Hard Starting Es 300 When Warmed Up

[es300lang]

I am a new member, but have owned my 97 es300 for over a year. Over the past few months the car has become increasingly hard to re-start once it has reached normal operating temperature. I usually have to really mash on the gas and rev it up quickly after it catches, or it stalls out within seconds. Other than that on cold starts and general driving it acts flawlessly, and in general drives better than any car I've owned, (especially for a car with 110K miles). Any ideas?

[steviej]

sounds like your idle air control valve is very dirty and/or sluggish.

search on IDLE VAVLE or something of that sort. There was a post of how to clean it if you are mechanically incline. Widen the search to do 365 days and newer.

This is a common problem with this engine.

steviej

[SKperformance]

agreed

[es300lang]

Thanks for the help...I found a lot of addl info in the forum (once I had the right key words). I will be taking the idle air control valve apart today to see what's up. :)

[lexusk8]

steviej got it right. In fact, I ran into pretty much the same problem in my '01 ES earlier this year (i.e. couldn't start the car after a few turns to the key, and my idle RPMs would be in the range of 0 to 500).

To deal with the problem, I took the car back to the non-Lexus used dealership where I originally bought my car, and they replaced the MAF (mass air flow) sensor and IAC valve under warranty. Problem unfortunately came back a few weeks later, so I then decided to take my car to my local Toyota dealership. As expected, it turned out that my throttle body (the portion in the engine body where air flows from the airbox to 2 tubings) is very dirty. Toyota used a special cleaning agent to clean the throttle body, and my car would and now start up every time. No hesitations or anything, and my idle speed would be in the normal range (750 to 850). Toyota charged me just one hour's worth of labor ($85), no charge for the material :D

Give Toyota a shot, they are capable of working on our Lexus.

[SKperformance]

OMG you got chaged $85 for a single screw and a $10 can of throttle body cleaner for 5 minutes total.

If you egr,iacv, or any part of the throttlebody is plugged most of its surrounding areas will be also.

Misery loves company and so does carbon.

[98es]

My car is actually in the shop right now for that. It'll get progressively worse until you'll have no idle at all. My mechanic says it's the IAC motor like previously stated. He called it a motor but it sounds like it's more of a valve. My '98 ES300 has about 105k. He also said there was significant carbon build up around the throttle body due to EGR malfunction. He's charging 1.5 hours just to clean the throttle body. Total price for me was about $350. Was this too much??? Good Luck!

[SKperformance]

You need a new mechanic, one who won't rip you off by thinking he is too smart.

You should have all gotten a motorvac and it would have done the same thing with no mechanic labour of removal of anything for $100