2000 Lx470 Needs Rear Seatbelts Replaced

[catcole]

HI,

I took my car in for servicing and to check the rear seatbelts as they were not winding back up. I have two kids in carseats and need them to be tight! The car has 92,000 miles on it and we bought it used a few years back. The service people said that the fabric the seatbelts are made of have lost their tensile strength and therefore need total replacement. It is not the tension winder. Soooo, they want to charge $645 to replace and install them. This seems sooooo expensive to me, but as it is a safety issue, I need it done. My car is still at the Lexus dealership waiting for parts.

Is this something that is really difficult to do? I am not opposed to ordering them and having them installed by someone else.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Cat

[catcole]

Just an update. I read a forum on here that talked about replacing seatbelts and it recommended calling Lexus Customer Service to see if they could help. The dealerships tend to be black and white on warranties and the LX470's belts are warrantied for 7 years or 70k miles. Mine is well past that. So I called customer service and, yes, they took care of it. They paid for the replacement of both rear passenger belts and mechanisms of which the dealer was asking $645 to do. I couldn't be more pleased with the service from Lexus! I am sure it was because it was a safety issue as well. Either way, I just picked up my car and the belts work great now.

[Jim_Chow]

Just an update. I read a forum on here that talked about replacing seatbelts and it recommended calling Lexus Customer Service to see if they could help. The dealerships tend to be black and white on warranties and the LX470's belts are warrantied for 7 years or 70k miles. Mine is well past that. So I called customer service and, yes, they took care of it. They paid for the replacement of both rear passenger belts and mechanisms of which the dealer was asking $645 to do. I couldn't be more pleased with the service from Lexus! I am sure it was because it was a safety issue as well. Either way, I just picked up my car and the belts work great now.

Lucky for you. The one or two times I called lexus customer service, they stuck exactly by the terms of the CPO warranty (plastic moulding attached to rear quarter glass and only sold as such cracked on driver's side. Apparently, this has happened on probably > 50% of the LC/LXs out there. Maybe because yours is a safety issue, lexus didn't want to take the chance of getting sued had you gotten into an accident and the belts didn't function as intended (and approved by the DOT). If there's a safety issue (ie., complaints to the NHTSA), toyota could be forced to implement a nationwide recall, which would cost $$$ and lead to bad press. I suppose had lexus customer service denied coverage, you could have threatened to take it to the NHTSA.