Herbie

Just use a steering lock to deter the scrotes in the first place. Hopefully seeing a big yellow steering lock through the window will make them think, "Nah, let's go somewhere else and avoid the hassle of getting that lock off."

I can understand that you're upset about your car being stolen, just like anyone would be, but I really fail to see what you expect Lexus to do about it. It's just a natural progression. It reminds me of the phrase "idiot proof". Yes, something may well be idiot proof, but only until a better class of idiot comes along. When I first started driving, some cars had the 'ignition switch' mounted in the dash and were very easy to steal just by hot-wiring. Then the ignition switch was combined with a steering column interlock, which made it a bit more difficult to steal but not impossible, so even better security was needed and such is the way of the world. For every security system ever invented someone, somewhere, is working on a way of bypassing it. I suppose that it could be said to be a bit of a design fault (with 20/20 hindsight, of course) but it takes anywhere between 7 to 10 years from initial concept to arriving in the showroom. I doubt that anyone would have even known what a CANbus attack was at that time, so we can hardly blame the manufacturer for putting the CAN wiring where they did. No manufacturer has a crystal ball to see what might happen in the future and I'm afraid that the only person responsible for this is the ne'r-do-well who stole the car, not Lexus.

Too late for you now but when you get it back or get a replacement, I would fit one of these trackers It's £35 for the unit and about £60/year for the SIM. It gives live tracking data, history, zoning with alerts for if it moves in/out of a zone, alerts for movement, ignition on and other parameters and you can keep tabs on it either by using their website on a computer or using their app on your phone. If the worst should happen again, after you get the alerts you can ring Plod and say (for example), "It's travelling north on the A6 doing 50mph and is currently at xyz location." Good luck in getting it back.

Many people, both in here and in the Facebook group, are well over the 200k-250k miles mark without problems, so don't worry about that. Even if it does go it would be unlucky for the whole battery pack to be faulty, so you can buy and replace individual cell blocks for about £30-£50 on eBay.

Some pumps have been known to eat their bearings, so a mechanical problem rather than electrical/electronic, so it may be worth taking it out anyway?

Maybe, maybe not. It may be full but is the pump circulating the coolant around the inverter? I'd be inclined to test the pump first. Oh, and sadly no, the workshop manuals aren't available on CD.

Sorry I can't answer your specific questions but one thing I can say is, never use Neutral when out on the road. Neutral is only meant for situations where, for example, you may have dropped your keys and they're just a couple of inches out of your reach. It's not worth letting the petrol engine fire up to move the car a couple of inches so you put it in Neutral instead and push it. If you freewheel down a hill in Neutral, or you stand at red traffic lights in Neutral, you are wasting the biggest benefit of owning a hybrid, which is the regenerative brakes. When applied, they spin MG1 in the opposite direction and it becomes a generator instead of a motor, so it converts all that kinetic energy that would normally be lost in friction heat, into electricity to charge the high voltage traction battery. The system does not charge the battery when in Neutral.

These may help:

Put some warm (NOT HOT) water in a sandwich bag/ziploc bag and hang it in the confined gap. You could also use another one to clear the screen if you don't like to use deicer spray due to smearing.

You may be alright but I'd be leaving it on a trickle charger if it was me. This may help you decide:

No one really knows why Toy/Lex decided on such small capacity batteries but the two main theories are: The cost of the battery itself. A conventional starter motor takes upwards of 300A to crank the engine, but a hybrid only takes 20A to boot the computers and get the car into READY mode, so a smaller battery at lower cost will do the job. A physically smaller battery weighs less, which means that fuel consumption will be less, which in turn means better for the environment and the ever-tighter 'green' targets being brought in by the world's governments. Might sound silly but when you consider the thousands and thousands of batteries per year, it could add up to a considerable sum. During the first Covid lockdown the advice on Toyota's website was to put the car into READY mode for at least 60 minutes per week to keep the 12V battery topped up. It seemed to work but it wasn't ideal. @D Johnson Now that we're into bad weather season I'm not sure if 40 minutes each way is going to be enough to keep the battery in good condition; not when you take increased usage of lights, heaters, heated screens etc., into account as well. If you put the car in a garage overnight, I'd be inclined to keep it on a trickle charger. Even if you don't have a garage but just keep it on the driveway overnight, it would be easy enough to keep the trickle charger in the house, drill a hole through the wall and feed the 12V wires through and terminate them in a waterproof box on the outside wall. You could then make a permanent connection to the battery and use some sort of plug/socket arrangement whereby you just pull the car onto the driveway each night and plug it in. There is a very rough calculation that you can use to see how long the 12V battery will last before going flat but you have to make so many assumptions that I really don't think it's worth the effort. First thing to understand is that every time it goes flat it sustains a small amount of damage and so its capacity goes down a bit each time. Secondly, all cars draw a quiescent current in order to keep things like the clock, the radio presets, the seat memory and so on, alive. Rule of thumb is that about 50 to 70mA (0.05 to 0.07A) is considered 'normal'. We'll assume a brand new and fully charged battery and, being as it was mentioned above, a capacity of 45Ah. This means that it should supply 45A for one hour, or 22.5A for two hours and so on, so it'll take: 45Ah / 0.05A = 900 hours 900 hours = 37.5 days 37.5 days = 5.3 weeks to go from fully charged to fully flat if the car is just left standing doing nothing. However, for the purposes of starting the car, it will be useless for that long before it becomes fully flat.

It could indeed and with winter coming it may only get worse, so I'd change it now.

Because, as you'll see from the screenshot below, one fuse can cover many circuits. Once the drain can be narrowed down to any given fuse, you then need to look at each circuit downstream of that fuse to find which is causing the problem. I'm not convinced there's actually anything wrong with that draw of 100mA because you must allow time for the car to 'go to sleep' and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could take that long to happen. You need to open the bonnet, doors and boot, then manually trip each lock into the 'Locked' position, which allows the car to go to sleep but still gives you access to the fuses to run tests (as demonstrated in the videos above). Once the car is asleep you never remove fuses because that could 'wake up' one or more of the ECUs and if that did happen, any tests from that point onwards would give erroneous and false results.

When it's not a safety device. Someone asked this question when they were going to a drive-in cinema where the car needed to be on for receiving the sound, but they didn't want to disturb other audience members with the brightness of the DRLs.

Absolutely, yes! I use a Stoplock Pro Elite because in various reviews and tests it took more than 5 minutes to defeat it and that was using hammers, chisels and saws. However, the main thing here is that it's a visual and very obvious deterrent, which will hopefully make the scrotes decide to just move on to an easier target before even opening a door. Another thing I would suggest is a tracker. You can pay hundreds of pounds for an expensive one with 24/7 central monitoring but I bought one of these. They cost £35 for the unit and then about £60/year for the SIM but well worth it in my opinion. It gives geofencing, real-time tracking, alerts for when it moves in/out of a geofenced area, ignition on, movement and other stuff.

We can't really be seen to condone software piracy so the correct way of doing it would be to download the official version from here https://www.lexus-tech.eu/DiagnosticTools/Setup and buy a block of time to use it (one day for €5 or one week for €10 etc).

Have you installed the .NET framework like it asked you to? .NET is a bit of a strange thing in that normally, the latest version (4.8.1 for .NET) of any given software is all you need for things to work. However, if something on your computer needs e.g. v4.6.2 then that must be installed as well as the latest version. If I remember correctly, Techstream doesn't know or care about XHorse, that would be the cable/emulator driver. Techstream is the diagnostic software, not the means of communicating with the laptop and I'm almost sure that the car can communicate with the laptop without Techstream even being installed.

Lenses used to be made from glass and never suffered from this problem but now that they're made from polyurethane (or is it polycarbonate, I can't remember) the UV light from the sun causes this to break down and become cloudy/hazy. Below is just one video of many available on YouTube (must admit that I haven't watched it - just picked one at random) and this particular one uses a 3M Headlight Restoration Kit but others are available if you wish. The most important thing is to use a good UV-resistant top coat to finish the job, otherwise they'll be just as bad again in a month or two.

Just sent a PM to you Deborah.

Fully charge the battery and then drive to almost anywhere that sells car batteries or any garage and ask them to do a load test on it. It'll only take a couple of minutes and most places will do it free and this will show up any bad cells. I understand that you don't have a specialist auto electrician near you, but are you at least taking it to someone who hasn't seen it before? I ask because the things your usual place have tried up to now do not fill me with confidence that they know what they're doing. Remember that even if they do find a parasitic drain, then they have to start looking for what's causing it and fix that problem. I don't know anything about you Andrew but I assume that carrying out the parasitic drain tests (as per videos earlier in this thread) is not within your skillset or you would have done it by now and told us the results, so make sure that whoever you take it to tomorrow knows how to do it.

Watch this and then tell me how much of a problem you've got:

The USB sockets usually provide 5V at 500mA. You need something like this to see what's going on.

Not Toy/Lex specialists but very good and knowledgeable guys who do a great job for a reasonable price, highly reccommended. Ribble View Garage 2A Rough Hey Rd, Grimsargh, Preston PR2 5AR Tel: 01772 798856 5 out of 5* over 43 Google Reviews (tell them that John, Carl's mate with the red Lexus RX reccommended them).

Exactly. I'd probably go to a Lexus or a hybrid specialist for something like the hybrid system but for things like this, no. A car is a car, is a car in this context. They all have brakes, they all have cooling systems, they all have engines and so on.

Well, I can see what you mean but there's no getting away from the fact that a 'general mechanic' will cover electrics as one module of an HNC/HND/NVQ/whatever or one part of their training, whereas an auto electrician specialises from start to finish in that one thing. There's just no substitute for knowledge and expertise in a given field. However: At the very least, try one of the other garages. It may be a Lexus but it's just 'a car' with wires and cables and a battery, just like any other car from any manufacturer - there is nothing Lexus-specific about this type of problem and they may just have someone on the payroll with a greater understanding of auto electrics than your normal places.