1990LS400

Surely you don't have 18" wheels on the front and 17" wheels on the back. 17" tires can't be put on 18" wheels and vice versa.

If you are not very mechanical, it may be less expensive to have your RX towed to a Lexus dealer for diagnosis than experimenting on your own. First of all, you see if there are any stored problem codes. A Lexus dealer or indie repair shop could do that. If you have to have your RX towed to have the codes read, you might as well have it towed to somebody who could fix it.

The main "insight" I have from experience with about the same weight of boat is that towing a boat that size out of the water can be much more difficult than towing it on level ground. The first time you do it, you might want to have "backup" just in case ... maybe another vehicle cabled to your RX or a pro with a truck equipped to do it if your RX can't. How well you do also depends on the ramp angle and how wet/mossy the ramp is. I hope your RX is AWD -- reconsider if it is only FWD.

I'm paying little attention to marketing hype these days and am more interested in how much content I get for my dollar. I suspect Hyundai or some up and coming Chinese auto company will do to Toyota's Lexus brand what Toyota's Lexus brand did to Mercedes in the early 1990's. Toyota is going to have to substantially decrease the prices of its Lexus cars if it going to compete with the up-and-comers - maybe by "de-contenting" and/or moving more of its production to countries with lower labor rates like China and eventually to the biggest untapped pool of cheap labor - Africa. I think I'd like a fairly inexpensive car next time -- one with a decent amount of leg room like this one ...

Many issues, usually unrelated to VSC, can cause the VSC warning -- you could see if there are any stored problem codes or wait until the real problem becomes severe enough to become obvious.

2000 and older RX300 - 17.2 gallon tank: http://www.lexus.com/contact/pdf/2000/2000RXspecs.pdf 2001-up RX300 - 19.8 gallon tank: http://www.lexus.com/contact/pdf/2001/2001RXspecs.pdf

Here is a link to a thread that describes how to reset the VSC on an LS430: http://us.lexusownersclub.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=55589

Klaatu barada nikto

No, unless you like to be laughed at.

Good grief.

If the battery is the original one, lasting five years might be pretty good. The original Toyota battery in my 2000 LS400 lasted almost exactly four years but the same model and size original Toyota battery in our 1998 Camry lasted over six years. Whether you replace your battery now or later might depend on your "inconvenience tolerance level" and how frugal (OK ... Cheap!) you are. My tolerance/cheap level is pretty high so I always wait until a battery is at the point of death or nearly so before replacing it. My method certainly isn't appropriate for everyone. I don't mind limping my car to a store where I can buy a battery and I've personally installed more than one new battery in a store parking lot and then delivered the old one back to the store for a credit. And I've made one or two "service calls" over the past 35 years when a battery in my wife's cars have failed. It's handy that tool kits in Lexus cars include a wrench of the right size for removing/installing battery terminal clamps. But five years on a battery is pretty good. And OEM Lexus/Toyota batteries are pretty darned good and have lasted longer than most of the aftermarket batteries, including the expensive ones, I've bought.

What kind of test did your battery fail? Does it start your car and are there any symptoms of a problem? The Lexus dealer here sells a Toyota 24F battery for a little more than $100 which is maybe $5 or $10 dollars more than what my nearby Toyota dealer wants for the same battery. Unfortunately a Toyota battery purchased from a Toyota dealer and put in a Lexus carries no warranty. I haven't found much if any correlation between battery life and battery price/brand/model and I usually just buy batteries at Walmart. A few months ago I learned again (I guess I keep forgetting) how important it is for battery terminals and cable clamps to be spotlessly clean and bright. We were having problems with dead batteries in both our Camry and LS and all it took to fix the problems was to clean the terminals and clamps with a cheap specialized cleaning tool. Batteries are super easy to install if you want to do it yourself. Just be sure to connect the right cables to the battery terminals. Doing it backwards causes very bad things to happen!!!

Chow certainly has some "interesting" ideas. Don't be concerned about a little squealing. Something as simple as removing the wheels and blowing the dust off the brakes might help with that. Check each brake pad for thickness. I don't have an LX but the minimum acceptable pad thickness for my LS is only 1 millimeter. To get the biggest bang for my brake pad buck, I almost always wait until brake pads are worn down to the minimum and trigger a warning light or noise. Repair shops just love to recommend and do brake jobs long before they are needed -- it's easy money even if they are essentially cheating you. Unless brake rotors are severely warped they can be resurfaced multiple times until their thickness is below specification. Brake rotors on vehicles made by Toyota are usually unusually robust and can have life expectancies of far over 200,000 miles. If you do need a brake job, don't "cheap out". Buy OEM pads and have the rotors turned/resurfaced. And, of course, vehicles almost never need all the brake pads replaced at the same time. Rear brake pads generally last 50% to 100% longer than front brake pads. As much as you HATE dealers, you may need one to fix your heated seats unless you know of a good repair shop with the required diagnostic skills and technical literature. There is a very detailed diagnostic procedure for the seat heater of each Lexus model involving testing switches and electrical connector pins for voltage, resistance or continuity. Don't let anyone just start replacing components without figuring out exactly which component has failed.

Unless you are billing your customers by the actual time employees are working on their accounts, my suggestion is to forget about tracking time and track only performance in meeting goals. Pay your employees for the work they do and the revenue they bring in.

The only "app" on my "iPhone" allows making and receiving calls. And I'm thinking of getting an iPad like the one in the attached photo. I seem to be getting less sheep-like as I get older.

If something is causing too much friction or impeding the movement of the glass, maybe the "pinch protection" feature is kicking in and preventing the window from opening. Maybe remove the door panel and take a look?

It is probably about the same as shown in the shop manuals for my 2000 LS400 -- 29 ft-lb. I've changed the engine oil exactly 20 times on my 2000 LS400, 26 times on our 98 Camry, 36 times on the 1990 LS400 I used to have ... and I never used a torque wrench on a drain plug. I always use a regular 3/8" socket wrench and slide my hand down to near the socket so I don't apply too much pressure. If you always use a new compression washer -- very important! -- you can feel the washer compress as you gently but firmly tighten the drain plug. IMO, "click type" torque wrenches on an oil plug can be dangerous -- inadvertently set it too high and you've got stripped threads. When I use a torque wrench, I'm more comfortable with my old beam-type torque wrench.

Good luck with replacing the relay but in the (too!) many years I've been on Lexus forums I can't remember any threads about a failed relay preventing low beam headlights on a Lexus from working. I could give you a list of other issues that could cause the problem but you wouldn't want to just start replacing those parts either. If the repair manuals for your ES are like the ones I have for my LS, there is an extremely detailed diagnostic procedure / decision table in them for pinpointing the problem.

The owners manual section of the PDF containing fuse information is to big (> 2 mb) to upload to this forum but you can view it in the "Vehicle Resources" section - without registering - at https://secure.drivers.lexus.com Since your car is well within its basic warranty, you might as well drive it to the nearest Lexus dealer and let it be their problem.

The fuel gauges in some cars made by Toyota (like our 98 Camry V6) remain at the fuel level position when the ignition is off. The fuel gauges of other cars made by Toyota (like our 2000 LS400) show "empty" when the ignition is off. I have no idea why the design is different in different models and model years but I suspect your ES is more like our Camry since the 1997-2001 ES and Camry is mechanically just about identical.

and, as it has been mentioned many times on these forums, the navigation will not go into night mode if the dash lights are set at maximum brightness.

OK, you've got a "new to you" car. Maybe it's time to read your owners manual to discover in which HVAC modes the various rear seat vents function and to learn about the many features of your car.

Which model are you talking about? Your profile says SC300 but you are posting in the 07-11 ES350 forum. Unless your car had a previous owner who absconded with it, there is probably a white plastic tweezer-like fuse puller in a slot in the fuse box in the engine compartment. I've used the OEM fuse pullers in several Toyota and Lexus cars and never had a problem pulling fuses when using them.

It might be a bad ground, cracked wire, corroded bulb socket, etc. Problems like these can be difficult to trace ... a friend once spent many hundreds of $$$ to get a similar issue fixed on his VW.

Just curious -- did you unwrap the wires at the trunk hinge and inspect each one individually or wiggle the bundle? If the trunk hinge wires have never been fixed, it's just about impossible for the original ones on a gen 1 LS400 to last 19 years.