First_Lexus

Me too. I renewed in May this year with a large increase in premium cost, but feel like I’ve got off lightly after reading some of the more recent posts. I love my RX, but I’m now only completing c5,000 miles each year. With the car two years old shortly, I’ll reluctantly be looking to trade down in the Spring of 2024 ahead of the next insurance renewal. To be fair it isn’t just the insurance price that’s leading me to this decision. It’s the fact that the car spends most of the time as an expensive ornament on my driveway. I simply don’t need such a large and expensive vehicle now. Believe it or not, my next car is likely to be a Honda Jazz. I’ve looked at EV and am unconvinced, but I think a hybrid Jazz will suit me perfectly. It will be something of a shock at first I guess, having owned two NX and now and RX over a decade or so, but the convenience of a smaller and nippier car for my majority local use, combined with far lower costs, seems like an obvious decision. Just to add, I have started feeling quite conscious of how the RX ‘looks’ in the current climate (both economic and environmental). Just a few weeks ago a young lady at a petrol station asked me why I needed such a large car. I didn’t have a good answer other than ‘because I can’ and ‘because I like it.’ It’s harder and harder to justify for me and my usage.

Looks great. I use Gyeon Wet Coat which does much the same. The impressive thing about these products isn’t just the finish and speed, but I’ve also tried the Gyeon version on a ten year old Ssangyong with absolutely no previous protection applied and the result was still impressive!

@Anthony B I owned two NX 300h over a five year period. The first, one of the last pre-facelift, a Mercury Grey Sport, and the second a 2018 post-facelift Luxury in Mesa Red. The NX300h is a brilliant car, and I’m sure you’ll really enjoy ownership. It’s not a rocket ship but driven as intended - calmly, in what I call ‘waft mode’ - and it’s a comfortable, refined, beautifully built and reliable companion. Mpg for me was mid-30s on the motorway in Winter up to 40-42 in Summer on mixed A and B-roads. You’ve also chosen well with Lexus Swindon. In my experience they’re superb, albeit I’ve now moved location from Wiltshire to Berkshire so am using Lexus Reading these days. Congratulations on your purchase. Enjoy!

Back on topic, I had my white RX ceramic coated with GTechniq when new in November 2021. I cleaned it at the weekend for the first time in six weeks - it’s just so easy and never seems to get that dirty. As @LenTsays, just wash and maintain it properly and a quick spritz with any good quick detailer spray will have it looking new in no time at all. I used Alien Magic ‘The Boss’ for the first time and jolly good it was too. Smells of cherries…😁

I’ve probably posted this before, but back in the mists of time when I was a student, one of my housemates was bought a brand new Metro by his parents. He was a very intelligent guy - Maths Undergrad (of some sort!) at the time but having driven a couple of hundred miles in his new car there were dead insects all over the shiny new bonnet… …which he cleaned off using a Brillo Pad! Yes, he really did…🤣

At least Richard (D i c k) Turpin wore a mask! (God bless the swear filter on here!)

Funnily enough, a friend with a VW id3 electric car (I know, I know!) was only telling me this weekend that her insurance had risen from £350 per year to over £600 with no obvious changes or explanation. She’s currently using comparison sites to see if she can reduce that cost. As I’ve posted previously, my RX insurance renewal in May from the incumbent company doubled, but through comparison sites I managed to get it back to ‘only’ a £200 increase. No increase at all for my MINI, make of that what you will…

As this gets rolled out more widely, there’s a benefit for all RX owners even if their car hasn’t had the modification. Anything that introduces uncertainty or jeopardy for the bad guys - will this car be an easy and quick theft or not - helps everybody, as hopefully they’ll start to look elsewhere and for other targets. My assumption is this modification isn’t about ultimate prevention, it’s more about delay and causing difficulty. If one car takes thirty seconds to steal but another 3 minutes then the hope is the villains will take the easiest option.

Today I’d like to moan about Royal Mail. In the last week I’ve received a letter from HMRC (only a coding notice) dated February, and a reminder letter for a membership dated May. I never received my road tax reminder - due 1st August - at all, but sure it’ll turn up in a few months. Last year I posted my Christmas cards all at the same time. One of my Sisters never received hers, but received her birthday card posted at the same time. The Christmas card eventually turned up, looking perfect, the following June… It’s a shambles. Speaking to others I’m certainly not alone with these issues. Bah!

If it’s the same as my RX you hold the wiper stalk in the ‘up’ (single sweep) position while turning off the power button. The wipers then park vertically so you can lift them for cleaning the screen.

I can only think of this sketch…😆

I’m just going to leave this here…😇 Ignoring Giles Coren’s issues with the charging network, he notes the car had lots of reliability problems. Knowing somebody who owned an I-Pace I don’t think he was alone… https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/motoring/motoring-news/tv-star-ditches-jaguar-electric-26017739

^^ That’s a great point. I certainly WON’T be moaning about having experienced some good times. I feel sorry for youngsters today - they’ll never have that joy! 🙂

^^ If you haven’t already done so, Brenda Dean’s autobiography ‘Hot Mettle’ is a good read on the printing industry. Clearly she has a particular view, but in general terms it’s hard not to agree with your points above. Many industries are the same - this is the first time in human history that technological advances have / will lead to fewer jobs rather than more jobs. Only the other day I listened to a radio article about sign writing. It’s a dying art, as things can now be screen printed (or similar) by machine and applied as transfers. Quicker, cheaper, but a skilled trade will be lost. Who cares? People just seem to want things more quickly, more cheaply…but what is the overall impact of the loss of all these skills? Is being a Deliveroo or Amazon driver a skill? Maybe it is, but not as I see it. As you say, “…we’ll never know how much we’ve lost to gain so little.”

After graduating, my first real job for a big company in Central London (actually on a rota with the other most junior staff) was to go into the print room on the second floor and sort all of the batch printing that had run overnight on a printer that was the size of a small country! Each invoice would have to be detached from the next (by hand) and folded so that the address fitted the envelope window. They all then went to the post room which was managed by a fierce older lady who terrified pretty much everybody! The task took most of the morning and was boring as nobody else had any reason to go into that room until the following morning. You just prayed that the printer hadn’t run out of paper, or ink, or got jammed overnight. If it had, you had to fix it, restart it, then wait for it to finish. If that meant you were there until 20.00 or later at night then so be it… I stayed with that company for fifteen years. It taught me almost everything I know today for my career. I saw the third floor typing pool disappear, internal mail vanish along with the fax machine, the introduction of desk top computers, and a general decline in standards that seemed to come with all that ‘progress.’ When I started everybody was addressed by surname, never Christian name. Male staff had to wear suits and ties (always) and more senior male staff wore waistcoats to donate rank. The staff restaurant was silver service, and senior managers had their own seats. Even if they were away, nobody could sit in a seat not their own! Smoking at desks was commonplace. Alcohol in the office at the end of the day (or for any occasion really at pretty much any time after 14.00) was also common, provided by the company on trollies with cakes and snacks. Different times. Gradually the dress code relaxed, alcohol and smoking in the office disappeared, and the workforce shrank. Those left had to do more and more. The building that held about 3000 staff when I started had only 1000 when I finally left. It’s now being turned into luxury flats. My moan is that I don’t like getting old. I know well that I’m seeing the past through rose-tinted spectacles, but the tinting isn’t that strong. Things really did seem better then, to me anyway.

Didn’t waste any time finding the article. It was on Sky News this morning. The date of the article is at the start, as it is on most mainstream news sites. This thread isn’t about EVs, it’s about hydrogen. I thought it was relevant and might be interesting. Apologies if that it in some way offensive, it wasn’t intended to be. I certainly won’t be posting here again for some time.

https://news.sky.com/story/could-a-truck-thats-powered-by-hydrogen-and-only-emits-water-help-in-the-climate-change-fight-12916780 As the piece on Sky News TV notes, the issue with hydrogen as things stand is the amount of electricity needed to produce it.

There have been a few similar threads recently. My RX was £350 fully comp last year, renewal was over £700. With a bit of shopping around reduced to £600. Interestingly no such increase in annual premium for my MINI, which stays at £130 fully comp (as it has been for years).

There are a few around. The MINI range has had brown in various shades since the launch in 2001, albeit it hasn’t ever seemed to be very popular. Honda also offered a light metallic brown (Urban Titanium) which my sister had for a time on a 2014 CR-V. The BL colour was called Russet Brown from memory, but I think the P6 Rover picture may have been Mexico Brown (although my memory isn’t what it was for such things!) BRING BACK BROWN! And while we’re at it, bright yellows and bright greens…and Slade. Just not platform shoes or flares please! Without taking this too far down a rabbit hole, ‘taste’ and ‘fashion’ are funny things. People in the 1970s decorated their houses, dressed in the clothes, and bought cars in the colours they did (and bathroom suites!) not because they were daft, or didn’t have taste, but because that was what the consensus said was ‘right.’ In the 1980s it changed again, as it has since the 1990s. Can you imagine Artex ceilings and the like in a modern built house? Or an avocado 🥑 coloured bath (ah, Mitchell and Webb, genius)…but at the time it was considered to be fashionable and every house had them. If you’re interested in such things, the internet has a wealth of fascinating television programmes from all eras. The BBC and Thames archives are particular favourites of mine. Recently I watched a Thames documentary from 1974 about inflation…not that much has changed! The members of the public interviewed wore different clothes but largely complained that the economic decline was the fault of joining the Common Market and going metric. Now almost everything is blamed on leaving that same ‘Common Market.’ 🤪

The link opens fine for me, in MSN news from a Daily Telegraph original article.

A new thread about hydrogen power…hmmm, what could possibly go wrong? 😇

Back in the 1970s my Father had a Granada Ghia ‘fastback’ in a lovely emerald metallic green with a tan leather interior, brown carpets and (from memory) a tan vinyl roof. Mmmmm…

Ah, the law of unintended consequences… As I understand it, the rules were changed so that insurance companies had to offer the same prices to existing customers as to new customers. The objective was to reward loyalty, as we all knew that moving insurance generally offered better prices due to incentives to switch. Move forward to now, and insurance companies realised that being unable to offer incentives meant that - as long as they all did the same - they would all win with the inevitable result that consumers would lose…not what was intended by legislators but there you go! Unintended consequence strikes again. Slightly different, but mobile telephone ‘roaming’ charges were outlawed by the European Union. When the UK left the EU most companies reintroduced them. “It’s the fault of Brexit” they cried in unison…well, sort of. Brexit allowed them to reintroduce the charges, but didn’t force them to do so. It was simply that the legal imperative had been removed. In essence, legalised robbery just to increase profits. Shameful.

Understand that Tata have decided to build their European battery factory in Bridgewater, Somerset - likely because of JLR production in the UK. Site was chosen instead of Spain. As far as I’m aware, the formal announcement is still awaited even though all media sources seem to know… https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uk-set-win-battle-host-tata-electric-car-battery-plant-bbc-2023-05-24/

I spoke with Lexus Reading about the issue last week and the proposed fix. They claimed to know nothing about the problem or the fix (!) but promised to speak with Lexus UK and call me back. I’m still waiting… …so I wrote to Lexus UK as well. I received the same bland “…we’re aware, all cars are vulnerable to theft blah blah blah…” response that others have had. Not very impressive.