Linas.P

Interesting find! I understand the appeal - interior does look brand new and car seems to be in perfect shape cosmetically, but this car was basically standing for 11 years. That is NOT good. Unless this car magically has 11 service stamps and those 200 miles are somehow very regular of say 5 miles very Sunday going "to the church and back", and rest of the time car was parked in the garage... well then I guess that is good. But otherwise it needs to be treated like barn find, with all dried out and leaking seals, tyres certainly need to go (not that original Turanzas were very good anyway). Kind of usual case "what is too much is not good" - getting 3000 miles car is always nice, but not when it is 11 years old.

No problem and glad to hear it passed. Your headlights were not too bad, body rust is not generally MOT concern, unless suspension mounts and other critical structural parts starts to rust (which on IS250 is not common). Just take care of the car from now on and I am sure it could last few more years. Timely maintenance is cheaper in long run than breakdowns. So if you wait for it to fail before fixing it that may turn out very costly.

That is why if you would have asked before buying it on here everyone would have told you categorically - DO NOT BUY IT. Fuel economy to be honest is last of your worries. If it would be at least reliable, then slightly lower MPG compared to competitors would be fine, as the rest of the car is much better, interior is nicer, better quipped, but it isn't reliable either and that would be my biggest worry. I think you little bit overstating the MPG other similar diesels achieve, this is not Golf 1.9TDi, it is much larger car which weights 1500kg, so expect the consumption to be in line with what you have. I think if you compare it to say BMW 320d, then average fuel consumption will be very similar - say 38MPG vs. 42MPG, now counterintuitively BMW 330d and 530d will have better fuel consumption, because those are better engines which are less stressed in large and heavy cars. 2L diesels are not economical and never been economical, because they are too small and too stressed. But that is why it would cost extra £4000 to upgrade from 320d to 330d when the cars were new. 2L diesels are cheap for a reason and what you save on purchasing the car you then lose on MPG. So in fair comparison with equivalent car like BMW 320d, the Lexus IS220d will be fairly comparable. As well I think you overstate what 3L V6 petrols can achieve. Yes they get 35MPG on motorway, that is true, but what is their average?! 24MPG maybe. So you comparing your average with their maximum, that again is not fair comparison. That said IS220d is not a great car by any metric, that is why anyone on here would advise you to pick IS250 instead, similar MPG around town (26 maybe), still decent MPG on motorway (up-to 48), but it is much more powerful and smoother engine, automatic gearbox is smooth, car is reliable and even sounds good. So if we compare IS220d vs IS250, then you have say 38MPG vs. 30MPG average. Similar diesels like BMW 320d will be 42MPG vs 38MPG. Now you achieving 32MPG is not great for diesel nor it is great for IS220d, but it is not so low that it would be out of ordinary. As said above - it could be your driving conditions and habits, or it might be a fault with the car... too many variables to consider. As well 2 tanks of fuel is too early to judge, so don't jump to premature conclusions. 30 miles as well are not really far enough for diesel, if you not driving at least 100 miles per trip I would not advise owning diesel at all. So perhaps when opportunity comes take a longer trip and see what actual MPG you get. And by longer I mean 300-400 miles... if you can't get at least high 40s (46-48) in long motorway run then I would start looking for problems. My goal is not to say IS220d is a good car - it isn't. My goal is to put it in correct perspective and compare it like for like.

Little bit on the low side, but not really surprising or exceptional. IS220d should be pushing around 55MPG on motorway and ~30MPG in town. So your average should be in high-30s, 36-38MPG maybe, considering that you doing more motorway driving than town. But again it kind of depends, what kind of motorway it is, how busy it is, how heavy is your feet. If you set cruise control and drive for 30 miles at steady 70MPH, without ever touching accelerator, nor brakes, and if the road is level and smooth, then yes you will get 55MPG. But if motorway is busy, outside lane is constantly hogged, you doing 80MPH and you often have to slow down to wait for retards to move over doing 60MPH in outside lane, or get cut-off by people not checking mirrors and you basically constantly slowing down and accelerating (which is my experience on British motorways)... then it could be as bad as city driving and that would explain your 32MPG. So... yes you missing few MPG, but not a lot 4-6MPG maybe, I would not expect anything touching 40MPG in IS220d, unless you doing motorways all the time. Or it may be literally dozens of issues that are plaguing IS220d. Common one which will destroy your MPG are leaky injectors or 5th injector, which is very common on IS220d. If somebody messed with EGR/DPF (by which I mean deleted/blocked/mapped out) then this would be another big reason of bad MPG.

Cam chain does not require replacement - it generally considered "life-time", but otherwise good for 300k miles. Regular oil changes obviously required. Well that is relief then - 3,000 miles extra miles probably haven't done that much harm. Generally, oil breaks down with both time and mileage, so it is still not good idea to keep it for longer than 12 months. But 6,000 miles in 24 months is still much better than 20,000. I would advise doing oil change before MOT, because that in itself could be reason passing vs. failing emission test, with fresh oil car will run more economically and cleaner. So is the car ~58,000 miles, that would be remarkably low, so you perhaps can add 30% to the numbers above.

Doesn't sound like anything unusual or horrible to me, EXCEPT no oil changes is very worrying. On these engine oil change is the upmost priority. Now I guess it depends of how many miles you did in 2 years time - if it is 10,000 then perhaps engine is still alright, event thought I would never recommend doing more than 6000miles or 12 months without oil change. You can neglect many things on these cars, but oil changes is not one of them. However, 20,000 miles without oil change could be situation where your engine is busted. The tyres needing replacement, that is not an issue, it is part of wear and tear, so you simply can count it as a cost of 2 tyres off the price, say £180. Headlights, yes - that is £50-100 to polish them, not a big deal. Exhaust rotten - that is common on these cars and all the cars of similar age. Central section is ~£600, I assume rear section would need doing if hasn't been done already, so £750 altogether. I think part which really makes your car uneconomical repair will be rear arches, I now remember another thread... so you looking at £500-£1000 per side to fix. Now if you were to keep the car for yourself, then I can see temporary repair as viable solution - sand it down to bare metal, treat with rust converter and spay with durable paint, does not need to be pretty, but will prevent it from getting worse. However, if you were to sell the car, this is generally what will absolutely destroy the value of your car. Now when it comes to selling the car on types like "we buy any car", I think with all you described it sound like good deal if they offer you £1350, however they usually assume that your car was serviced and that it does not have any serious problems, when they see no service records for 2 years and rust on rear arches, they may say £400. All in all, what you described - the most concerning part for me would be lack of oil changes and lack of service of any sorts. Generally when buying IS250 - service records showing regular services is the first thing to check and top priority. So if we assume that hypothetically car like yours is worth £5000 in perfect condition, then no service records makes it £4000. We can extrapolate the rest of the costs fairly quickly, -£750 for exhaust, -£180 for tyres, -£100 for headlights, -£500 for full service and let's say very optimistically £1000 for rear arches. So we arrive at very decent price of ~£1470, not considering anything else that may be wrong with the car. As such £1200-1350 would be good deal, if you could get it. So I guess in summary I can see where you are coming from - car seems to be beyond economical repair. You would need to spend considerable amount of money to get it fixed and any potential buyer would still be very suspicious of engine condition, because it was run for so long without oil changes. In your position I would take the offer from "we buy any car" types if it is ~£1200-£1350, else I would try to get it trough the MOT as that alone kind of fixes the price of the car at ~£1000 in certain circles (so called "beaters" - buys cars with MOT, to run for a year then scraps them) and then try to sell it on eBay as spares and repairs. It is important that you note all the issues in the listing honestly and list it as spares and repairs. I would not be surprised if you can get slightly more on eBay, lets say ~£1500. As well I would be inclined to list the car on Buy-It now price with the option for offer e.g. £1600 and set offers to auto decline below £1350. You can even say you were offered £1350 by certain sites that buys the cars, so that is your bottom price. You may get more money with auction (as people get competitive), but there is common catch - people bid-up your car and don't turn-up to buy, or turn-up and start negotiating which is just plainly wrong if all the issues where described correctly. So instead, I would just list it as set price with "offers" enabled, then I would require £100 deposit before pick-up. In such case if person start negotiating on agreed price, you can decline and keep deposit (again provided you described condition of the car fairly).

IS250 generally are solid cars if maintained, but if not maintained they can become real money pits. Parts are expensive, there aren't many experienced technicians that can work on them and Lexus diagnostics costs are extortionate. What are the problems with your car? I guess based on that, mileage, spec and how much you want for it would depend if anyone is interest to buy it. Overall, IS250 prices very much stable for last 8 years and for last 3 they actually have increased. I have bought 2008 IS250 SE-L with 120k miles in 2014 for £4000 (I believe it was £3950 to be precise), yet 2008 IS250 SE-L with approximately 120k miles, will cost more or less the same today, if not even little bit more depending on condition. So in summary - these cars are worth decent money and there seems to be demand for them, the question then becomes how broken is yours and whenever it would be economical repair. As far as where and how to sell... It is slightly challenging to sell broken car. It is illegal to sell car that is not road worthy, even if it has MOT. You can list it as "spares and repairs" on eBay, in which case what you selling is technically are bunch of parts and not a car, but you will receive significantly less in such case. So it may be the case that it would be better to spend money to fix the car before selling if you want to get decent price for it (again depends on what is broken).

I don't want to sound snob, but just kind of highlighting the irony of form over function. Keeping the original lights probably allows for enough illumination and keeping the reflectors where they should be. VLANDs look cool, but there is a catch. But don't take that too seriously - this is minor detail, I doubt it will ever become relevant, I am just nit-picking and justifying to myself why I don't like aftermarket lights. I like and support car modifications, but only when they have no downsides, sadly the aftermarket "stylised" lights have compromises I would not accept.

You need to remove washer fluid tube on the passenger side... but I would not say that is difficult job - driver side has 3x10mm, passengers side 1x10mm, both takes make 5min to replace... unless bolts are rusted and brakes... which has happened to me in the past, so this time around I was mindful of that and sprayed WD40 for 5 days in a row before attempting to undo the bolts and then replaced them with new bolts to prevent it from causing issues in future. Although, if you have xenon that is like once in 8 years job.

Yeah that was my worry looking at them... kind of fail at their purpose sadly. I would be more worried if somebody crashes in my parked car at night, because there are no reflectors. That being said - as I generally don't park outside or on unlit country streets that would be unlikely to happen, still I think reflectors are there for a reason.

It has nothing to do with ML, rather year/model of Head Unit. HDD based Sat-Navs appeared in late 2009 models and then there were few iterations of them in both cars with ML and non-ML. Generally - having USB port means you have HDD based system, but again has nothing to do with car having ML. My IS250 has ML, but it is early model and does not have neither HDD, nor USB port. Head Units were not made by ML, I believe they were made by Panasonic/Pioneer, ML made speakers and amplifiers. In short - yes, you can store and play MP3 from built in HDD if your Head Unit has one, but ML is not the reason why. ML does have one special feature, but that is not HDD, rather ML equipped cars were able to read DVDs (i.e. they had DVD changer rather than CD changer) on pre-2009 cars, so there was possibility of playing DVD-Audio, which is slightly better quality than CD or indeed MP3.

Any exhaust place can adapt it to fit. But no... Not without modification. Then as well consider you need to cut the bumper quite a lot.

That I know and you are correct - the classic saloon will always be the cheapest, simply because they are most common. Not every car model will have all 4 body types, but for example BMW 3-Series historically did. What I have observed over long period of time... after saloons then comes cabriolets despite being probably the rarest (I could speculate maybe classic convertibles are too much pain even for enthusiasts), then coupes (which for long time were most desirable) and nowadays estates often cost just as much and sometimes even more than coupes. And that is despite estates clearly being more utilitarian e.g. coupes and convertibles usually comes with more options, like leather, bigger engines, factory body kits etc. And this is not singular examples, I was looking at vintage car auctions, especially in US and estates very often commends premium even over coupes, which is a somewhat new trend of maybe last 10 years. Just kind of find it strange, but not sure if that translates to demand for new estate cars.

It is 45, not 40. Or... 40 for 18" - 225/40/18 and 255/40/18

I believe 32GB should work on Lexus, but that is probably the absolute maximum that could work. Remember - Lexus infotainment system is really outdated, even by the standard of 2011. I personally tried 16GB I think 4/8GB works fine as well, some 16GB worked, some didn't... I don't think ever tried 32GB so maybe try smaller capacity stick and see if that works first.

That is actually good point - I find it hard to justify anything wider than 225s, considering base spec. came with 205s and it is not like it has less power, or weighted less... same 204hp, same weight. I do understand people put larger wheels for the looks, but what is the point of wider tyres where it doesn't need to be wider?!. If you track the car and you have some sort of amazing grip set-up, sure wider tyre is better on dry surface. But wider tyre is actually worse on wet, worse on fuel, noise and it costs more. Again if the car has 400hp+ - then sure you need it for traction (not cornering, but straight line traction), but for 204hp 225s are plenty. I maybe see the point of 245s on IS350 that has 306hp and as it obviously shares design with IS250 I can understand why Lexus has wider rears by default - so it is not so much that IS250/IS220d needs it, but more because it was cheaper to set-up suspension geometry once and fit it across the range.

I thought "wagons" were resurgent trend in US (and overall) now? Perhaps that only applies to vintage cars thought... I always find it weird when "estates" are priced higher than coupes/convertibles as classic cars. But then again I was never and estate car lover... I understand it is practical, but I just value different things in the car, don't have dogs, don't need to help my family move furniture, don't need to put tools for work, so probably I will never get it. But I do appreciate some people need such car (more so than SUVs), I just always considered them more of "utility cars".

I think there is as well limit of how many files the Lexus system will read per folder. So if you have like 700 mp3 files in one folder it may fail to read it, or it may take forever. So ideally you need to put them in separate folders (which I tend to do anyway, to organise music). Later IS250 systems with USB definitely plays music from USB, I have used that myself. It has to be FAT32, which to be honest is still standard format for most of flash memory and only recently is becoming limiting factor (FAT 32 can only have maximum partition of 2TB and individual files of 4GB). So you basically take flash drive, press format - choose FAT32 as the format type, then put the mp3 inside it, ideally no more than 50-100 files per folder. If I were to upgrade the system, then I would go with whole aftermarket android head unit, can't see the point of putting GROM, paying £500 and still having outdated satnav, unresponsive screen etc.

Aftermarket sensors are dodgy. In my experience 50% are DOA... one failing within 2 months 100% possible. Toyota sensors on internet are dodgy as well, because like 80% of them are fake. Sadly, when it comes to o2 sensor and particularly lamda sensors... you have to go OEM. I would probably look at places like rockauto.com or www.amayama.com once you know what the issue is. The lamdas are ridiculously expensive ~£175 each, the o2 are slightly better ~£80. Whenever to replace or not again - sadly live-data is required and I know very few mechanics who can make sense out of it. I guess if you have workshop manual in front of you and following the steps, then it is possible, but no mechanic I know spends 2-3 hours troubleshooting the cars like this (hence I do it myself and just pay for fixing, or even just fix things myself).

Cat would be literally last on my list of things to check. Live data would be required to give better picture. First of all - what your lamda is reporting? When they were replaced? Generally speaking lambda sensors last ~75k, aftermarket/fake ones much less - so that is where I would start looking. If lamda is reporting incorrectly (sometimes referred as being lazy i.e. it does not trigger the code of it's own yet, but reports incorrectly enough to cause issues, rough running, misfires etc.), then you would automatically get wrong Air:Fuel Ratio and automatically will get cat performance issues, O2 sensor is just "catch-all" in the end. Only when you confident that lamda works correctly, you can expect o2 sensort to work correctly. Now just to say - it is NOT impossible that cat is bad at 125k, just rare, but 9 times out of 10 it will be either exhaust leak (anywhere between engine and o2 sensor, not necessarily right next to o2 sensor) or it will be upstream sensor giving wrong readings and messing-up A:F. Yes - it would be. To simplistically explain how it works - there are 2x O2 sensors on each bank, one is "wide band" also known as "lamda" and other one is "o2" sensor. The lamda checks for remaining oxygen in the exhaust gasses, theory being if there is oxygen > then engine is running lean > then inject more fuel. O2 sensor after cat just checks that reading of lamda is correct, if it reads different level of oxygen than lamda, then there will be various codes, but the popular one is for cat performance. Usually, bad lamda gives you "too lean" code, but P0172 and P0175 are "too rich" codes, together with P0333 I would speculate maybe an issue with spark-plugs (those are 75k rated as well). Realistically, nobody could give you definitive answer over the forum, you need life-data reading and performing several tests to find the root cause of this. Replacing cat before doing it would be "just throwing parts" at the problem, which sadly many bad mechanics likes to do "it says cat performance issue, let's replace cats" and if it turns out not to be cat, then it is customer issue...

What is the mileage? Cats - generally last well over 100k miles and I would not expect one to fail before at least 200k. My first step would be to check for leaks in exhaust, as that is most common reason for P0420 - O2 sensor is measuring how much unburn O2 comes after cat, so if you have leak it would obviously show incorrectly. And... no - Primary cats cannot be "deleted" and it would not solve your issue anyway.

In general having narrower tyres will improve the fuel consumption, so most likely it will use less fuel. Yes the tyre will be 1.6% smaller, not massive difference but it the speedometer will indicate slightly more than actual speed, which it already does anyway.

Yeah - wet grip is priority for me as well.

I am personally not an estate fan, but it must be said that IS would look great in that body style... and as an alternative to SUV... any day for me.

But that was specifically what we were discussing... As for the rest I think you are correct on all individual things in isolation. 225mm means - only the thread surface i.e. the part that touches the road. And indeed the side wall design could be very different, some have wheel protectors, some don't, some are round, some are more like triangle, some are very thin and flimsy, some are reinforced etc. But the thread will always be 225mm and 225mm is more than 203mm, so that is all that matters here. And on top of that there is no way you will touch and actual wheel to the arch, unless you severely lower the car (like 80mm), but you will probably scrape the bottom of the car before you scrap the wheel on the arches. In short as far as spacers are concerned, wheels width isn't an issue most of the time.