Thackeray

Purely hypothetically, I imagine it would be possible for the car to be propelled without the hybrid battery. In practice, this probably happens much of the time. I've realised after puzzling over this in the past that the power setup is a bit like one of those old diesel-electric rail locomotives. The ICE drives a generator (motor generator 1) and the generated electricity is used to drive MG2, which is directly linked to the road wheels to drive the car forwards. In addition, (unlike the diesel-electric) MG1 provides resistance to the ICE to stop it spinning freely in the planetary gearset and instead the ICE torque is also transmitted to the road wheels, along with the MG2 torque. In practice, while cruising most of the torque comes from the ICE and a much smaller amount comes from MG2 and MG1. But to get the car moving from stationary, if the engine isn't running the car needs the battery to provide power to MG2 to get the car moving. A short time after the car starts moving, MG1 will usually start the ICE. So, in principle, once moving, the car could do without the hybrid battery. But even if the hybrid battery died suddenly at 70mph (not very likely) I imagine the car wouldn't just keep going because I'm sure the computer wouldn't permit it. And as Herbie has pointed out, there's no way to start the ICE in the Toyotal/Lexus configuration if the hybrid battery isn't there.

Sounds fantastic! I envy you. Small world too! This sounds like the exact spot we went to a good many times. If you're driving to the Furka Pass you'll also drive past Fiesch which is where you would park for the Aletsch glacier. I also remember sitting in the car on the train through the Furka tunnel on one occasion. The tunnel constantly dripped water from the roof and the cars were on open wagons, so it wasn't very pleasant! The pass I'm sure will be much nicer.

Set off at 7am in GS450? Luxury! (as the four Yorkshiremen would say). When I were a lad, set off from mountain village above Sion at 6am in a Mini. Valais to Calais by 6pm. Six hundred miles in 12 hours. Raced onto the ferry as they were about to raise the ramp and cast off. Central London by 10 or 11pm (I forget which). While you're in Valais, have you been to the Aletsch glacier? The biggest glacier in Europe, I believe. Though now I think of it the cable cars to 3,000 metres may not be running because of coronavirus social distancing.

I've wondered for a long time how worth while carrying a spare wheel is and how much more likely is a flat tyre compared to other kinds of breakdown. Over the course of many many years I've had two flat tyres that I can remember. (This doesn't include slow punctures where I could still drive the car.) The first was decades ago in an ancient car that had inner tubes but no spare wheel. Solution was to repair the inner tube by the road side. The second was around 15 years ago when the tyre was completely destroyed at around 80 mph on a French motorway. I managed to coast into a service area and had a spare wheel underneath all the suitcases. By contrast, I've had three breakdowns that I can remember. The first was in a 1960s Mini. The problem was that it was raining. Solution - walk into the nearest town for a cup of tea until the rain stopped and the spark plugs dried out. The second was in another 1960s Mini. The engine stopped. The RAC came out, borrowed my wife's nail varnish and used it to paint over a crack in the distributor cap. The third was a Volvo. I turned off the engine and it wouldn't start again. The problem was some aspect of the ECU. It meant the car wouldn't start when hot as it was constantly supplying to much fuel. Solution - walk into the nearest town for a cup of tea until the engine cooled down and it was cool enough to start again with excess petrol. So that's two tyre problems and three engine problems. How do other people's experiences compare?

The way you've written it suggests the 255 tyres are on the front. I suppose that's not the case and they're actually on the rear.

Yes, I agree, it's confusing. Efficiency perhaps wasn't the right word to use. I was really just comparing how much energy the various cars consume and thought it was interesting to see some figures that you can compare. And, of course, the Tesla figures are probably overall results, so aren't directly comparable to 70mph in the IS300h. I was really more interested in it from the government policy point of view rather than whether one car is preferable to another. If you can generate "free" electricity from renewables then electric cars make a lot of sense. But for today we're comparing a 40% efficient petrol engine (IS300h) with fossil fuel power stations that from memory are also around 40% efficient. (Correct me if that's wrong.) In addition you've got to get the fuel from the oil well to the car's fuel tank (I don't know what that consumes in terms of energy.) And you've got to get fuel to the power station and then the electricity from the power station to the car and I think you lose around 25% of the electricity in transmission grids. So efficiency of conversion of fuel to motion of the car is fairly low in both cases. If you generate your own electricity from your own personal array of solar panels out in a field or on your roof and you feed it straight into your car, then presumably that's going to be a lot better than using a power station to generate electricity. But for the moment this still seems some way off for the average driver.

I haven't tried the Lexus link app. The Hybrid Assistant app is produced by a private enthusiast and is free.

Yes, I believe HUD is a legal requirement in France. When you're tailgating as required in France you can't risk looking down at the dashboard.

There have been a number of threads that discuss mpg on this forum. Measured over a year in all conditions a real 44-45 mpg looks about average (the dashboard will be overestimating and showing around 48 mpg). But I've just come across some other figures that we'll probably have to start looking at in the not too distant future, using kilowatt hours per 100 km instead of miles per gallon. I've finally got around to trying out the Hybrid Assistant app that monitors the performance of Toyota and Lexus hybrids as you drive. It has a partner app called Hybrid Reporter which saves statistics from each trip and displays a vast number of statistics and graphs of what was happening during the trip. As well as storing mpg (on a minute by minute basis if you want) the app produces a graph which shows total energy used in kwh/100 km. The graph it produced for my first half-hour trip showed the IS300h settling down at 70 mph to around 12-13 kwh/100 km. I thought it might be interesting to compare the efficiency of pure electric cars, such as Teslas. This page says the model 3 does 14.73 kwh/100km, while the model S does 20.5 kwh/100km. If these figures are at all close to reality, you have to wonder if it makes sense to be pushing towards purely electric cars if a petrol hybrid uses fuel that much more efficiently than a Tesla model S. Of course, electricity is a lot cheaper to buy than petrol. But that's because most of the cost of petrol in the UK is tax. If people start switching to electricity in large numbers there can be no doubt that governments that rely on petrol tax will gradually increase tax on electricity - they can't afford not to. So when that happens, does electric power still have a big advantage? I suppose if we can generate most electricity with renewables it becomes worthwhile eventually. Until then, maybe a petrol hybrid is still more efficient.

Something seems to have gone wrong with this link as I just see an older version of the list. The one I can download has 11 entries. With Toyotec added it should take it to 12 entries. Here's a link to their website. http://www.toyotec.co.uk

Have you tried registering a different key? Did you close the driver's door while registering the key? Was the car in Park and the power switch ON mode? Here are the instructions from the manual which are slightly different from the video. If you can't register the other key either, maybe it's worth experimenting with memory button 2 or 3.

And nothing happens when you turn the power switch on or fasten a seat belt? (Before you resort to pressing memory 1 button.)

Do you mean it's working as you want? Here's what the manual says:

Have you registered seat preset 1 to the key you're using? Have you turned on the power switch or fastened your seatbelt to get the seat to move to the position recorded on your key?

All the more reason to always carry one of the portable jump starters. Not so much in case your Lexus doesn't start but in case you get asked to jump start someone else's conventional car at 1am with no-one else around. Then you can decline to risk your own car but the jump starter will get the other people started. Incidentally, here's another follow on question for Herbie. Is it ok to jump start another Toyota/Lexus hybrid from your own Toyota/Lexus hybrid car? I'd guess that would be ok. Any thoughts? Edit: I've clarified that this is a question about Toyota/Lexus hybrids. I think there are other makes of hybrids where there is a conventional starter motor starting the engine. These should obviously be treated as conventional cars and not jump started from a Toyota/Lexus hybrid.

As always, Herbie's wide knowledge helps clarify these complicated areas. (Not sure that his explanation could have been much more succinct.) Nonetheless, stand by for my quibble. I've puzzled over this money saving hypothesis before. So now's the time to raise my question. How do Toyota save money by installing an expensive AGM battery, when they could have put in a cheap conventional flooded lead acid unit? Maybe there was another reason. The design group might have said, "We don't need a big battery just to provide 20 amps. So maybe we can get away with a less heavy battery. Any saving in weight will improve fuel consumption. A smaller battery might just push the car into a lower CO2 level and a correspondingly lower tax band."

I get the same as John "GS300h2014". On the other side of the paper it says, "Lexus Hybrid Health Check Pass...This is to certify that your Lexus has successfully passed its annual health check..."

If the independent dealership has taken the car to a Lexus dealer for a hybrid health check, they might expect to have been given a printed report. This is what private customers get. This has a number of different categories under which it can fail, including diagnostic codes. But it also includes internal resistance, internal voltage, and variation between the battery modules that make up the whole unit. To replace any of these could be expensive, particularly if you pay Lexus prices. I would ask to see this report. It may be that driving a few hundred miles could do something to make the diagnostic codes look happier. I haven't come across this problem so I don't know what this might be. But as regards charging the battery, my experience with the IS suggests you don't need a few hundred miles to recharge the battery. On the IS, it takes four minutes while the car is stationary for the engine to raise the hybrid battery charge from its minimum of 40% (represented by two bars on the dashboard display) to its default level of 50% (three bars on the dashboard display). Then the engine stops. This is because the point of the battery is to collect regenerated energy so that it can be used later. If the battery is topped up to eight bars, then the car can't store any regenerated energy.because the battery is already full. If the car is left parked with three bars of charge, I'd expect it still to be showing three bars of charge a week later and possibly even a month later, from what others have reported. So you can easily tell if the hybrid battery is being charged by running the engine for four or five minutes with the car stationary in Park. Don't rev the engine - on the IS charging stops when you rev the engine (or if you select Neutral). You wouldn't be able to tell if it's holding its charge without coming back a few days later. But really you want to see the hybrid health check report to see what the problem actually is. Replacement of modules could be expensive if this is the problem.

If the alternator wasn't working at all, the battery would eventually go completely flat. If you could start the car, you could probably drive quite a long way just running down the battery to provide sparks to the engine. But there might not be enough power remaining in the battery to restart the car after a longish journey. The good voltage when standing and the raised voltage when the engine is running suggest the alternator is doing something - maybe it's fine. The figure of 13.7 volts may be because of regulation for battery temperature or air temperature or something else. If you leave it running it might rise above 14 after a bit. When it dropped to 12.4 was this with the engine still running?

I wonder if the area affected had been resprayed and the surface wasn't well prepared or the paint wasn't very well applied. If it was original factory paintwork you would expect to see a lot more complaints from other VW owners. Thanks for the suggestion, though. I'll try a small amount first just to be cautious.

I was just about to order some of this when I came across a review that says it damaged paintwork. Scroll down the list of reviews till you get to a review in German. The Google translation of this review says: Has anyone else had this experience? Or is there a way to use it and be sure it won't cause damage to the paintwork?

Obviously, the tyres must be changed if they're unsafe. It isn't possible for anyone on the forum to judge without seeing them. But it's worth bearing in mind that to pass the MOT the outer edges can be bald. Here's what the MOT handbook says: "The primary grooves of the tread pattern must be at least 1.6mm deep within the central three-quarters of the breadth of tread and around the entire outer circumference of the tyre (see diagram 1). Either side of the central three-quarters of the tyre can be devoid of tread (‘bald’). Diagram 1. Primary and secondary grooves in tyre tread pattern ...." This is copied and pasted from this government webpage. Personally, I change tyres when they get down to 3mm.

Does your car have smart entry? If it does, the alarm probably won't go off if the car detects the key. There was a discussion about this recently https://www.lexusownersclub.co.uk/forum/topic/124729-has-my-car-got-a-alarm/

Same here. On mine the creaking starts when the weather gets warmer and stops when it's colder. A couple of years ago I saw a thread on this topic and meant to try the products recommended for the door seals. But I found that just washing them with water solved the problem, so I've never got around to trying a specialist cleaning product. It may be that the problem goes away for longer if you use one of these products.

The whole philosophy of these hybrid cars is aimed at not using the mechanical brakes. So in an ideal world they would never wear out. On a conventional vehicle, the car wastes energy when you brake, effectively throwing away the energy as heat. These hybrids aim instead to capture this energy and store it in the battery rather than throwing it away. Running the generators captures the energy and at the same time slows down the car. Of course, in the real world you need mechanical brakes for emergencies, for precise control at low speeds, and for the times when the generators are not powerful enough to slow you down as much as you need, like when coming off a motorway. But if the car is driven moderately, planning ahead for traffic light stops and so on, the experience of Britprius above (140,000 miles on original discs and pads) should be the norm.