Thackeray

Lexus/Toyota hybrid cars have a petrol engine like conventional cars, which provides the heat for the cabin via the engine coolant. Purely electric cars don't have this source of heat, so they have to provide some other means of heating the cabin. The original Volkswagen beetle had the same problem as its Porsche designed rear-mounted engine was air cooled. Can't remember how they solved the problem but I seem to recall that the heating wasn't very effective. The key question for Dylan is what temperature the cabin reaches. Does it stick at, say, 10 degrees or does it go up to around 20?

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Well, that sounds like a fault. Just to double check, it's zero degrees outside, you start up the cold car, you use Normal mode rather than ECO, you press Auto on the climate control and select a temperature (say, 23 degrees). No other buttons are pressed after this. After a 20 minute drive, the cabin is still only, say, 10 degrees. If I did this in the IS300h, there would initially be little air flow. But after about five minutes (or maybe longer in cold weather) the engine is warm enough to supply warm air to the cabin and the fans start to turn faster to heat the cabin. Then when the cabin is warm the fans slow down again and cool air comes from the face vents. If you can use the free Hybrid Assistant app, it will show you what the cabin temperature sensor is reading, along with the outside temperature, and the engine temperature. On the other hand, a simpler test when you're driving the car is to ask yourself, "Can I take my coat off?" If the answer is "No," then your heating is not working properly. I'm not familiar with the NX but cold cars were phased out in the 1950s, even though the first heaters were optional extras. So I doubt the absence of warmth is a new feature for the NX.

So is the problem that the cabin is cold? Or is the cabin temperature ok but you'd prefer to have warm air coming from the face vents? What happens when you turn on the windscreen demister after the engine has warmed up - do you get warm air onto the windscreen?

If it's not intentional, I can't think of any reason why the headlights would turn on at midday on a cloudless bright sunny day. What might make this happen?

Just to be clear, did you mean to write "the car does get up to temperature quickly" or did you mean the car is slow to get up to temperature? If the cabin has reached the set temperature you probably won't get warm air from the face vents. On the IS300h it will gently blow warm air from the face vents initially while the car is warming up. But it pretty soon switches to cool air as soon as the cabin has warmed up.

I have found that the automatic headlights can come on even when it's midday with a cloudless blue sky. It seems to do this when the sun is fairly low in the sky (mid-winter midday, or summer evening) and is behind the car. This is exactly what you might want. The cars coming towards you are driving towards the sun and it may be hard for their drivers to spot cars coming towards them. If you were controlling the lights yourself you might turn on the headlights to help make your car visible against the sunlight. Is this just a coincidence or is the car able to identify this situation and turn on the headlights in the interests of safety? If so, how does it do this? Is there more than one light sensor?

If the car had been running ok for 50km and you just stopped for five minutes I would guess that it's very unlikely that the 12v battery caused the problem. It would have been fairly well charged while driving. My only other thought is that the power lead clamps might not be securely fixed to the battery terminals. But otherwise my guess would be that it's something else causing the error messages. It will be interesting to hear if you have the messages pop up again.

I would have thought 12.1v was fine. I think it's about 50% charged but that should be plenty to get the car into Ready state. If you still get error messages at this voltage it looks as if the problem is elsewhere. But if you hadn't been using the car much when you saw the error messages, the voltage might have been a bit lower and caused the problem.

If the battery was showing 14.4v, that suggests the reading was taken with the car in Ready mode. This is around the voltage that the hybrid battery feeds to the 12v system to recharge the 12v battery and doesn't indicate the health of the 12v battery. If you leave the car overnight and then check the 12v battery without starting the car, it will probably show around 12v. If it shows below that, say, 11.5v, that might be the cause of all the warning lights. On a lot of Lexus cars the brakes are pressurised when you open the driver's door. (You can hear the pump running.) I don't know if that's the case in the GS450h but it's probably worth taking a battery reading after this, too, but still before pressing the start button. This might explain why initially you get error messages if the 12v battery is depleted by the brake pressurisation but they are gone if you try again after leaving the car for a few minutes, which would give the battery time to recover assuming the brakes didn't need to be pressurised again. If the battery is the original it would almost certainly be on its last legs. But even if it's been replaced it might not be holding the voltage if the car hasn't been used a lot during covid lockdowns.

The DS (third one down) was certainly revolutionary. So was Citroën's Traction Avant of the 1930s. And one of the most stylish cars of the 1960s was the Paris based Facel Vega. But as this thread is not meant to be a catalogue of compliments, I'll just add that's it's a pity that the company went downhill after it decided to build an engine with only two camshaft bearings instead of four. Apparently the engines didn't last very long.

It looks as if I'm the fifth in this thread to have this rear window seal problem. About eighteen months ago I noticed a few drips of water landing in the same place as CypressPhil described above as "the plastic thing that sits on top of the battery (that holds the puncture repair kit)". There's nothing above this except metal bodywork so I initially wondered if it was a weld seam failing. But I eventually became more convinced that it could only be coming from the seal around the rear window. A drip would fall into the car from the window seal, presumably it would then roll down an internal concealed strut by the side of the boot and eventually fall off the strut into the plastic box, some distance to the rear of the window. The box itself is conveniently big enough to hold a fair amount of water without it overflowing onto the 12v battery. Like Colin (colabora962) above I tried Granville Silicone Sealant along the window seal. I went for the clear version rather than the black. It seemed to help and reduced the amount of water that dripped over the course of a few days. But it was still dripping from time to time. Then I read this thread and Wharfhouse's recommendation of Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack Cure. This is a liquid the colour and consistency of milk. It just flows like water and penetrates cracks before setting. So I tried trickling some down the seal and it quickly became obvious that it had penetrated below the Granville silicone sealant. You could see the white Tolley's liquid creeping below the transparent silicone, like a vein visible below the skin. A few white drops fell into the plastic box but then stopped. The liquid becomes transparent rather than white when it sets. As the liquid is difficult to control precisely I used a craft glue syringe (£2.99 from Amazon) to apply it drop by drop. And now, so far, the plastic box is completely dry. There hasn't been a lot of rain in the last week or so which means I can't be certain it's completely fixed. But a big thank you to Wharfhouse for the recommendation. It may have solved a longstanding irritation for a few pounds instead of a few hundred. If it hasn't, I'll give it another application and hope that it will be gone for good. Incidentally, I first discovered the drip because the puncture repair kit in the plastic box was wet. For other owners, if this window seal problem is widespread, it might be worth taking out the repair kit to make sure it's dry and there's nothing dripping from above it.

Macron bans UK over-65s from French restaurants I didn't notice it last week but I've just read that Macron has restricted the validity of covid vaccination certificates to six months and five weeks from the second vaccination. This can be extended by having a booster. (Most countries allow a year's validity from the date of the second vaccination.) No problem then, you might think, just get a booster. Except that in the UK the booster is not recorded on the NHS app so there's no way to prove you've had one. So from 15 December, if you can't prove you've had a booster (you won't be able to prove it if you're British) you're not allowed in restaurants, bars, clubs, long distance trains etc in France.

Here's a video showing the effect of aquaplaning with new tyres first on the rear and then on the front.

Many thanks for the detailed explanation. Much appreciated. As for the high voltage battery, my guess (based on no information at all) is that the top priority is to make sure the high voltage is completely safe and connected to absolutely nothing unless the car is operating correctly. I think I've read that there is an isolating switch on the high voltage battery which is only turned on when the car reaches the Ready state. If that's the case, it might be a challenge to design how to allow power from the high-voltage battery to the 12v battery in the event of some sort of fault (ie low voltage in the 12v battery). If the fault can't be safely identified it might not be a good idea to connect the high voltage. Perhaps there's a solution but the designers probably just assume that the 12v battery should always be in good condition.

Are you saying that you couldn't start the car with a portable jump starter? I have one in the glove box but I'm wondering if it might be pointless to bother with it.

This is inconsiderate, obviously. But ultimately I blame the service station companies who designed the layout. Why can't we have service stations like many in France? You fill up at the pump. You then drive up to a payment kiosk at the exit. It isn't possible to leave without paying but at the same time you move your car away from the pump as soon as you've finished filling.

That is often the cause. This is a recent discussion of possible causes of false alarms. It's often an insect in the car.

You may also be able to reset it in the Settings menu. In the DIY Maintenance section of the user manual it says:

The regenerative braking doesn't happen in the brakes. When you brake lightly the brake pads may not operate at all. This is why they wear out much more slowly on the drive wheels (rear wheels on an IS300h) than on a conventional car. Instead, the electricity regeneration happens in the transmission where the motor/generators are. These operate as motors when accelerating and as generators when slowing down. It's a bit like engine braking when you use the engine to slow down the car. In the hybrid transmission the motor/generators slow down the car by generating electricity which is then stored in the battery.

Not in an NX, but I once filled up my IS300h in France while the display was switched to kilometres and the range immediately after filling up was a little over the psychologically gratifying mark of 1,000 kilometres. That's just about enough to get from Calais to the Mediterranean coast.

Others have already given the answer but I'll just add some other details. The car runs the engine when it's needed for whatever reason. In the winter if you have the climate control set to Auto, the car will know you want heat. The heat for the cabin comes from the engine so if the engine is cold the car knows it must start the engine to provide heat for the cabin. You can test this by turning off the Climate Control when the engine is running with the car parked; often the engine will stop if it's not needed for any other reason. Bear in mind that the engine also runs for other reasons. For example, it will run to charge the hybrid battery if it is at or below 40% charge (two bars on the dashboard meter). It will keep running if it has already started and has not yet reached 50 degrees. But otherwise the engine will stop if you turn off the Climate Control. So, of course, in the summer when heat is not needed the engine may not start. However, in winter when the engine is cold when it starts, it will take a few minutes before it's warm enough to provide heat for the cabin. So until the coolant water is warm enough the climate control fan runs very slowly, rather than blast the passengers with cold air. When the engine coolant is warm enough to provide heat the fan will speed up until the cabin is warm enough. Just leave it on Auto and the car will do what's needed. As for the windscreen demisting, I think from memory that it will provide a blast of air whatever the engine temperature. The air comes via the air conditioner so even if the engine is still cold, it begins to demist the windscreen. It presumably works more quickly if the engine is already warm.

Have a look at this thread. If you scroll down a bit you'll see a picture of the parking pawl along with an explanation of why you get a clunk. There's also a video which I think is supposed to suggest a way to avoid this happening.

I know what you mean. Panic buying of champagne? There's nothing worse!

Poorer countries? You mean Germany and France? Or perhaps Austria! Oh, I know, you must be talking about Italy!