Herbie

"Regrets buying Lexus"....no offence, but to me this reads more like 'Regrets buying Lexus and not insuring it straight away when the cost was a little expensive but I just thought ok, instead of waiting a month and then finding that premiums had gone up and it's that that's left a real bitter taste in my mouth.' The best time to buy insurance is 22 or 23 days before you need it. If you leave it later than that you get penalised for it as the premium then goes up daily. If you leave it until the day before it's due, or the actual day itself, their algorithms tell them that you're disorganised, take unnecessary risks and so on. Having said all that I do agree with you. The way premiums are rising is just unbelievable and I, too, am so disappointed that Lexus still haven't come up with a way of encrypting the CANbus signals so as to prevent the thefts in the first place.

Your ISP doesn't have enough IP addresses to give one to everybody so they get shared around. Whoever had your IP address last must have been spamming and ended up on 'the list'. The ISP that hosts this board has also now seen that the address is on the list and so is blocking you or, more correctly, blocking the offending address. Switch off your router and wait for about half an hour; that's usually enough to force a change of address from your ISP and all should be well.

I haven't got an LBX and it's difficult to properly tell from a photo (much easier stood looking into the engine bay) so don't shoot the messenger if I get it wrong, but I think most of the arrowed places should be suitable. Basically, any clean and, most importantly, unpainted screw, nut, bolt or bracket should do the job. Just be aware that some screws may terminate in a moulded plastic bracket, and these are unsuitable for obvious reasons, as are (usually) the shock absorber top bolts. If you want to try it before you need it in anger, simply get a 12V lamp and either solder two wires directly to the lamp or use a proper lamp holder. Connect one wire to the red +ve jump point in the fuse box and go around touching various points to see if the lamp lights up or not. Alternatively use a multimeter, which is far more versatile and once you have it, it'll come in handy for a myriad of jobs around the house/garden/car. You can get some really good ones for under £20, even under a tenner, here.

Not sure about the 'connected services' working here in the UK, it may just be a USA thing. I know they have things like remote start and an SOS system where, if the car is involved in an accident, a monitoring centre operator will call to see if assistance is required; either that, or the car contacts the centre itself - I can't remember which. As for the screen brightness, there'll be a setting that you can adjust but I can't remember where to find it. It's one of those 'set and forget' things and I did it about 4 years ago. If you don't have the Owner's Manual (and there's probably a separate one for the infotainment system) you can download them free of charge from here.

@Lexusjim linked to the Ancel Battery Monitor and I believe they're very good. At £24.00 it's amazing just how much info you get from it and if I was in the market for something like that, I'd have no hesitation in getting one of these units. However, I'd like to propose an alternative, in the form of the Rewire Security DB2 Tracker at £34.99 (plus about £70/year for the tracker service/SIM. Its main function is as a tracker but it does so much more, including 12V battery voltage monitoring. Have a look here to see what you get for your money. This is a screenshot taken a few seconds ago:

I don't have an LBX so this is a complete guess on my part but I've had a 2013 RX450h and currently have a 2018 RX450h, and neither of them had any warning systems (apart from the standard dash warning light) that referred to the 12V battery. My guess is that your car doesn't have anything either and the 'BATTERY LOW' warning was for the traction battery. I sometimes see this when I press the EV button but the screen tells me EV is not available due to low battery. It doesn't take long for the regenerative braking to get some power back into the traction battery and all's well again.

Lexus Preston fitted my plates as soon as they were available so it's been a while now and no problems whatsoever. Same with the tracker too. The tracker is, of course, Thatcham rated so it may have a slight effect in our favour when it comes to insurance renewal time. The plates, however, are not Thatcham rated so they will be completely ignored when it comes to working out the premium.

Sounds like the belt may need tightened up (although I appreciate that you say it seems to be alright) or it may need new brushes. Replacing the brushes is usually a very easy DIY job once the alternator is out of the car.

As Colin says, you don't need to connect to the earth strap. The negative battery post is connected directly to the body of the car, so any* nut, screw, bolt or bracket that is clean and unpainted (very important) and has a good connection to the body will do the job. * Just beware that some screws will be terminated in moulded plastic brackets/fitments that may not be immediately obvious, so they're no good for this purpose; neither are shock absorber top bolts, in general.

Hmm...maybe put the phrase "common issues with lexus hybrids" (without the quotes) into Google and see what pops up? This is on the first page of results https://mag.lexus.co.uk/lexus-hybrid-parked/

The quiescent current draw (this is to keep things like the radio presets, the seat memory, the clock and suchlike, alive when the car is not in use) is somewhere around 50 to 70 milliamps (mA) or 0.05 to 0.07A, perhaps even more. Someone said that the LBX has a battery rated at 35Ah, which means that it can supply 35A for one hour, or 17.5A for two hours, or 8.75A for four hours and so on. If we assume a brand new and fully charged battery, we can say 35Ah divided by 0.07A = 500 hours to go from fully charged to fully discharged. That's just 20.83 days or 3 weeks. And don't forget that the battery will not be able to start the car long before it becomes fully discharged, so that reduces the useable time again.

No wonder it was flat if you're leaving it for almost two months. The quiescent current draw (this is to keep things like the radio presets, the seat memory, the clock and suchlike, alive when the car is not in use) is somewhere around 50 to 70 milliamps (mA) or 0.05 to 0.07A, perhaps even more. Someone said that the LBX has a battery rated at 35Ah, which means that it can supply 35A for one hour, or 17.5A for two hours, or 8.75A for four hours and so on. If we assume a brand new and fully charged battery, we can say 35Ah divided by 0.07A = 500 hours to go from fully charged to fully discharged. That's just 20.83 days or 3 weeks. And don't forget that the battery will not be able to start the car long before it becomes fully discharged, so that reduces the useable time again. No one knows for sure but speculation indicates two things: Weight. Less weight means better fuel consumption figures Cost. Smaller batteries cost less. A conventional car will pull over 300A to crank the engine but it takes just 20A or less to get a hybrid into READY mode, so a smaller battery makes sense - to a degree. We may think they made a stupid decision but when you think how many cars they produce annually, that's not a trivial saving. Sadly it's not a flaw or problem in the sense that it can be fixed. It's a design issue that should have never got off the drawing board, but it did, and we just have to put up with it.

Cheers Martin, that really IS tiny.

I very much doubt that's the case because the sequence is: car is stolen you ring Police to get a crime number you ring Tracker, give them the crime reference, then they activate the device

Therein lies the whole point. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Lexus. They should be much more open and honest in their advertising and they should fully explain this design 'feature' and how it may affect the owner of the car. What I am saying is that the presence of a 'Hybrid' badge denotes that the car is different to a conventional one and that owners can't just completely wash their hands of all responsibility. They need to find out just how it's different and how it will fit in with their own circumstances and/or driving habits, and luckily we live in a time when doing research has never been easier. The Internet is awash with information and a bit of time spent with Mr. Google would reveal all. What gets me most is how indifferent and seemingly uninterested people appear to be in this respect, e.g. "Nobody told me..." or "It's not my job to look for information..." When I buy a car my wife says that I'm an absolute nightmare to live with for 2-3 weeks because I'm as excited as a 2 year-old rather than my actual 67 years. I surround myself with magazines, brochures, and anything to do with my prospective purchase. Or at least I did; now I just spend hours and hours on Google but you get the gist. I make it my mission to find out as much as possible, both the good and the bad.

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Given that your car is brand new, you should be able to use Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Given that Lexus navigation is usually rubbish and also out of date, why not use AA or ACP and use Waze (my personal favourite) or Google Maps, or Sygic, or TomTom, all of which are better than the factory offering? Waze and Google Maps are updated (free of charge) on a daily basis and even 'on the fly' in the case of Waze. If you approach a traffic jam or roadworks for example, you can push a button and the info will be uploaded and pushed out to all Wazers within minutes.

Wow, wow, and thrice wow! My flabbers are gasted at your perseverance and dedication in trying to get this problem sorted out. I wish you all the very best in your continued efforts and I really look forward to hearing what the problem is/was when you get there.

That may well be because it doesn't do any processing and is really just a 'dumb' device, according to the following info anyway:

I see that the Geofence thingy is always referred to as an 'OBD device' so is it something that's permanently plugged into the OBD port? I hope not because I often use an app called OBD Fusion via an ELM32 plug in there.

And just like that, all my troubles don't seem too bad after all

A mate of mine had exactly the same trouble-free experience with Motorway, with Lexus Lincoln (or could have been Leicester) winning the bid. Strangely enough, he wasn't actually in the market to sell and was only wanting to find its value so that he could work out his options, but the offer was that good that he would have been a fool to refuse.

Your car has factory-fitted CarPlay and given that price, I reckon it's just a wifi dongle. Jonathan's 2014 car and my 2018 car don't have CarPlay at all, so we have to buyCarPlay/Android Auto units first before needing wifi. I think the BeatSonic in the video is around £300 and my Grom Vline 2 was about £530.

Do it yourself, it's easy enough. I fitted my own Grom Vline 2 unit in my 2018 RX450h and had it done start to finish in under two hours. I've finally admitted defeat with the Grom though, which is really a shame because it always felt like it was about 95% perfect and just one last little push would make it superb. Sadly, that little push never really came. They fixed one thing but that broke something else, and the unit has never really fulfilled its promised potential. Within the next week or two I'm going to remove it and replace it with an Lsailt unit that I bought secondhand, the original owner of which said that it's been perfect in every way (he's selling due to changing cars). This video shows what's involved but honestly, it's well within the scope of a competent DIYer:

By the way, you should never rely on just a visual alone because they can sometimes look alright when they're not. Use a multimeter and check for continuity through the fuse.