JonQ32

I too have the mildew problem in our 2013 ES 300h. We received our car in January of 2013 and the problem began around June/July of 2013. We only had approx 5000 miles on the car. A car this new should not be having this type of problem! The dealer also sprayed disinfectant in to the system and said this should solve the problem. This band-aid lasted about 2 hours. Last fall, I did some research on the internet and found that several brands/models of cars have same type of problem. The engineered design of the condenser coil is flawed and does not dry out between uses. Moisture accumulates and saturates the coil when we use the AC. When we park the car the coil does not dry out and mold and mildew begin and continues to grow. The sour putrid smell permeates the systems. I found that there is a foaming cleaning product specifically for cleaning condenser coils. This is supposedly a simple process. Raise the car up, insert tube in the condenser drain tube, spray foaming cleaning product into condenser, let it do its job then let it drain out. Reports are that this does fix the problem for a time... but this treatment will need to be repeated periodically. I have not yet tried this but feel that Lexus should be responsible for this issue and be cleaning these coils on at least an annual basis. They should comp this service to us. I wonder how many Lexus owners have this same problem. Here is pic of the drain tube:

Well... perhaps we should contact the phone company... or better yet... perhaps Lexus could collaborate with the phone companies.

Yes... that's a good question. Is Lexus working on this?

Unless your situation is different than what I think.... If you enable the "messages" feature in the phone / nav system, your text will be alerted to you through the car sound system. You can then select the button that has the little gal in the dash read the text to you. This way it doesn't matter if you can hear your actual phone or not. Everything goes through the phone / nav system. I assume an email will be alerted to you as well... although I have not tried that yet. Cheers!

Congratulations! We have placed an order for ours. It should arrive sometime in a couple or three months. We chose to go with the Obsidian/Grey, Ultra Luxury. As for the "zooming around"... I felt that during the test dive, putting it in sport mode gave it plenty of zoom zoom for me. I'm not in my twenties anymore... I'm not in any hurry. Just want to enjoy life. Looking forward to it's arrival. Again, Congrats!

OK... So yesterday was an overcast day and I decided to go check the car out again. You guys were right. The color looks fairly close to the website and brochure representation. It was a tad warmer toned but definitely not as yellow as I had originally viewed. I mentioned to the salesman about our original assessment of the color being yellowish. He said, "That's interesting that you brought that up, because others have also mentioned it." Evidently, on bright sunny days, something weird happens there. It might be something to do with the buildings around this place... who knows. Here is a better representation of what we saw yesterday... On left is website picture. On right is representation of what we saw yesterday. Cheers all!

Thanks for your comments. And yes, perhaps I did overdo the coloring (meant as approx. example). But it definitely did not look close to the brochure or website representation... not just to me, but also my wife saw the same. I am glad to hear that your parchment color was accurate. I will visit the dealer again and let you know how it goes. Perhaps I will take my camera... just for the fun of it. I will let you all know how it goes. Thanks again guys(gals)! Jon

Hey thanks for the reply Uncle Ben. That's kinda what I was saying. The website looks like cream or ivory. Very similar to the car we currently drive. The car at the dealership was definitely more yellow looking. The lighting was natural daylight, no clouds in sky, mid day. And actually, we compared it to the 2012 ES... and it definitely was different from last years Parchment. Here is what the difference looked like to me. Both are pics from website... but the yellowish one, I photoshop'd it to represent what the car looked like at the dealer. Anyway, we thought it was strange that the factory color choosers would choose this for there "Parchment" color. If we could get the "Ivory" type color, like on the website, we would be completely satisfied. Edited: I removed the yellowish picture as it gave a misleading representation. Please see further down the thread for newer pictures. Thanks

My wife and I have just ordered the 2013 300h, Obsidian/Grey. Luxury Pkg, with ML. When we first were researching the car (on internet) we loved the parchment interior. We have always loved dark exterior cars with light creamy interiors. However, when finally got to see the parchment in person... it looked yellow. Is it just me or does the website parchment interior look way better than the real thing to you too? Honestly, we were very disappointed and are considering cancelling our order. The grey interior looks good too, but we just feel like we are having to settle for something that we are not completely satisfied with. I noticed on another post that Canada calls the interior Ivory. Does anyone know if that is the same yellow color as Parchment here in the states?