Herbie

Something that no one has mentioned is, what about when it's away from your home address? You can invest in any amount of lockable parking posts and/or other stuff to keep it safe at home but if it ever has to stay away somewhere overnight..... Life is not a rehersal. You get one chance and that's it, so if you want a Lexus go and get one and stop being so paranoid. Enjoy your money while you've got it and can spend it. In a couple of months my wife and I will be doing a road trip to Eastern Europe, something we've been doing annually for our holidays since 1991. We never have any specific destination in mind but we'll be driving and touring around Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. Some hotels will have their own car parks, some won't, and my pride and joy will just have to take its chances being parked on the road. Will I worry or fret about the possibility of it being stolen? Absolutely not.

The negative (-ve) battery post is connected directly to the car body, which means that the whole of the body, ie, panels; screws; nuts; bolts; brackets, etc., at the front, back, top or bottom of the car - as long as they are clean unpainted metal (paint acts as an insulator so you don't want that) - can be considered to be the -ve battery post and any of them will serve the purpose. The only reason why they discourage connection directly to the actual battery post itself is that the battery could give off hydrogen gas and there could be a risk of explosion. Having said that, after more than 40 years of hobby-spannering, neither myself nor anyone I know has ever heard of an explosion actually happening. The main thing to remember is - from an electrical point of view it matters not one iota where you connect the -ve lead to the car and I tell you this as a time-served, fully qualified electrician. When the factory closed down I became a telephone engineer on Post Office Telephones for the majority of my working life. Later on, after a back injury, I became a computer technician and hobby-wise I'm also a licenced radio ham. I'm not trying to be obnoxious, big-headed, or blowing my own trumpet; rather just saying that I've been in the electrical and electronics fields for 50 years and I do have a bit of knowledge on the subject.

That's not the way to use a trickle charger - the clue is in the name. Just as an example let's say that you have a charger that's capable of supplying 5A output. If you connect a flat battery to it, the battery will initially pull all 5A or close to it. As the battery takes charge and returns back to normal values, the charging current reduces, e.g.,when flat it sucks up 5A but by the time it's 90% charged it may only be pulling 0.5A (completely ficticious made-up figures for illustration only). That's how a 'standard' charger works. A trickle charger may only be capable of supplying a maximum of, say, 0.5A anyway. It's meant to be connected and used all the time that the battery is stood idle in order to maintain it in a fully-charged state, so you wouldn't just use it overnight to charge the battery. You would connect it to the battery every time you got home and only disconnect it when you want to use the car. If the car wasn't going to move for two weeks, the trickle charger would be on and connected for all that time.

I fitted a Grom Vline2 unit in my 2018 and it's been good. Other units to look out for are Teyes, Lexion and Beatsonic. Stay away from Carlinkit - in my experience, these are terrible things.

That only turns off the internal ultrasonic sensor. The only way (as far as I'm aware but happy to be corrected) is to use the key and lock the car manually.

It's very easy to install Ronnie, takes about 5 minutes tops. It doesn't drain the 12V battery and one of the sensors even shows current battery voltage. I initially took out the 24 month subscription but I think I'll go for 36 months next time as it means you avoid any price increases. Highly recommended my friend.

If it's got six removable plugs on the top it's wet - you take those plugs out to top up with deionised water. No plugs means it's AGM.

With the greatest of respect George, I'm afraid that most of that is incorrect. For instance, the car needs a good hour or two to go fully to sleep, not just 10 minutes. Also, pulling fuses can cause other (sometimes seemingly random and unrelated) ECUs/modules to wake up and give false readings. The following video shows the best way of doing a parasitic current draw test:

Just sent a PM to you Rob.

A very slight inconvenience but hardly a deal-breaker. I rang my insurance company from the Lexus showroom before driving off in my new pride and joy when we bought this car. All done and dusted in minutes.

Cheers, I didn't know that. Everyday's a school day eh

I'm almost certain that it's for the USA and not the UK/EU markets. 'Connected Services' does such things as automatically calling the emegrency services if you're involved in a collision and suchlike.

Every time a battery goes into a deep discharge (deep enough to need jump starting) it suffers a bit of damage that lowers its capacity, which means that on its next charge it can't take as much as it did before. If you don't use the car often enough to keep it charged then ideally you need to connect the battery to a trickle charger. A 'standard' charger will quickly squirt about 5A in if needed but a trickle charger does exactly what it says on the tin - it trickles a small charge in all the time, keeping the battery charged and ready to go when you need it.

And yet it's still zero feedback score. Hmm....

The only thing I would say is that the seller has zero feedback score. It could be that he's only just opened an eBay account and we all start at zero, but...

Thanks Stephen, much appreciated my friend.

I would happily do it for you Stephen but I'm out of the game (and reality) at the moment due to Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS). They've been successfully treating it with Pramipexole but that drug causes augmentation, which means that it becomes not only ineffective, but also augments the original problem and makes it much worse. Because of this they're changing me to Ropinirole, but I have to taper off the Pramipexole first. I'm not tolerating the withdrawal well and now I've got DAWS (Dopamine Agonist Withdrawal Syndrome). The only way to alleviate the sensations of RLS is to move the legs, so 50 of the last 57 hours have seen me just wandering up and down the house, shuffling from room to room. Lie on the bed; sit in a chair, doesn't matter; less than one minute later I'm off again. It's just taken me about 30 minutes to write this post so I'd probably end up blowing the car up if I tried changing the battery for you

No need to criticise, that's a perfectly good way of keeping all settings etc., and is a method that been in use since I started my apprenticeship back in 1974. No need to use jump leads either as you're not cranking the engine, only a few mA to stuff that needs it. Basically, a bit of bellwire and almost any 12V source would do the job.

What is this sorcery of which you speak?

That should be fine. As you say, an earth strap is an earth strap, nothing special about it.

What's HV?

Welcome to the club Philip. I'm certain that you'll get more responses in the proper UX group so never be afraid to ask as many questions as you like. Above all else, enjoy - and that goes for both club and car

These, along with other units like them, are very easy to install - they're just plug and play. All you do is to unplug a connector from the factory unit, plug it into the new one, and then plug in a harness from new to factory. It's basically a process of 'teeing in' the new unit between the car and the factory unit, so instead of wiring going from car > factory unit it now goes car > new unit > factory unit. The most difficult process is getting the trim off and getting to the connectors in the first place, which is where YouTube comes in. No matter what you're doing, whether that be plumbing, painting, changing a water pump on the car, fitting a new laptop screen or whatever, someone will have done it before and uploaded a 'how-to' video to YouTube that you can follow.

To use Techstream you need a miniVCI cable like this one from eBay and they usually come with a pirated copy of Techstream. I know you've bought an official licence to use Techstream, but have you downloaded the software from Lexus or are you trying to use the official licence key with the dodgy version?

Just sent you a PM Nick, hope it helps.