Dear Forum Members:
Long story short-- today my dealer told me that my 2006 rx 400h (30k miles) has a defective hybrid battery which isnt properly holding a charge causing the engine to run too much and they are sending away for its replacement.
I am looking for others who have had to have their batteries replaced as well to see what if anything Lexus did to make sure the car was actually fixed. Here is the long version of my saga -- sorry it is so long. The car has been to the dealer multiple times because I never thought it was working quite the way that it should. The mileage has never been good regardless of how I drive and the car has never seemed to be able to move from a dead start on electric power without the engine coming on regardless of how gentle I have been on the throttle- or the engine would continue to run while at a stop for minutes at a time even when the batteries were 3 or 4 bars from being fully charged and engine at normal operating temp. Each time the car went to the dealer, they told me they have run the tests and that there are no errors and therefor the car is doing exactly what it was designed to do. I havent been satisfied with that and contacted corporate. They arranged for me to drive an '08 for several days and I found that the new car was getting significantly better mileage and the engine wasnt running as long at stops even when driving my normal routes and under similar conditions. I reported these observations to the folks at corporate, they explained that the differences in mileage was probably differences in the trip computers (I didnt actually calculate mileage on the loaner by using actual gas calculations from the odometer and the pump but do so on every tank with my car) and that the difference in how long the engine runs before shutting off is not significant.
I was continually told that if there were any sort of problem, the "sophisticated" sensors in the hybrid system would log any errors long before the batteries went bad and that the system would identify any time the car was operating outside of "parameters". Today the technician who drove my car noticed there was "something wrong" with the system but apparently the computer did not note any problems.
My concerns going forward are these. 1) is the problem deeper than just the batteries or is there another malfunction which caused the batteries to fail 2) how do I know that they have fixed the problem if the computer didnt log any errors this time and the batteries were bad. 3) for all owners who like me think their car isnt quite right, how does Lexus diagnose so that they can correct the problem when they insist that there cant be a problem if there are no errors logged in the computer. 4) what do you wise members think I should do in my conversations with Lexus to make sure that they take care of this problem.
I would very much appreciate any help anyone can give with this issue. I would especially appreciate knowing if anyone else has had their batteries replaced and if so, what were the circumstances and did the replacement battery solve your problems.
Thank you all.
