Delphius1

Do you drive with the aircon on? Does the "water" smell sweet? Could be coming out of the heater box. The drain for the heater matrix and aircon evaporator is on the driver's side of the centre console. If you get down by the pedals and look behind the centre console trim there should be a hose coming out of the heater box and down to the floor and outside through a grommet. Could be the drain hose isn't connected or perished and you're getting either condensate (water) from the aircon condensor or coolant from a leaky heater matrix draining into the driver's footwell instead of down the hose and outside. Always hard to diagnose faults without seeing the car. 😉

Check any drains in front of the windscreen in the scuttle panel.

It would be nice if the thieves used tools. The tool of choice for them is the angle grinder or the reciprocating saw. It would be nice if that was the case and the thieves used "proper" tools to remove the cats, but they use angle grinders or reciprocating saws and just cut the exhaust either side of the cat. With the MX-5 they usually cut the downpipe with the cat on it and the mid-pipe, which means the poor victim has effectively to buy a complete new exhaust system. At least with the 2nd gen RX you can get away with replacing the cat with a straight pipe and it will still pass emissions thanks to the cats in the manifolds. But a picky MOT tester might fail it for the missing cat and if you get stopped in the ULEZ in London VOSA or whoever enforces it might have a dim view of it because the cat is part of the Euro (4?) compliance. The missing cat effectively makes your car not compatible with the ULEZ. Family up North in Tameside have been warned of the issue, thanks to the OP for posting the warning. (To keep post on topic).

I'm involved in the MX-5 scene and as difficult as you'd think it would be for a low-slung sports car to be a popular target, the cat stealers prefer the 2001-2005 MX-5 above other cars because the cat is quite large and has a higher quantity of rare metals in it. The cat from that year MX-5 on it's own is worth over £200 scrap, compared to (say) £20 for a Fiesta. Lots of thefts in London, especially South London. Of course as London becomes greener and cars have to be ULEZ-compliant (and require more/bigger cats) then the thefts will be concentrated where there's more cats available. But Japanese cars seem to be more of a target, I assume because the cats are better quality and fetch better money. Ashton is my home town although I now live on the South Coast. I've parked in that car park loads of times taking Mum to M&S. I'll have to be wary from now on.

I'd second the door switch for the interior lights. With the lights on auto, with the ignition off when you open the driver's door the headlamps should go out. If they don't, the thing that senses the door is opened may be broken. Or frozen. Any dampness in the car that condenses on the switch may freeze in this weather and jam it.

Yep, I second that. It's usually accepted that "lifetime" generally has a limit of 100,000 miles, although on transmissions that are known to have issues with old transmission fluid, it can be prudent to replace the fluid every 50,000 miles. Just my opinion and what I've heard from mechanics. What manufacturers call lifetime has a different definition from what a normal person would infer from the word. "Lifetime" can be the warranty period (as short as 3 years), or the intended lifetime of that model from the manufacturers point of view (maybe 5-10 years), or it could be mileage (usually 100,000 miles). Basically it's marketing-speak for as long as it takes for punters to stop bringing the car back to main dealers for service so it becomes someone else's problem. 🙂

When I mentioned coasting, I meant just taking my foot off the accelerator, not going into neutral. I suppose I should have said overrun or engine braking. In an Rx300 the auto box is the usual slush-matic, with normally a fluid connection between the engine and the wheels via the Torque convertor. There is a lock-up clutch, but that isn't always engaged. In fact if you take your foot off the accelerator and roll for a while, you can just feel the clutch disengage as the car feels as though there is a little less braking through the transmission. I assume under a normal engine-braking/overrun scenario, the car rolls with the lock up clutch engaged and the engine being turned by the transmission and the injectors off, then at some point (seems to be around 25mph) the ECU decides to start putting fuel into the injectors to keep the engine idling and disengages the clutch, so the only connection to the transmission is via the fluid in the torque convertor to stop the engine stalling. Just that almost imperceptible nudge as the engine starts to turn itself again and the lock-up clutch disengages. Going down long hills, rather than keep using the brakes, I knock the transmission into sport and select a lower gear like 3rd and the transmission and engine ECUs detect that the transmission is able to keep the engine turning without fuel, so it locks up the clutch and you get proper engine braking. In the hybrid, the gearbox is totally different with the MGU harvesting energy once the car is on the overrun and returning it back to the battery (Regen). I've not driven a hybrid, so I've not felt the dynamics of how the gearbox, engine and MGU operate.

I'm a Grandad too, so the statement is true. Yep, the engine in the Getz isn't the most efficient or refined thing in the world. The Fiat Uno was a good, cheap, fun car. Snikking up and down the gearbox keeping the revs up in true Italian style was a lot of fun, for such a small car. A lot more fun than you'd think a 1.0 would be. When you close the doors of the Getz, the tinniness takes me right back to the Uno... 😄

That's true, although I don't skimp on the acceleration side of things... I just work with the mass of the car once all that bulk is rolling.. The hybrid models are certainly a more elegant way of harvesting that kinetic energy once it's got going. Definitely the way to go, but I had misgivings about investing is 15-year old hybrid technology. Possibly unfounded, but I couldn't risk any expensive bills. The same reason I avoided the airbag equipped SE-L.

John, it's a Hyundai Getz Automatic (explains the lack of acceleration). I know, but she wanted a small car with an Auto gearbox. I wanted a Car I could pick up for less then £500. Yeah, a grandad car, but it so reminds me of the Fiat Uno, except the engine doesn't rev as freely as the old Fiat FIRE engines. It's almost a classic: 2004 and less than 50K miles. 🙂

I find if you drive any RX like a normal car, you're going to get bad economy (you'll also wear the brakes out quicker too). The trick with any RX (including the hybrids) is to use the car's mass. For instance when you take your foot of the accelerator, the car will coast for quite a while. I was surprised how far the car can coast before you have to re-apply the throttle. Get up to 30mph in town and take your foot off, it can coast for quite a way and still stay close to 30mph. To be honest, it wasn't like that at first, thanks to under-inflated tyres and sticking brakes. But those were easily sorted. Using the coasting method, I get around 22 mpg around town on my daily commute in my RX300. That's with AC always on, a heavy toolbox permanently in the back and no deliberate mileage-enhancement. If I drive it like a normal car, the mpg does start to drop down and has gone as low as 17mpg. The hybrids should get better mileage, using the battery to store the energy gained under regen. Then I get in the wife's 1300 and it's a different ball game. Great mileage, but the lack of acceleration is painful.

Easiest way I found to remove the panel over the fuse box was to put the ignition key in each of the three slots and just twist it slightly. It releases the catch quite easily. No need for excessive force, just insert and twist a bit and the catch comes free. When putting the panel back, make sure the pegs at the back locate in the holes otherwise the panel drops down eventually. To get at the fuse box you have to be a 20 year old contortionist. Any older or less supple, you will struggle/ache for a week/require back surgery (delete as age-appropriate) after getting to it as it's buried up there under the glovebox. Moving the passenger seat back fully does help, a little. The Sunroof fuse is definitely in that fuse box under the glove box. As are the fuses for any of the 12v sockets. I have high 12v demands, so I know all about those fuses and the pain after accessing them. 😉 Make sure you have the correct fuse available. I think it's called a micro-blade fuse. The engine fuse box uses different sized fuses. I found out thanks to those pesky 12v demands. I didn't appreciate getting under the glovebox and finding that out. Also I wasn't impressed the fuse box under the dash doesn't have space for spare fuses either. Do put the chiropractor on standby before you attempt to access the fuse box though.

The nav being out may be something as simple as a blown fuse. The interior fuse box is up under the glove box under a cover and is notoriously hard to find if you don't know where it is. But that suspension is the killer. It will fail and it will cost £600 per corner. When I was looking I deliberately sought out the SE model with springs. The price of the car on eBay is around what a good one would go for with everything working. My 2004 RX300 SE-Nav cost £2.5K over 2 years ago. So it's not really much of a bargain considering the lack of the Nav unit. If it's the Nav unit itself that's faulty, it's not a cheap item even second-hand. I don't know if it's coded to the car, I've never had to swap one thankfully. It depends if you want to roll the dice, how much of a gambler are you?

I'd second walking away from an SE-L with air shocks. Find an SE-Nav instead. Springs in the suspension and Nav with reversing camera. The SE-L was okay when it was new and under warranty, but an older car outside of warranty is a liability. £600 per corner when the shocks rust through. And they will. Just bear in mind the Nav on a 2005 car will be pretty clunky and the last upgrade didn't improve it much. I just use it for preset destinations to hear the posh lady's voice. Day-to-Day I use Waze for navigation on my phone, it's easier to use being totally hands-free.

The invertor charging circuit for the 12v battery may not be faulty. These small sealed batteries only have a very low charge rate, basically a trickle charge. Because they are sealed, they cannot accept too much current. If a charger supplies too much current, the battery starts gassing. That's the water being converted to oxygen and hydrogen and floating away into the atmosphere. In an open wet lead acid battery, gassing isn't a problem because you just top up the electrolyte with distilled water. In a sealed battery, that's your capacity going out of the vents. You don't have the ability to top up the electrolyte, so gassing in a sealed battery is a bad thing. A trickle charge allows the gas to eventually recombine in the battery case without pressure in the case getting up to dangerous levels and opening the vents. So even after a good long run the battery may still be effectively flat. In fact it may take days of charging to bring a sealed lead acid battery up to full charge, especially the AGM or Gel battery types. That's another reason why I recommend a small solar panel to keep the battery topped up. It's better for battery life to maintain the charge rather than let the battery go flat and then charge it up again. It's also less of a pain waiting days for the battery to be fully charged once it goes flat. I don't have a hybrid to check, but I'd bet the charging current on even a healthy circuit will only be in the region of 2A max.

The best thing I can recommend to maintain a battery is a solar panel with an OBD2 plug on it. It plugs into the OBD2 port and therefore directly to the 12v battery. Keeping the battery charge maintained helps prevent sulphation of the lead plates in the battery due to the battery being left partially or completely discharged. It helps extend the life of the battery massively, especially on cars that don't get driven much, or where there is a constant drain on the battery, or like with hybrids where the 12v battery is quite small capacity-wise and doesn't take much to discharge to a significant level. The solar panel can be left on the dashboard and it just sits there and keeps the 12v battery topped up. I have one and it can be plugged into any car with an OBD2 port, which is anything since the year 2000. Ours fits in my RX and also my wife's Hyundai. Of course this is only useful if the car is left outside with some sunlight and not left in a garage! The sooner hybrid makers start to use super-capacitors for the 12v electrics the better. They are better suited to the large swings of charging level than lead-acid batteries.

Techstream might be of use here as it's able to dig deeper into the ABS system and check out the brakes, if necessary you can run active tests of the ABS system and Techstream will report back any issues. I know you say you've changed the ABS module, but did you change the electronic part, the valve block or both parts of the ABS module together. Also, did you use Techstream or something similar to actively bleed the brakes once the ABS module was changed? There's a procedure in Techstream that you need to go through once the ABS module has been changed. It activates the ABS pump to pressurise and actively bleed each brake circuit in turn. It pumps brake fluid through the ABS valve block to each caliper in turn. There is a YouTube video about it somewhere, I'm sure I've seen it.

I also gets a bit murky when you factor in London's ULEZ. Because of the high rate of Cat thefts in Greater London, I just wonder how many people are running around inside the ULEZ without the secondary cat? I also wonder that if you're missing the cat and technically not meeting whatever Euro emissions standard, if VOSA ever stopped you in London you'd be liable for multiple breaches of the rules. Not only construction and use regs, but the ULEZ rules as well. Could get a bit expensive!

When I got my car I clay barred it and then applied wax polish. The clay bar picked up several years worth of rubbish off the surface so it was worth doing. It's always satisfying to feel the smooth paint surface you get once you've clay barred. Then wax polish was applied for protection. As the car's 16 years old now, tit was a bit of overkill, but it brought the paint up pretty well. I got the clay bar kit off ebay with the lubricant. As for products, I tend to use Meguiars a lot. Their ultimate compound works well keeping my plastic headlamps clear and shiny. I use their glass cleaner ion the windows inside and outside the car. It also works well on the black shiny trim round the windows too. The wax I use is part of a kit I got given as a sample. I can't remember the name but it's a pink liquid wax and works very well protecting the paint. Although I've used Autoglym high definition wax before with good results. As for cloths I use microfibre cloths from Lidls. No point in paying more for the same cloth elsewhere. I really need to sort out my scabby wheels though as they let the rest of the car down. 🙂

It's not just Lexus, there are many design faux-pas by manufacturers across the industry. designers think they're clever by packaging cars ever smaller, but don't take into account general maintenance. So you find it ridiculously hard to change things which should be easy to change. Having to remove the entire front end to change a headlamp bulb is probably the worst one I've heard of. But my mechanic was cursing when he did my front wishbones.

What a Lexus mechanic will pick up and flag to you is a different standard than an MOT tester is looking for. An MOT tester is looking for failure of the bush. What he may do is mark the bush as "degraded but not excessively so" in an advisory, or "degraded but not causing excess movement". So I wouldn't worry too much about cracked rubber because the surface of the rubber can be cracked with age but the bush can still be doing it's job. Until the tester actually comes back with a failure or advises it really should be changed in the next 12 months. I think the term the MOT testers use to say the bushes are on their last legs is "bush allowing movement but not excessively so" or something like that. Basically the bush is allowing the arm to move but it's not failed...yet. But it will do soon. My front bushes got changed when I noticed excessive wear on the edges for the front tyres. I looked at the bushes and they were completely shot. So they got replaced with polyurethane bushes that should last quite a while.

Is that what you call "Being as Thick as Thieves"??

Lol, I see damage pretty regular when garages fit shocks and use the air gun to tighten the top nut for the shock piston. So much torque the d-shaped hole becomes a round hole, the piston spins and the seals on the shocks tear. I've seen brand new shocks reduced to scrap by overzealous use of the impact air gun. I once saw one so bad the shaft of the shock had gone blue with heat it had caused so much friction spinning in the top mount. "No sir, that's not a warranty issue....you need to have a word with your garage....."

I just followed this video to programme my key. Did it myself with Techstream for the imm0obiliser and the door open/close thing for the remote locking. From 3:40 it shows the remote locking larning routine:

I forgot to add to my post above. Another classic issue is towbars that mount the towbar further back than standard. That then reduces the amount of weight that can be put on the towbar. Think of the towbar as a lever with the rear axle as the pivot point. The further away from the pivot, the greater turning force any given weight will have on the pivot. So the further out from the back of the car the towball is, the greater effect the nose weight will have on the suspension, as well as any movement under way. Dynamic forces on the towbar when under way can also be amplified by a poorly designed towbar with a significantly lower nose weight. It's worth checking the specs of the towbar as some towbars will have a lower nose weight than the car manufacturer's official nose weight because of this reason amongst others. It may be on the type approval plate on the towbar, or it's worth checking with the towbar maker to see if their figure is lower than the figure for the manufacturer's recommendations. An aftermarket towbar nose weight could be several kilos lighter than the manufacturer's standard figure. Land Rovers are notorious for this (the max allowable nose weight can be as mush as 50Kg shy of the manufacturers figure), but it becomes really important when you're towing big weights and trying to accommodate a nose weight of a certain percentage of the trailer weight. It's been a while since I've towed something really huge, so I kinda forgot. 🙂 Make sure you're in the sweet spot for the tow bar nose weight, the car's max allowable nose weight, the hitch max nose weight and the caravan manufacturer's max nose weight. Not all may be the same. You might be thinking a particular nose weight is correct, but you could still be overloading the vehicle if you don't pay attention to the maximums allowed and anything in the rig that could change that, especially if it reduces the figure by a significant factor, like the scenario above.