Thackeray

If it's been serviced on schedule over the course of 75,000 miles - every 10,000 or 12,500 miles - it should have had at least six services. If the mileage is recorded for each of these services it might help to build up a picture of what has happened to the car. It's unlikely that the mileage would have been recorded wrongly on every service.

Are all the VIN stickers present on the car's bodywork? There should be one on every metal panel. For example, they should be on the inner rim of the boot lid, bonnet, every door edge, the side body panels. If they're present, do they show the correct number? If any are missing this suggests bodywork repairs, which would not be surprising on a 75,000 mile car. Does the service history show any repairs or changes of tyres? If it's really 75,000 miles you would expect around three changes of tyres.

On the IS300h the symbol on the button represents something called "Pollen Removal Mode". There's no dedicated button on the IS300h but you can turn it on from the air conditioning screen where it shows the symbol. From memory, I think this function turns off automatically after about 10 minutes. My guess, partly based on the picture on the button, would be that it concentrates all the air through the filter, whereas perhaps this doesn't happen to the same extent in normal operation. So I'd be inclined to take out the filter and see if it has some scent!

You're right. I found it in a couple of seconds! Actually I use Qwant rather than Google for searching. Just on principle, I'm not keen on Google knowing everything that I do!

That's the item. But how did you find it? I find the forum search function impossible to use. In this example I knew it was by Britprius and I knew it was about TPMS but nothing I do in the search page will produce the right item (or indeed any results from Britprius). Even knowing it's by Britprius and now knowing the title is "TPMS system fault" I still can't get the search function to find it. What am I doing wrong?

Isn't the bonnet made of aluminium so no risk of rust?

My guess would be that there's a good chance that this technique results in the parking pawl sometimes not engaging with the parking gear. I don't suppose this matters as the parking brake is holding the car but here's a video that shows the parking pawl and parking gear in a similar Toyota transmission. From this you can see that sometimes the parking pawl may not slip into a slot in the parking gear. This is the Prius P410 transaxle, whereas the IS300h has the L210 transmission, which is pretty similar but designed for rear wheel drive rather than front wheel drive. If you look at the video you can see that the parking pawl won't necessarily fit into a slot on the parking gear unless it turns a fraction to line up the pawl with the slot. This movement is what causes the jolt you sometimes feel when it engages. It probably doesn't matter whether it engages or not because if the parking brake were to fail, the parking pawl would still slide into the next slot of the parking gear before the car had a chance to move more than a fraction. And for normal use, if the brakes are holding the car whenever Drive is selected, it will never be obvious whether the parking pawl was engaged or not.

I've just noticed from a document on the internet about the 2007 Camry that at that time Toyota was recommending inverter coolant replacement at 100,000 miles. For the very similar setup on the IS300h it's now 150.000. So it may be that they revise the recommendation in the light of experience.

I noticed a couple of days ago that when I pressed Auto for the climate control, the aircon light went off. Usually aircon will be turned on when you press Auto. I've never noticed this before and guessed that it must have been because the outside temperature was around minus 5. But as far as I remember, I could still press the aircon button to turn it on again and I think it came on automatically when I pressed the button to demist the front screen. It was just when I pressed Auto again when the demisting was finished that the aircon turned off. I haven't looked at it in enough detail to know if it would come back on again if the outside temperature rises enough.

One of the advantages of buying a second-hand hybrid Lexus is that you know the transmission has never been in the control of someone driving roughly. It's entirely computer controlled and all the driver can do is make requests to the computer for speed or acceleration via the accelerator position or the simulated "gearchange" controls. Everything the transmission does has been decreed in advance by the engineers who designed the transmission software. By contrast, a manual gearbox can get all kinds of abuse (and maybe damage) from an aggressive driver. As for the service schedule attached above, it's interesting that it mentions "inverter coolant" replacement at 150,000 miles. As I understand it, the inverter coolant circuit also cools motor generator 1 (MG1) and MG2 which are both integral parts of the transmission, with the water based coolant circulating what must be just centimetres from the transmission oil. If Lexus go to the trouble of specifying coolant replacement for one part of the transmission it looks odd that they don't specify oil replacement within the same unit if it's actually required. Although they list "automatic transmission" for inspection, I'd suspect that they mean a conventional automatic, not an e-CVT. Toyota make automatics, as well as conventional CVTs too, and the oil recommendation for these wouldn't necessarily apply to a hybrid e-CVT. So why do they mention the automatic in this schedule? I think it's just a general schedule for different types of car. For example, it says inspection is needed for the ancillary drive belt for alternator, power steering and air conditioning. But Lexus hybrids don't have any of these - there's no alternator, the power steering is electric, not belt driven, and so is the air conditoning. This list is obviously not specific to Lexus hybrids. Having said all that, it seems odd that the differential oil is specified to be changed every 20,000 miles, whereas the oil in the planetary gearset of the e-CVT has no schedule for change, even though conceptually the differential and the e-CVT are quite similar - just a set of permanently engaged cog wheels. I wonder if it's that they've made the judgement that on balance there's more that might go wrong with a careless change of the transmission oil than will go wrong if you leave it untouched from when it leaves the factory. A bit of a mystery.

On the IS300h you switch to the station you want to save, display the preset screen press and hold the preset number you want to overwrite with the currently playing station. It may be different on your car but "press and hold" seems a common way to save a new preset station.

They would if they could! I think lorries have limiters restricting speed to 90 km/hr (about 56 mph) and buses 100 km/hr.

My guess is that if you leave it for 10 minutes this is long enough for the battery to recover enough to get the computers going and into Ready state. Check the voltage if you can but it sounds as though a seven year old battery is being drained by the radio just enough to prevent it having enough power to get all the systems started until it's had a bit of time to recover.

It doesn't cost much but I've always felt that filling with nitrogen is just a marketing ploy when applied to ordinary cars. (Formula One may be a different matter.) The fact is, if you fill with ordinary air, that's already about 80% nitrogen. As I understand it, (correct this if it's wrong!) the nitrogen molecules are bigger than oxygen molecules so they don't seep through the rubber tyre, whereas the oxygen can gradually escape through the rubber, reducing the tyre pressure. Much of the remaining 20% in the atmosphere is oxygen. So that gives the potential for up to 20% of the air to seep out. But even if all the 20% escaped, the air that was used to replace it would again be 80% nitrogen. So the original inflation gives you 80% nitrogen and a second inflation to replenish the missing 20% gives you another 80% nitrogen taking the total volume to 96% nitrogen just by inflating the tyre with air and then topping it up once. So I've never bothered with paying for nitrogen inflation.

Good point! As you say, the advantage of using the touch method to lock the car is that you can see and hear that it's been locked. If the key's radio signal was jammed and the touch method wouldn't work, you'd notice that the car wasn't locked. Whereas if you used the fob only you might not notice whether the car had been locked or not. This is all probably quite a remote possibility anyway but you do read in newspapers anecdotes about these kinds of attempted thefts. Maybe they don't really happen in practice.

After all the design effort Lexus put into the locking system, it's a pity that it won't keep the car secure. So I've gradually refined how I lock the car. The habit I now use is: touch the car handle to lock the doors. This is because if you use the key fob the radio signal could be jammed by some thief across the car park, the result being that the car isn't actually locked when you walk away from it. When you use the touch pad on the door handle I assume (perhaps wrongly!) there are no radio signals involved. Disable the key fob. The combined button operation means that this does two things at the same time. First, the lock button double-locks the doors since they are already locked before pressing the button. Second the key fob is disabled so the radio signal can't be relayed from the keyfob to the car. On balance, as a habit it's little more effort than just using either the keyfob or the touch pad on the door handle but potentially makes theft of the car a little more difficult. As others have said, a steering lock would be a good addition but I haven't got around to doing this and as the car gets older it's probably less of a target for thieves anyway.

I don't know if the DAB radio has been improved in recent models but it's hopeless in my 2014 car. This forum contains many comments on how people have given up on trying to make it work. This weakness indicates two managerial shortcomings that Lexus UK might be able to help with. First, the software setup of the DAB seems to indicate a complete lack of understanding of how UK DAB works. The Japanese digital radio system is different, I believe, and it seems that whoever implemented the UK version had no idea of how it was supposed to be used. The result is that you have to switch from one "ensemble" to another (I had to look this up on Google) before you can switch from one station to another. This is nonsense and represents unfinished software. Instead you just want a complete alphabetical list of available stations. That's just one individual problem but it represents a lack of any attempt to understand non-Japanese requirements. UK input is needed on something like this at the design stage. The second problem is that having designed some software that is very difficult to use, there should be a user manual which explains how to make it work. Here the problem is that the manual gives the impression that it was written in Japanese and then translated into English by someone who also didn't know anything about UK DAB radio. The result is that you have a feature that is not intuitive to use and the documentation does not help. What's missing here from the managerial point of view is Document Testing. Ask the man at Lexus if they have a Document Testing department. Probably the answer will be "no". If it's "yes" that's good but in the case of the DAB radio it's obvious that they didn't get a native English speaker to test the document. The testing should involve getting a native English speaker with no knowledge of DAB radio and sit him or her in the car with the manual and see if he or she can get the radio to work. If they can't do it and the radio isn't broken this is a failure of the Documentation and the manual needs to be rewritten and re-tested until it achieves its goal of successfully helping the user. It's a complete waste of development and manufacturing time, even with good products, if the buyer can't make it work and the manual doesn't explain clearly how to use it. So an English language Documentation Testing department is needed or if it already exists it needs to be reorganised to achieve its goals.

Toyotec in Redhill seem to get good reports. I haven't tried them myself though, so it would be good to hear of any reviews good or bad.

Are you able to say which insurance company this is? Maybe all insurance companies act this way or maybe this one is best avoided for the future.

It's a while since you asked this so maybe you've resolved the problem. But if not, the Hybrid Assistant app shows the actual percentage. In this picture, it's showing 64% on the right of the display. The normal operating range for the battery on my car seems to be 40% to 80%. When the battery gets down to 40% the dashboard is showing two bars and the engine starts to recharge the battery. I've never seen one bar that I can remember so it's surprising if you're seeing one bar. Eight bars represents up to 80%. The range 50% to 60% seems to be represented by three to six bars.

I doubt that the CVT transmission actually makes much noise apart from the usual noise you get from electric motors. If the engine is not running, I expect the CVT with its two electric motors would produce a similar noise to an electric car. When journalists talk about noise from the CVT I think what they're talking about is the engine noise. That's because the CVT allows the engine to spin up to maximum power which for most petrol engines can be quite noisy. Conventional transmissions don't allow this unless you change to the lowest possible gear.

I don't understand this. I'm sure the president of the AA knows a thing or two about cars but I thought modern cars used rolling codes from the key. So there's no point in capturing the code from the key as it will be different next time. In a previous thread, I seem to remember Len mentioned a technique in which thieves block the signal as you lock your car and then you don't notice that the car is left unlocked for collection later. Maybe this is what happened to the AA president's wife's car. Since that thread, I've adopted Len's advice and locked the car by touching the handle so there are no signals to intercept and you know the car is locked. Then I do the key combination on the fob to turn the key off. This simultaneously double-locks the car and turns off the key's signal. This seems pretty secure to me unless the AA president is right in thinking you can capture key codes and then come back later to use those codes and steal the car.

People want the momentary drop in revs and the physical jolt of the car as you change gear because several generations of drivers over the past hundred years have been taught that this is what a car does. But I'm another odd one out and also prefer the continuous smooth acceleration, particularly at a green light when the cars beside me are speeding up and slowing down, going ahead and dropping behind as they change gear. (I'm not talking about racing away from the lights - just gentle acceleration up to 20 or 30 mph before the next red light comes up.) However, what I don't understand is why the people who want the jolt and drop in revs in a car don't demand the same in a jet plane or a power boat, or an electric powered train, come to that. Can anyone explain why people don't demand the same lack of smoothness in these other forms of transport?

It's worth remembering that the primary purpose of the hybrid battery is to store electricity regenerated from braking. If the battery was full, the regenerated electricity would have to be thrown away as heat. So the car's computer aims to keep the battery around half full. This leaves plenty of space to store newly regenerated electricity. And it also gives a decent reserve of power for the occasional boost of acceleration from the electric motors or a short gentle cruise on battery alone with the petrol engine turned off. What I've found with my IS300h (other Lexus hybrids may be programmed differently) is that if you leave the car stationary in Park and in Ready mode, the hybrid battery will gradually run down to 40%. This is shown as two bars on the dashboard meter. The engine will then start and recharge the battery up to 50% (shown as three bars) and the engine will then stop. The battery will then start to go down again until it hits 40% and the process is repeated. When cruising, the parameters seem to be different. I've found that setting cruise control at 70 mph results in the hybrid battery being charged up to 60% or around six bars. The range from 50% to 60% seems to be shown by three to six bars. This sounds like your experience after 25 miles of cruise control. I've only seen eight bars on a couple of occasions. This represents around 80% charge and at this level the car takes action to prevent overcharging the battery. I've seen this when cruising down a long continuous hill of around two miles. At some point, it sounds as if the engine starts after not running at the start of the descent. This seems confusing. But actually the engine is turning without fuel and just sounds as if it is running. It is being turned by the electric motors to use up electricity and actually discharge the battery slightly. I've never seen one bar on the dashboard display. This would be less than 40%. If you're interested in seeing all of this in action, the free Android app Hybrid Assistant is worth a look.

Interesting that the manual says the TPMS must be reset if the tyres are rotated. Can someone explain why this is? It may be that later models than mine have a different system but I thought the sensors inside the tyres simply transmitted an ID number and the tyre pressure to the car. The car can then report the pressure for each sensor to any device that can read it. (On the dashboard it just puts up a warning light if any of the pressures are too low.) But how does it know which corner the tyre is on unless an installer has identified the location of each sensor? If it's just a radio signal from the sensor to the car, how can this be affected by moving the tyre from one corner to another? And if it can't, why is there any need to reset the system after tyre rotation? Can anyone provide enlightenment?