warranty) I know they are expensive to fix. Your second point is as well valid - Lexus does not mind people keeping their cars a little bit longer, because "good and reliable" car experience creates returning customers and even after 3 years people are still key demographic for Lexus (basically they can up-sell them with newer model) and they still likely to use Lexus service, the only thing Lexus does not want is for people keeping cars "too long" and it seems they decided 10y/100k is that limit. And finally longer leasing is great point as well... Lexus makes quite a lot money from interest on leases - more so than margin on sale of the car... longer lease = more interest... and if service plan allows it, then it all just makes sense. I still think this is "genius" move from business perspective, but I can see that they decided to trim some excess liability to achieve that.

I guess the other area of reduced value is for people who do more than 10k miles per year - obviously, if you done over 10k miles you need to service your car regardless (in fact I much prefer 6k miles instead), but previously one would have warranty separately and it was for 2 years... and serviced the car whenever it is due. Now it is going to be that one will be forced to have warranty every 10k miles in order to keep warranty. In theory that is not a problem, because warranty is free, but who is to say that service price won't creep-up overtime to reflect extra cost of warranty?

You can edit feedback via eBay itself, however I would not bother. You got you money back from paypal, you left fair feedback for the service and there is no need to contact the seller any longer or communicate at all.

I guess they are working on the assumption that people get warranty at the same time as the service, so basically when your current warranty runs out, they would expect you would be due for service anyway. That probably is true in most cases...

In other hand - this may make Lexus over 100k miles cheaper to buy in the first place... I know not exactly good thing when you are on selling end... but sounds good for me when I may be buying 😄

I think only select models have this "self-healing" top coat, it is certainly fairly new thing (I would say ~ last 5 year).

I was thinking more about it... and I concluded overall it is a good thing for most, but not all owners and better than any other make. Further, it seems to have sound business reasoning and I can't fault them. Basically, all owners who have car between 3-7 years old and under 100k miles will benefit from this as they will be basically getting "free" warranty. Sure - it does not cover as much as old Lexus Extended Warranty, but it covers far more than no warranty. The only group of people for whom it will be worse will be Lexus owners who done more than 100k miles, or has cars older than 10 years... I does make perfect business sense for Lexus - motivates people to upgrade cars after 10y/100k and reduces liability on extended warranty. Obviously, this is cold business calculation and is designed to make them more profitable. Now... yes it is true that Lexus being so reliable many people got into habit owning them for longer and with higher miles, but I recon they are "non criteria" clients for Lexus... I felt that very much when I owned my old IS250 and I was getting "second tier" customer service every time. Finally, let's face it - Essential Service and Lexus Extended Warranty were far too good to last and I completely agree, they made 10y+/100k+ Lexus still viable for longer. The new Relax warranty is certainly not as good for those older/higher mile cars and I do understand some people may be upset for a reason. Perhaps Lexus should consider introducing separate product for additional cost ... specifically for parts not covered in Relax and for cars over 10y/100k...