sorcerer

Any idea what that age cut-off is - we never had any problems getting full European breakdown cover for our old Nissan which was 14 years old. Of course, the problem may well be that as the car was only worth about £1200, any breakdown that came anywhere near that figure, they may just write it off or refuse repair - and then how would we get back from Poland/Czech Republic? Hope we never have to find out in practice!

Do they not come back on if you wait a while? Since we bought our RX300 in May it's not been cold enough to use them so I don't know how they work in a Lexus, but when we had our Nissan Maxima QX they were thermostatically controlled - when they reached a certain temp they would switch off until the temp dropped to a certain point and then come back on again.

Just a complete guess but it may be that if your car has a reversing camera then you can turn off the rear sensors and still have one safety device in action, whereas the front ones, being the only safety device at that end, can't be switched off?

Mine's in the spare wheel well too - there's a couple of pictures in this topic I started a few weeks ago here:

Ah, well, there you've got me - I did say my car hasn't got them so I didn't know there was a permanent on/off switch for the rears I'm sure someone who actually has them will be along shortly to put us both in the know.

My RX300 doesn't have them so I may be talking rubbish but yes, logically I would think that's normal behaviour. They are a safety feature so by default they should be on. There may well be times when you want or need to turn them off temporarily but when you turn the ignition back on again the car is smart enough to enable the safety feature again in case you forget to do it. It may be a setting that can be altered from within the Toyota Techstream software but I wouldn't expect the driver/end user to be able to permanently disable it.

You could have a bigger tank fitted. Mine's an 85 litre tank and gives a range of over 200 miles minimum to a best so far of 300 miles. A paper map could well go out of date quite quickly so have a look at my reply above to @Chasdad regarding the FillLPG website and also the free Android app and satnav POI files.

If you have an Android phone you can download an app from the Play Store for the Fill LPG website. You can also download the FillLPG POIs for satnavs. My nearest filling place is a Calor Centre rather than a filling station forecourt; even that's a 12-mile round trip to fill up if I don't happen to be heading in that direction anyway but it's well worth the small inconvenience to make substantial savings on fuel.

Not sure this is exactly an answer to your question but maybe you're overthinking it a bit? I don't know whereabouts in Lacashire you are but I'm in Preston and we have a motor factors place called Dodgson's on Fylde Rd. I went in there and just asked for a full set of wiper blades for an RX300 and came out with all three for £16. They don't judder or skip and they work very well - not sure how long they'll last but at £16 a set I'm not exactly breaking the bank, even if they only last a year. In my experience (ok, only had the car since mid-May, so not a lot really) the thing that causes more judder and skipping is the sensitivity of the rain sensor. I don't know where it's located or how it works but the windscreen can be 99% dry and one tiny drop sets off the wipers, which then swipe over a dry screen and cause havoc

Sadly not I'm afraid. It's not worth the risk of starting the job and then my back injury flaring up making it impossible to finish it, so I've just dropped the car off at my mate's garage for him to do it.

Thanks Chris, as always your input is much appreciated but sadly too late in this instance - I've already picked up the stuff from my local Toyota dealer. However, we intend to keep the car until it dies and hope to get at least 100k out of it (on top of the 84k it's already done) so I suppose I could look at it as a 'belt and braces' job

Glad you've finally got to the bottom of the problem and you had enough funds to do so. If it was me, I'd have had to scrap the car for the sake of spending over £4k on a new battery. Further up the thread someone mentioned that there is an external battery charger available but not many dealers have one at their disposal. Seems to me that there's a market for an external power supply that could be plugged into the mains and also plugged into the car, temporarily taking the place of the battery for testing purposes. Ok, you couldn't take the car on a test drive but in cases like this, it would have shown that the battery was not at fault and to look elsewhere.

As others have said it's most likely the light sensor but one thing I can say is that it's not a sign of a defective battery. Once the car fires up and the engine is running, all onboard electrics are fed by the alternator, not the battery. If there's enough 'spare' power (which there obviously should be and usually is) then the alternator will charge the battery, but the battery effectively becomes redundant once the engine and alternator are running.

That's brilliant, thanks Steve. I couldn't believe the price of the ATF, so much so that I'm wondering if they've made a mistake. However, as we say around these parts, I'm keeping my head down and saying nowt

Thanks very much for that Steve. However, I note that you say you've never done yours so is it possible you're mistaken about the sump gasket being a special sealant? I ask because a couple of videos I've seen seem to show the gasket being a 'normal' type, as you'll see from the attached photo. Ok, they are for the RX350 and the Toyota Highlander rather than the RX300, so I'm not sure if they're closely enough related but... And I've also been lucky enough to get 10 litres of Toyota Type T-IV from my local Toyota main dealers for £75.60

@ChrisKaye My mechanic still hasn't had chance to do the fluid changes yet but in a way I'm glad, as it's given me time to ask you something else - did you change the transmission fluid filter at the same time? Good idea to do so, or not? TIA

We've only had our car about three months and haven't had to change any bulbs so I don't know how easy or difficult it is to do, but your owner's manual should give you details. As to the actual brightness, bulbs do age and become less efficient so maybe just replacing them will solve your problem. If it doesn't then I'd hazard a guess that it's the plastic lens at fault, which is a very common problem with all modern cars.

Brilliant, will do. Thanks again sir

Brilliant, cheers my friend. Coolant was changed on Saturday and all went smoothly. I was hoping he'd get to do the ATF as well but my local Toyota dealer doesn't carry it as a stock item and had to order it and it should arrive today. Great price though - got 5L of Toyota Type T-IV for £37 so I'm not complaining. Thanks again Chris

To be honest, I used to love DIY mechanicing but then cars got too complicated. Mind you, even if they hadn't, a back injury from many moons ago now makes it impossible for me to do anything but the most basic stuff, so I've got a good and trusted mechanic who I go to these days. I'll be asking him to change the coolant (currently green rather than the Pink), the ATF and also the front and rear diff oils too. Just had a message from him to the effect that he's not too familiar with the RX300 and was wondering if the gearbox and the diffs have specific drain plugs or will I need to buy gaskets as well in case the only way to get the oil out is to dismantle something. Have you got any idea about that Chris?

Thanks Chris. I think I'll go for the drain & refill, drive for a few hundred miles and then repeat - like you say, much less hassle Cheers

Hiya Chris and sorry for the late reply, been away for a few days but thank you for your very informative input. The car is running perfectly alright with no roughness at all, either at speed or when just idling, but to my non-mechanical mind it's all a bit of a mystery what's going on. The push-rod is now back in its little green retainer and is free to move but I'm not sure when it should move. I've had the car stationary on the driveway and revved the engine up to over 4,000rpm but no movement occurs. I've also moved the assembly by hand whilst the engine is running but it has no effect - engine still runs smoothly with no lumpiness, stutters or roughness. One of the problems I've got is that I've never had, or driven, a Lexus RX300 until getting this one so I have nothing to compare it to. One area I'm not too sure about and it may or may not have anything to do with this 'Valve Assembly, Intake Air Control', is fuel consumption. Before the LPG conversion the best we had on petrol on a run was 28mpg (according to the onboard computer) and the best around town was 17-18mpg, which would seem a bit low maybe? I'm comparing it to my old Nissan Maxima QX which was a 3.0 V6 auto, the same as the RX300, and gave about 32-33 on a run and about 23 around town. Now, I do realise that the RX300 is a much bigger and heavier car, but I'm wondering if size and weight alone can account for the difference or if this Intake Air Control has comething to do with it too? Another area I'm not sure of is the 'drive by wire' system. The Nissan was SO responsive - on the German autobahns with a fully-loaded car, already doing 80mph, I could put my foot down and we would be thrust back in our seats, and just mere seconds later we'd be doing over 110mph. Ok, that's an extreme example and not something you do in every-day driving but you get my point. Putting my foot down in the RX300 seems to elicit a 'thinking time' of a second or two before there's any response sometimes. Again, I don't know if that could be anything to do with this part or if that's just how drive-by-wire systems work? Cheers, John

Looking to change the automatic transmission fluid on my 2005 RX300 and the Owner's Handbook lists the capacity as 3.5 litres for a drain and refill. I'm assuming that that figure doesn't include the fluid that would be in the torque converter, so my question comes in two parts: 1. if doing a full change, does anyone know what quantity is required? 2. Is it better to do a full change or just a drain and refill? Or maybe even to do a drain and refill, run it for a few thousand miles then do another drain and refill?

Not being nasty or funny about this but I'm asking a genuine question - why would anyone use a CD/DVD-based satnav over, say, a TomTom? My 2005 RX300 has the factory-installed disc-based satnav but, even if I could get an up-to-date disc for it (which I don't believe you can), I would use my TomTom in preference to the built-in one. Why? Well, unless I'm mistaken, I'm almost sure that you can't integrate your own POIs with the disc-based systems, so why would you limit yourself like that? One example is that we recently had our RX300 converted to LPG, so my TomTom has the location of every LPG/Autogas filling station in the country loaded as POIs. If I'm getting low on gas but not sure where I can fill up, all I have to do is to select 'Navigate to POI near you', select LPG as the POI and off you go. Another example is that the TomTom will load things like the PocketGPSWorld Speed Camera Database and lots of other stuff, so why would you prefer to use the limited functionality of the integrated system over that?