Hazzle

Very kind of you to speak of expertise. If only… I’m a slow learner & prone to forget things after a while & have to learn them all over again. (Fortunately, I get an instant reminder from the app whose exact name I forget for the moment (!) when, as occasionally happens, I omit door-locking from my end-of-journey routine.) We’ve come a very long way from my ICE motoring beginnings in a Moggy Minor in 1965. I look back fondly on the relative simplicity of driving in those days, and in later decades. All grist to the mill. Hope you are well, Tel, and enjoying your motoring.

In fairness to the dealer, I was part-exing a Yaris Cross hybrid & had owned 3 Jaguar hybrids — so their salesman probably assumed (correctly) that I knew about staying out of neutral and not leaving the car undriven for long. But not having owned any hybrid long enough to encounter others of the vagaries you refer to (and not having had the leisure to digest the 400+ page online Manual), I was thrown (when the BATTERY LOW warning came up) not by the car itself, but rather by my discovery thereafter of the information excluded from its systems (e.g. 12v battery monitoring, & which battery was LOW) & from its User’s 173-page Guide). At handover, the salesman would have needed a fortnight to fill me in on the range of such vagaries.

That makes sense (so one wonders why there are 3 mini-videos on the ´net showing how to do the job on a Lexus key — though not, it’s true, on the LBX key supplied to me). Life is full of such little mysteries. Still, I’m glad to know now how to do it should the need arise, however unlikely that might be.

Thank you, Colin. Have noted that. (I still however question some things left out of the User Guide, e.g. how to rebattery the key. The 3 lined pages at the end of the User Guide, for customers’ notes, would in my view be better used for inclusion of detail likely to be needed by a lot of users.) Thanks again.

That explains a lot. I was given with the car the "LBX USER GUIDE" — 173 printed pages. I’ll be printing (if allowed) hard copy of the "main owner’s manual" you kindly refer me to — and which is mentioned (along with its online location) inside the front cover of my User Guide. (Copyright forbids me from copying anything from the Guide, in whole or in part, without Toyota’s written permission. Life’s too short. So is the Guide.) Thank you again.

I’m sure your suggestion will be of interest to a lot of owners, Lexusjim, and it certainly extends the range of attractive possibilities for me to think about. Thank you. (As with other suggestions, the snag for me lies in the fact my 12v battery is neither under the bonnet nor in the boot.) Whichever device I eventually choose, the car will have to be booked into service at, and the device fitted by, my nearest main dealer (20 miles away). It’s all a far cry from the 3-4 decades in which I always owned 2nd-hand cars and replaced their under-the-bonnet batteries myself, with new ones bought fully-charged from a small business just up the road in this small village.

PS. What page of your handbook is that on? I couldn’t find it in mine — which as far as I’ve seen so far, just says open the case, without saying how to open it.

Thank you so much, Nemesis UK. As soon as I got home just now, I did as you say, & it worked a treat. And I have a card full of the correct battery! (The online videos do not show this type of Lexus key, so the ones I looked at are all less than adequate.) Every day is a day in school.

I’ve seen videos about the Ancel product. It does mean getting to the LBX’s 12v battery, which is in a hatch beneath a seat. Thus dealer fitting would be the way for people like me. I’m exploring the use of a trickle charger as an alternative — though that too and its loom would have to be dealer-fitted. (So much more these days seems designed to keep money flowing into dealerships.)

On mine, the word "key" was not there, and the display was on the central screen. I nevertheless explored what then seemed the key battery possibility, using the method shown in 2 or 3 online videos — but could not get the mechanical key to split open the electronic key, try as I might. Other advisers said it is not at all easy & it’s best to get the dealer to do it. The older I get, the more I find the digitalisation & electricalisation of so much in car maintenance (that used to be relatively easy when nearly everything was mechanical) is of questionable advantage.

You’re correct, Herbie, about the lack of warning systems on the LBX. I’ve sought info on how to check the state of charge of my 12v battery in vain. And your guess about the traction battery being temporarily low also rings very true (it fits all the facts). It’s not just the systems which are deficient on the LBX. The index to the users’ manual is quite useless — and the only way to stop my disabled blue badge sliding all over (& eventually off) the dash-top is to slide the bottom half of the blue badge down the narrow gap between the dash-top & the windscreen (thus obscuring from view much of the badge). Thank you for setting my mind at rest. It’s been quite an anxious day or so.

Curiously, the BATTERY LOW message was no longer showing on the centre display today (Saturday). Had been unable to get main dealer service to answer the phone. Sales wondered if it was my key battery that was low. Am now exploring how to monitor the state of charge of my 12v battery. Glad to see suggestions of dealer-fitted loom for trickle charger (I have an outdoor 13-amp socket) or mini solar panel. Will try again to raise dealer service about these on Monday. (I’m no electrician as is obvious — and new to the club, also obvious. Sorry if I bore anybody.)

LBX 6 months old. Daily (7 days per week) 7-mile round trip. Today did additional morning 40-mile round trip to get recall (reprogramme) work done at main dealer. At 8.00 pm (after 7-mile round trip), message comes up BATTERY LOW. First trouble in 6 months.