My 2004 all-wheel-drive Lexus RX330 was purchased new in 2004, and has Adaptive Cruise Control, heated front seats, the Navigation System/Mark Levinson package, and other amenities, all of which put a pretty good load on the standard OEM Panasonic battery installed in the car. That battery died on me twice within the past few weeks, so after seven (7) years it seemed prudent to replace the battery. Since I am uncertain as to how much longer I will keep this beautiful, wonderful car before trading it in on a new Lexus, I was primarily concerned with dimensions so that the new battery would fit properly into the tight space occupied by the Panasonic. The class for this battery is 24F, but – as is typical of batteries – dimensions within any one of the classes vary all over the place.
The OEM Panasonic battery in my RX330 measured 7 3/8 inches High x 10 inches Wide x 6 5/8 inches Deep. It took a while to track down a domestic battery that would fit those dimensions, but yesterday (04/20/2011) I finally found one, namely the CARQUEST 24F Premium 60 for a total cost of $78.74, including tax and exchange. This is not the top of their line, but it will serve my purposes just fine. It looked to me like a number of the CARQUEST batteries were of that same size, so I suspect any one of them would have fit. Also, I do not know who manufactures CARQUEST, but it may very well be that Johnson Controls group that makes many of the domestic batteries that are sold in this country.
The only footnote I would add here is that this Lexus is driven mainly as a long-distance car (Virginia to Florida, Alabama, etc), and sees very few short trips around town. It has only 37K miles on the odometer, an average of a little over 5K per year, which is quite low for a seven-year-old car. That might account – to some extent – for the long life of the OEM Panasonic battery.
Oops! One more afterthought: Certainly it is true that the Panasonic battery has Positive top post on the LEFT as you view the battery from its front, and Ground (Negative) on the Right. The CARQUEST that I purchased was just the opposite. Did that matter? No, not at all. The Mechanic simply rotated the battery 180 degrees, and installed it with no problem. Since this battery is of the “maintenance free” type (we know all about that, don’t we?), it has a certain degree of symmetry to it. So, the only visual difference I perceive is that I have to crank my neck around a little to see CARQUEST’s large logo on the “back” of the battery. But do I care about that? No, not a twit. For me, this battery works just great!
