thelazydogsback

I still doubt this very measurable in practice in the case of particular ICE in the 400h - especially given that when you put the petal to the metal the ICE is assisted by two electric motors all through the CVT.

I've never used anything but regular in my 400h - there's really no reason to pay the premium for, ah, premium. The more expensive fuel is not likely to effect performance or economy except in very high compression racing engines. It may effect pre-ignition/knock and how the ICE starts/stops - it may help when the ICE does not stop running immediately when you're at a light, etc. (Hardly worth the price.)

I'm not sure the 400h with it's milage is what they had in mind :)

I think that rating is unrealistic - I get a little under 24 in mixed driving conditions (42/mi round-trip commute/day, highway+street, 20mph-70mph) - and this seems avg FWICT.

> if the battery is 5 years old, it should be replaced. They generally don't last much longer than that. Of which battery do you speak??

There's no oil light or anything else. Cool. I thought if it was that then I'd see the OIL or one of the other items hilighted. They have a strange definition of REQUIRED... thanks The oil light usually means that the oil pressure is critically low (e.g. leak or burning it off), which is different than a pre-set time or mileage having been reached. I think the conventional wisdom is: Maintenance light goes on, you make an appointment when convenient. Oil light goes on, you pull over right away (ASAP) and get some oil in the crank case before driving again because you may be damaging the engine. Cheers.

Cool. I thought if it was that then I'd see the OIL or one of the other items hilighted. They have a strange definition of REQUIRED... thanks

I see MAINT REQD, but no other warnings and nothing lighting up in the maintainance section. Anyway for me to tell what this is, or do I need to bring it in? thanks

No, there's no way to upgrade - I've asked. (I suppose of course there is, but there's not something avaialble that they can do at the dealer or aftermarket.) I've had bad luck with both cassette adaptors and FM transmitters - the former cut off frequecy response much more that expected for a direct inductive coupling, and the FM transmitters are so bad they hardly make it 6 feet - this appears to be especially bad with our hidden FM antenna. I think they want you to buy a new car to get BT streaming :)

Replaced OEM Bridestones @ about 40K w/hardly any tread left. After about a month of use on dry and wet (and one day of minor snow) use in Seattle (including some flood condition days) I can highly recommend these. Dig into the water well, and great general handling -- seem to "roll over" less than the Bridgstones on corners - maybe stiffer sidewalls? (Also about 20% cheaper.) Performed a last-minute emergency manouver yesterday, and the car seemed like it was on rails. Could be a little louder, but hard to tell - but if so, not by much.

I think it's because the 400h is so close to being a perfect car that we can afford to pick on it. For me, having no choice but to pay for the Nav/Bluetooth system (there were none w/o it) and then having it suck is a pet-peeve of mine...

You're a frekin' madman ;) Doing all the work for what most would consider a minor change - I hope you put this same patience and passion into your day job! Now if you can only totally replace the center console (especially the silver side w/the vents) - then I'm sold B)

I would say to save your money on the NAV. I was pretty excited to get an integrated nav, but they're always years behind the state-of-the-art of a 3rd party one. If you happen to need one in the future, grab a Garmin Nuvi (or whatever) and you'll be better off and have lot's more money in your pocket. Have fun w/the 450!

Well, I'm both sad and happy to hear this story. I'm sad for you, but I'm happy for me as now I don't have the urge to go run out and lose money on trading in my 400h for the 450... It's hard for me to beleive that they screwed the pooch on the Nav system again. After all the complaints for years, and on a brand-new 2010 model... The Nav my 400h is so bad, I've also had to use my external Garmin. This is really embarassing. And not being able to do anything while the car is moving - have they ever heard of thing called a passenger?? Or how about seeing the bluetooth stack in the 400h doesn't support the dailing profile, I can't use the great voice-dialing on the blackberry, so I have to take my eyes and hands off the road to dial the phone? Can you use phone voice-dialing now with the 450h? The built in voice control is worse than useless. Seems like a great market opportunity so special order a 450h with no dash :) and have a decent 3rd-party control system put in...

Alas, this is not possible - it's a real PITA. I have a Backberry w/great voice reco, all synronized over-the-air to my Exchange server, and I can't use the voice dialing. Not only can't you use the microphone in the Lexus, but because you're connected to BT, the phone's mic. is shut off, so you can't use phone voice dialing at all in the car.

That's normal -- if the car is cold and/or the batt needs charging, then the engine will start. (E.g., first thing in the morning, my ICE always starts up.) If your headlights, heated seats, cabin heat/AC, lamps, etc., are all off and you try again, you may (or may not) find that the ICE doesn't start when you first start up.

Sadly, no. The 400h is incredibly annoying and proactive in some respects (especially "safety" featues, or "maintainance required, please see your dealer and pay them too much"), but silent on the matter of running out of gas. I have come dangerously close to running out of fuel several times - especially since in my seating position the steering wheel nicely covers the gas gauge. (Even my old Ford had a little beep when I started up if there was < 50mi. to go.)

As you know, YMMV, especially on the RxH's. Personally, I'm getting 22.2MPG (2000 mile avg. / 20 mi city+hwy communte/day each way) on my 400h - I can get close to 24 if I lightfoot it. Not great, but a lot better than the 14MPG I was getting w/my V8 Explorer which it replaced. No way is anyone going to get 37mpg in sustained "real world" driving. (E.g., cold temps, short trips, normal to sporty acceleration, etc...)

I found the 400h to be above-average for snow driving. (The only downside was it's tendency in deep snow to "give up" just a little bit too early when reducing torque to avoid spinning.) But all-in-all, very nice.

Certainly I can't argue with the screen-size and convenience - although I usually try and use the speech prompts, and "turn right in 1/2 mile" doesn't work as well as "turn on Clinton St." when there are many streets coming up. (I also wish the "Turn in 350 feet" text-prompt was more "predictive" - by the time you see "turn in 50 feet" you've already passed the street. What really gets my goat is that on the bottom of the screen it tells you what road you're currently on -- gee, thanks, I know that already; on the Garmin, it always shows what the next intersection is coming up so even if you're following directions by hand without a desitination entered it's quite helpful. But the main thing is the address entry - if you know the address is on "123rd", you're SOL unless you know exactly if it's "123rd st", "123rd st NE", "123rd st SE", "123 court", "123rd place", or any of the scores of variants - rather than listing all the variants in the database, and telling you the "Address doesn't exist" if you pick the wrong one, the Garmin will spriral out from the current location or partial desitination location and list only those that really do exist. (BTW, this is the Seattle area.) There has been many-a-time when I've had to whip out my blackberry edge and use Telenav to get to an address or POI.

I know it's nice to have things integrated, and I was looking forward to having Nav built-in, but I would advise against it. In retrospect (assuming I could get a 400h w/o Nav, which I couldn't anyway) I would not not pay even half the price for it -- the Lexus Nav is so bad I would recommend that you instead buy your favorite (Garmin Nuvi for me) Nav system and get a nice professional mounting/power install to make it look nice. I don't want to spend too much time ragging on the system, in summary the biggest two problems are way-to-infrequent map updates and a poor address entry/verification system. In practice this means that a large percentage of the time the Nav will either not have a POI listed (or even an address) in the DB or it will have an address and either make it so hard to enter that you can't find it or you will be able to enter it and the system will insist that it doesn't exist. That's only the problems -- there are of course plently of modern features, such as text-to-speech (to speak street names) as opposed to the few generic pre-recorded phrases in the Lexus Nav, etc. YMMV, of course - just in my experience.

> plugged into the rear AC outlet Gee, do I have one of those? :) Is it an option? > The device contains, essentially, two rechargable AA batteries so I'm not too worried about battery drain and all that. Given how easily the small 400h battery can be drained, and the fact that the both the AC power inverter and your GPS power-supply/charger will always use some current regardless of the status of your AA batteries, I'd still be weary of doing this. Other than experimenting, you could try and measure the current on the 12V side of the power-inverter (through the fuse box?) when it's active and your GPS is plugged in and charging.

BTW, do you have the model of these and/or an ebay pointer if you are happy w/them?

I bought one of the inside-fitting models. Unfortunately, even though the window looked like it rolled all the way up, the "smart" window-closing sensor decided that there was something in the way and would roll the windows back down again. I asked the lexus tech, and they said they didn't know how to disable this feature...

I think it's silly (for me anyway) to pay a 5% premium for what probably amounts to a sctual 0.1% cost increase in fuel additives. As our 400h's aren't operating in any exotic compression range (I don't think) I wouldn't expect any performance increase - or certinly not enough to warrent the cost. If you're having a problem in the summer now with the ICE not cutting off quickly and traling off for a few fractions of a second, then the higher octane should help with this -but again, it hardly seems worth the price. You can probably use the "cheap" :) stuff and use an octance/cleaning additive every so often.