Les Lex 2018

I placed an extension cord under the hood to show the direct path a critter might take to get into the ventilation bay. I point to a small walkway that a rodent could take even with the hood closed. There is a clear open path from the engine compartment up into a gap that leads into the fresh air intake bay, if that's what they call it. i.e. the mouse does not need to chew thru the rubber seal that surrounds this bay.

You can go online to all the dealerships in the Deep South and Fla to look at their inventory. To get your business they will look the vehicle over and guarantee you that the vehicle has no salt/rust evidence before you come down and trade for one. Same for hail damage. They will put all that in writing as an addendum to the AS IS label. If they don't move on the the next dealer. I haven't been on salt since I went to a funeral in PA in January of 1997, but I do remember this white fog of salt. You can see hail damage much easier in a closed garage with overhead lighting. Don't know why, but I can.

According to the 2020 CR Buying Guide's, list of Used Cars to avoid, it showed that: Lexus had zero recent model years. MB had 10 vehicles to avoid. Audi had five. They make a heavily padded seat / slip over for use when riding a bicycle. That might work for long trips. It would definitely zero out the effect of a bump in the center, if you look at a picture of one.

The RX-350 does not use electricity as it has its own generator. Alabama actually slaps an extra charge each year for Hybrids to pay the gas tax for the gas the hybrid does not use. So if one drives less than 13,000 miles, they are paying more to the state than they should. Rip Off... I had a Camry Hybrid and loved it. The two manuals that come with your RX are mostly easy to read and understand. Most of that stuff is already enabled and you just need to understand what it does. You lean as you drive. Yes it takes a while but it will all come a lot easier once you need it and use it. If you don't need it, it does not matter how it works. I need all of the auto and emergency brake options, Air Conditioned seats, BSM, Radar Cruise, "Show Radar" to get the local Radar Map. Auto Speed Limit sign Display, Auto Tire Pressure monitor, Garage door home link, USB for tunes... Don't use Paddle Shifter, Auto steering / Lane monitor, Car Play (good trade-in feature though), Internet connection to a live person. Only time I called to talk to a Nav person, she didn't seem like she was all that happy to hear from me, haha. And Man, are you right about the Nav system. Like you say, they screwed that up royally. The Manuals is a bit hard to read on that. Zoom in and out does not work. So time to dig out the books and go back to school.

I tried one tank of mid-test in the 2018 RX and found no difference in performance or MPG. What you should consider is to stay away from cheap grocery store gas. I only use high detergent gas like Shell and Exxon and keep the receipts if a future owner ever wants to know what kind of gas I use. I have had problems with a Camry using cheap gas over time. Your engine is designed to handle knock using regular gas. But your fuel injectors stay a lot cleaner in the long run with a high-detergent regular. It all comes from the same tanker, but it's the additives they put in it that makes the difference. Look for the Top Tier performance standard advertised for your gas station. Cheap gas often use the minimum EPA required amount of detergent additives and they will not tell you what standard they use.

Just go down to your dealership and sit in a bunch of the 21s and see what you find. My wife raves about the seats in both the 18 and 20. Being a bicycle rider, my butt is so hard I couldn't tell the difference between seats in a Lexus RX or a ford Pinto, which sadly to say I once owned. Called it a Splint-o, or a Bic lighter, and other bad names... The 20 and probably the 21 RX now have air-conditioned seats, where as the 18 did but hardly cooled your seat at all. We called it Faux Air...

Right, Dave! The only way I would stay at home more than one day is if it's raining and I don't want to wash the RX. Having a 70 MPH expressway within a mile is just what the doc ordered to keep the 350 running like a Texas Jack Rabbit.

The fact that it has 18" tires means it was not the high priced model with all the bells and whistles offered on the Lexus Bread and Butter model, as they choose to call it. So, there is less options to go bad in the next 10 years. 20" tires are incompatible in areas that have a lot of high profile curbs that can tear up your fancy rims. And you have more rubber between the rim and the road with 18" tires. If it's a lease car, the records are at the dealership. I still avoid lease cars. I look at them as rentals with 3 years on the contract instead of 3 days. I look for cars that did not spend 24/7 ouside of a garage. You can tell because the Sun takes a toll on vinyl and rubber parts. Commuter vehicles spend every work day in the sun. Retired people go out for brief periods like I do and put the RX-350 back in the hanger. Just some thoughts...

They have an entry point under the passenger side hood hinge. See the pic. I placed a clothes pin in there to point to the little alley way they have to go up inside and get into the air filter. On this side of the clothes pin is a little square flat area where you can cut out a square piece of sticky paper designed to catch mice before they enter. when the hood is closed, that area is blocked to rodents by a rubber seal. But if you look at the seal in the pic, they can just wiggle between two pieces that are not bonded to each other. So the design was there but the application was careless. So it seems.

April Consumer Reports put the RX at the top of the 2-row Luxury class for overall score. The Germans like BMW and Audi had higher scores for road tests but lost in other areas. If you don't need to be driving German racing machines, you would do fine driving an RX. IMHO

I highly doubt they inventory the cover. I have no use for them because the tinted glass is so dark I can't see what's back there anyway. I threw mine in a back corner of the garage. And when I traded the 18 RX, I remembered to dig it out and put all the original stuff back in the car so I could get a one or possibly two dollars more by impressing Lexus used car dept that I am the greatest and am thinking of them. Then you come in complaining that you didn't get your car cover, and your salesman, if he is a caring salesman and really likes you, will go out and pilfer one from another used car just to make you happy happy, and all will be well with the world. Then the cycle will repeat itself when the next guy finds out he didn't get his certified cover. That's just life on the used car lot... Best of luck with your RX. I love a car that drives itself.

It's not CarPlay! That came out in 2019. There is a hint here - The fact that it's getting worse. You have two computer's talking to each other over blue tooth. Both the vehicle and iPhone are doing multi-tasking at the same time. So when they start getting slower, maybe running too many apps, or for a variety of reasons, one of them comes in too late to catch the other ones message. You might look at the apps you are running on both systems. Has your iPhone shown any signs of running slower than it used to? Once again, they are computers and they start getting old like people. And like people, they don't get faster with age. :+)

In the dark, I stuck an LED torch into the hole where the Ac cord was previously inserted. The inside of the air intake lit up bright indicating the opening is kind of wide. I did the same thing on the driver side and there was no light entering the intake, indicating that there is no entry point there. So, while the design is to obstruct or resist rodents from entering there while the hood is closed. when the hood is open, the rodents have a clear entry point into the vehicle air intake tray that you show in the picture. With the hood closed, they have to do a little more work to get in. As you noted, the next obstacle should have been metal against metal so the rodents cant gain entrance to the air filter by chewing what ever it is that is left in their way.

You can see here where the two piece rubber seals come together.

I read the terrific report that you put out and popped the hood on the 2020 RX350. Yes, you are right. I placed an AC cord thru the passenger side opening shown in the picture and sure enough, it easily slid into the air duct going to the fresh air filter. To protect this opening from critters, there is a seal that goes all the way accross the that blocks any break-in from mice when the hood is closed. BUT the catch is that there another short piece used to complete the seal. And the gap between the two seals is such tht you can push your finger thru the gap real easy so mice would have little trouble squeezing thur. So there you go... That's a problem, but with the right size piece of same kind of rubber, then that enternace gap could be blocked so it's too much trouble for the mice to chew thru it and then squeeze in. 55B0DD11-FCB8-4946-85F5-E12CF936C82B.heic 197ABDA4-B299-418C-B739-6C14462B5581.heic

Great find about the mice breaching the filter container. And the ducts under the seat being used for heat rather than return. I'm guessing that on the 2020, the system detects a passenger in the back seat before sending air to the back seat feet. That might explain the difference as to why I got no air from that duct with heat on to the feet. Since purchased in April, no one has sat back there, come to think about it. When you go into the outside air duct from the filter area with that special camera on a flexible cable, I'll bet you find something wrong. Still wondering about the drain line.

The only visible air-intake ducts in my RX-350 are under each of the front seats. When I put heat only to the feet area, heat comes out of the two ducts blowing on the feet of the front passenger, but no heat blowing out of the ducts under the seats. There are outlet vents on the back of the console that do that. If you wanted to get cool air off the floor to recirculate back into the heater, that is where you would put the ducts. Also, the air filter is separate from the condenser/heat exchanger. Exchanger is located between the center console and the fire wall. Reason you know this is because the freon and hot water hoses exit the engine compartment and go thru the fire wall in the center. So between the center exchanger and the filter on the far right firewall, you have a a Y valve that takes air from under the seat for recirc, or from the air filter. The y valve could very well be part of the actual exchanger housing, but the filter is not.

Yes, the RX is just the right size at ~4400 lb. The heated steering wheel in the 2020 is not in the bamboo wood top section of the wheel but rather in the leather wrap on either side. That is weird. I don't use heated wheel or seats because the RX is in an attached fully insulated garage so bottom winter temp is about 60 degrees in there. The RX can be started now via the iPhone. It also allows you to open close all windows and doors and buzzes the iWatch if anything changes, like a brake in. I don't really use many of those options but it is something to play with. Lexus pays all the subscriptions for that stuff for the first 3 years.

I recommend you get a lo-capacity Ozone generator on a timer and run that to get rid of the smell. Fumigation, I don't know. Mice also will not stay in the vehicle, or will parish due to the lack of Oxygen. Just opening the vehicle and selecting outside air should get rid of the Ozone, provided the filter is cleared. Things, Gary, I could no longer do without in an RX: Blind Spot Mirror, Radar tracking Cruise, radar perimeter auto braking/cross-track braking, Auto-hold brakes at stop lights, Speed Limit sign reading/posting/ over the limit warning, Cooled Seats, Voice Activated Weather Radar Display, Live operator for any questions, Auto tire pressure readout, heated mirrors. Mile Range to fill-up, internet set clocks, Homelink door opener... Some day they will offer a College degree in how to run and set all this stuff, haha...

There is a two position door between the clean side of the filter and the condenser box. Under the dash air is blocked from entering the box from under the dash in Outside air mode. In Recirc, the door opens up to air from under the dash while closing off the path from the clean side of the air filter. Same as the way it's done in a window air conditioner. If your 350 has mice in the vehicle but they have not chewed thru the air filter, then the only way I know of is that they forced their way thru the rear exhaust vent. IF they are on the top of the air filter, but they can't get in to the vehicle, then its the drain hole or hood hinge thing. But then, there are things you know, and things you don't know that you don't know... Or something like that.

There is only one location for air "intended' to enter the vehicle and that is below the windshield as you show. Air exits the vehicle via the vent I showed you in the rear. After air enters the dirty side of the filter, it then goes to the condenser coil and then out all the vents provided. 1. IF they are nesting on the dirty side of the filter, they are coming in thru the windshield intake or some other opening that is not intended to be there in that path. All air from the windshield intake is suppose to go to the cabin air filter. Lexus does not want dust in your condenser or your cabin. 2. If they are nesting on the clean side of the filter, they are coming in from some where else and going thru the air vents and they can get into your condenser coils and on to the clean side of the air filter. But, see below: I think you hit on something - The drain hole! That hole is inside the cage where air is collected and sent to the air filter. If they come in there, they get a free ticket to the air filter.

Sounds like you live close to Mother Nature, where there is an overpopulation of rodents. I hate cats but my kid found one. We made it a nice cozy box in the garage and it was happy running around the area catching mice. I don't recall that we had any rodent problems after that. Didn't need to buy cat food after that. Nothing like the balance of nature. But getting back to your problem, the exit vents are way in the back of most all vehicles. Once again, the vent opening is 1/4 in on the 2020 RX here.

Well, your Computer selects the speeds and RPMs it needs to make your car either economical or just plain Fast, based on you desired setting. If you are going to pass a lot of cars on two lane going 60 MPH and need to get up to 80 real quick, you would want the sport setting.. IF you are just interest in puttering around town with the rest of the crowd, Econ mode is just fine. In Sport mode, the computer will want to get you up into your max HP range before shifting, whereas for econ mode, the computer will shift up early at a lower power output and RPM. I'm sure I over simplified this, but that's kind a how it works.

Thanks, Jack! The vent holes on my 2020 are 1/4 inch wide, not 1/8th and even bigger for length. I keep seeing on internet searches that small rats can fit thru a 1/4 inch hole but mice can't. I don't know what a small rat is as far as what species... Based on that, you are right. Mice should not be able to get thru the vent to the dirty side of the filter. Les Lex 2018 / 2020