patt

When the bars go green because of the engine running to warm up the car, that happens right at the beginning of the drive - first five minutes or so at Northern California temperatures. It isn't high speed driving that does it - it is running on engine to get the engine heated enough to produce heating for the interior when otherwise it wouldn't need to run so it is creating extra charge to store in the battery. At 75 miles per hour, I've never seen the batteries go high and except on a very steep down hill, I haven't seen it run on battery. The air resistance at that speed needs plenty of power to keep up the speed.

The bars go green whenever the battery charge is high (top bar or second from the top bar are on). I think it is just so you can see in a quick glance that the charge is high. In my experience, one of two things makes the charge level get that high - the beginning of a drive in cold weather or a long downhill stretch. When you start out in cold weather, the system will run the engine to get it warmed up to provide cabin heat even if the conditions would otherwise allow it to run on the stored charge. In that condition I have seen it go to all but one bar charged but I live in Northern California. In a colder area like Chicago, maybe that continues long enough that it gets all the bars lit. Also, if it is really cold I usually turn on the seat heater until the cabin temperature comes up a bit so maybe that ends up drawing enough to keep the top bar from getting lit. On a long downhill, the regenerative braking also charges the battery and can get to the all green. It doesn't take much of a slope to allow the car to go all electric at 65. It can be just barely noticable. It is also possible that the system takes the high charge level into account - the battery is charged above the target charge level so it is better to take power from the battery for a bit as long as it can get enough without overworking the motor. Going home, your car was already warmed up and you probably took some charge down on the airport access roads. Also, if you were downhill or wind at your back on the way to the airport you probably had the opposite on the return journey so the engine power would be needed.

My cups seem to fit fine with the arm raised. Is there a way to take the holder out to give it a rinse? It seems like there should be but I haven't managed to do it.

I have noticed that my the heated seats reduce gas mileage by about 1 mpg, just a guess though. haven't tried it on then off etc... yet. I have noticed that when I first turn the car on in cold weather, the engine runs at just about any level of acceleration. This is what I expected because the manual mentions getting the engine up to temperature to provide heat for climate control as one of the reasons the engine will run. As a result, the battery charge level gets into green level much more often than it did during hot or moderate weather. I get in the cold car, turn on the seat heater to get nice and toasty for the first part of driving. When the climate control has gotten the inside of the car warmed up, I turn off the seat heater. This doesn't have a noticable effect on gas mileage. I think this is because the seat heater is on only for a short while and it is on during a time when the engine is running extra anyway.

When I learned to drive (a long time ago), I was told to apply the brakes gently after going through a puddle to dry them off so they would work when needed. The rainy season has started and it occurs to me that this probably doesn't work for my RX 400h. If I apply the brakes lightly, the brake pads won't be applied. Splashy big puddles are common here when it rains. Does this not matter with modern brakes or all the smarts that are attached to the brakes now? Of course the brake pads being wet won't hurt for most stops because the generator load will do the braking but I want them to work in a panic stop situation.

I have noticed that the A/C light stays on as long as the system is set to auto climate. When you use the manual adjustment, you can shut the A/C down and that seems to help. You can also force A/C off while in auto by going to the climate screen and touching the A/C button. That way the auto still controls the fan speed and such.

I also get a rattle from the back sometimes. It isn't the arm rest. I've wondered if it is from the grills on the batteries. It kind of sounds like it comes from there.

Well, we won't know the answer to the question for another 5 or 6 years. We bought the warranty 6 years 100K miles platnum. We had an extended warranty on our Toyota Camry which I bought partly because they had knocked the price down significantly. Even with a good price on the warranty, we didn't have many repairs on it so if I was buying an good old standard Toyota I probably wouldn't get the warranty. Our Camry is now well out of warranty with 200K miles. We change oil about every 5k miles and do the other recommended maintenance and have had very few repairs. On the other hand, this car does have a fair amount of new components - some leveraged off the Prius design but even then in this car they had to be modified for more power and more features. There are a lot of bells and whistles which can develop problems (one reason why the platinum warranty is a good idea - too many items not covered So we went for the extended warranty. I hope it doesn't pay for itself because broken cars are a pain even if they don't cost me money, but we felt in betting on such new technology that we wanted the insurance. We did talk the price down in price to something under $2000. I don't remember the exact number but I think we got them down to under 1800 but that was before Lexus had posted RX400 list prices for the warranty on their website. And we were paying full list price for the RX400H itself so I figured they could afford to knock a few hundred off the warranty. I don't understand the notation of the pricing you are posting e.g.: 7 yrs or 75k miles: $2750 (400h - $1858; 330 - $2010) What does 400h $1848 mean? The 400h warranty price should be higher than the 330 price. Also, the prices you have outside the parenthesis all look like the 100K prices for the number of years, not the 70 or 75K miles prices. Personally, I don't think the smaller mileage warranties are worth the cost - the standard warranty covers the power train and hybrid stuff to 70K and 100K so you are just buying protection for the other stuff for 20-25K miles.

If you put in garage for a key word, you should find a thread on this issue from back when the 400H's were starting to ship. I thought about the solution of only openning the RX400H door when the garage door is closed and quickly discarded it. There is more than one person in my family who opens the garage door. Sooner or later someone would be in the garage with the RX back open and someone outside would activate the garage door. The first solution we tried was backing into the garage. The garage roof is high enough - just the garage door is too low. That was okay, but my husband was concerned that one of us would have some time when we didn't pay enough attention and we would scrape the side on something in the garage. The second solution was to clean out some of the stuff that was stored on the floor of the garage in front of the car. Now we can pull in far enough that the RX door is clear of the garage door. If your garage is deep enough, I think that is the easiest solution.

Yea, I guess you have alot of experience in this area out in Sacramento. Give me a break!! ← Actually, someone from Sacramento should have some experience in how flooding can occur unexpectedly. While we don't get hurricanes, we get plenty of storms that don't go where they were predicted to - even when the prediction was just a few hours ago. Flooding often occurs unexpectedly due to a combination of the rain falling plus failure of the usual drainage path for the water. One April, I got caught in water that was a couple of feet deep in an area high enough that one wouldn't think it could flood. I guess it must have been a slight local dip and the storm sewers clogged. On my own street, I've seen the storm sewers back up so badly that they blew the manhole covers off and there was a fountain feet high above the flooded street. (Fortunately, our house is well above street level.)

Unless they have changed lately, neither Sacramento or Roseville Lexus is charging a mark up. I don't know how long their lists are since we've already gotten ours.

Your experience with the loaner Camry could be partly due to the tires they equiped it with. We have had our 94 Camry up in the Sierra snow a few times (including one time when the snow was pretty light and we got the CHP guy to us go without chaining up). It was fine - not all wheel drive but definately not horrible. I've had it in mud too - not my first choice but it was someplace I needed to go and it was raining on this dirt road. It took gentle handling but did okay. We haven't had our RX400 in the snow yet but it sure was great in the rain this spring. It is our first AWD car. I buy the argument that when the front wheels slip the ability to transfer some torque to the back will help even if it is a smaller amount than can be delivered to the front. Of course a lot of the cars I've seen get into trouble in the Sierra do it on the downhill. FWD and AWD don't make much of a difference when you aren't needing to apply drive.

Actually, it is a combined mpg figure for my husband and myself. Driving style contributes, but there are some additional factors. During these last two tankfuls, we have mainly been driving our usual commutes which are about 15 to 18 miles and very few short 1 to 6 mile trips which pull the mpg down. Our commutes are about 10% freeway and the rest mostly uncongested suburban driving which seems to be a pretty sweet spot for the performance as long as we don't hit too many red lights. If our area had synchronized lights instead of sensor based lights, we would probably do even a bit better. The second tank also included a 260 mile round trip on the highway, but Bay Area congestion kept the speed down for some of the trip or the mileage wouldn't have been quite as good. For comparison, during the summer AC load we were pretty consistantly getting something between 25 and 26 mpg on a tank.

The weather had turned beautiful here. Cool enough that we don't need to use air conditioning which has been doing great for our gas mileage. However, every time I start the car, the automatic AC turns on the recirculate mode - which means that it blows warm air until I remember to switch it to bring in outside air. Is there a way to disable it from using recirculate? I can't see why the automatic system is choosing recirculate since the outside temperature is cooler than the the inside of the car and the car is hotter than the temperature I've got it set to maintain. A sensible autormatic program would see that the car is hot and the outside is cool so it should want to bring in outside air to cool the inside. I've even driven for a while to see if it was some start up thing where it would change later but it doesn't. With the air conditioner off, we are getting close to EPA numbers. The two tanks so far were between 28 and 29 mpg (by calculation, the number from the car's monitor is about 1 mpg high fairly consistently). With air conditioner load off, the highway and city mileage are back in the right order - I've been seeing about 27 mpg for highway cruising between 55 and 60 mph dropping a mile or two per gallon when the speed goes into the 65 to 80 mph range; 30 mpg and up for city driving (not awful stop and creep but closer to the EPA test of a stop every 1/2 mile and peaking at 25 to 45 mph between the stops).

Just to add a little personal experience here - we did have some late rains this year. I encountered some deep puddles on the freeway in our RX400 early in the spring. A few inches of water on the roadway splashed around by the passage of the car didn't phase it - I wouldn't expect it to.

Roland, It is interesting that you encounter the problem plus low gas mileage. I have a feeling that the control systems on the car might sometimes be not quite smart enough. Lucca mentioned TSIB EG010-05 in a post on the RX400 Dead Battery thread. The idle speed training in the RX400 can apparently get messed up if the 12 V battery has gone dead at some point. It can cause reduced fuel economy and the engine running more frequently then normal or too long. I wonder if it wouldn't also cause the "surging" effect too as the engine goes on idling at the wrong speed. I wonder if some of the cars are coming from the factory or out of shipment needing this proceedure. Ideally, I would hope that a control system like this would monitor itself and re-adjust, but apparently it doesn't. You might ask them to try the retraining process in TSIB when they do your service. It definately isn't something ours does.

We have a bit over 5000 miles on ours including a round trip from Sacramento to San Diego mostly on Highway 5 so we have had plenty of time to feel any odd highway behavior. I don't notice any surging on the freeway. Very smooth. So was the one I test drove for an hour.

Markatty, I know what you mean. Our 5000 mile maintenance required notice popped up toward the end of a long car trip. The method to clear it is in the owner's manual (and if Lexus would get the RX400H manual on the Lexus Owners site, I could look it up and tell you, but they haven't). I'm not sure I remember exactly what I had to do to clear it. I think it was something like: get the odometer/trip meter set to odometer turn the car off and back on hold the odometer button down until something happens.

There is an override for the RX400H that allows one to enter destinations while driving. It takes about 10 button pushes and has to be redone if the car is started so it probably isn't something you would want to do every time. However, we were on a long car trip recently and it was nice to be able to use so the passenger could enter a destination. I learned how to do it from the RX300/RX330 board: http://us.lexusownersclub.com/forums/index...opic=22623&st=0 The second key seems to vary based on model/year. For our RX400H, the key after MENU is Volume. It takes care of the Nav destination lock-out but not the phone. I wish they would at least enable these features when the passenger sensor (the one for the airbags) indicates a passenger is present. Are they worried that some drivers would install a lead-weight passenger?

18 MPG or even 21 is pretty poor MPG. Maybe if your commute is 15-20 minutes creeping along in stop and go. If 15-20 minutes means 8 to 15 miles, I would expect to see better numbers based on the experience I'm having with mine - maybe at least 24 or 25 mpg. It seems like the TSIB might be your problem, but there is only one way to find out - get the dealer to try it and see if it makes a difference. I'd really like to hear the results of someone with low mileage taking it to the dealer for the TSIB. Driving style does make a difference, but unless it is really poor (so that you would get poor mileage on any car) I don't think it would pull things down that low.

I don't know if it makes any difference to filling a chip, but the RX400H glass is suppose to be some kind of sound deadening glass. If a problem got severe enough to warrant replacement of the windshield, one would want to get the same kind.

It works on our RX400 too. I had to try it a couple of times because at first I expected some sort of click or other reaction to the top left and bottom left taps. There is no reaction until the sequence of four is finished. It takes a lot of pushes so I don't think I will enter the mode all the time, but when we are on a road trip it will be nice for the passenger to be able to enter a destination.

jj, You can find out about how EPA tests are done here: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/!Removed!/ratings_description.shtml There is no way to get a number that will be what everyone sees as their long term average mileage. That will vary between people because driving styles and the profiles (% freeway, % surface street, exact type of city driving, length of trip). What the EPA numbers are suppose to be are numbers that are tested the same way on every car to provide a relative measure by which the fuel economy of cars can be compared. The fuel economy test schedules item on the site above will tell you the driving conditions for the EPA tests. What I meant about the difference between an average of 24.6 vs never getting more than 24: Our life time average so far is a little over 25 MPG. That includes extended periods when we have gotten 26 to 27 mpg and another where we were averaging 22 mpg (a lot of short trips - the worst thing for mileage). Not surprising given the wider variety of our driving compared to the EPA test conditions and the fact that EPA tests don't include some factors that reduce mileage like loads from accessories (e.g. AC). On the other hand someone who never gets more than 24 mpg is probably also running over a range of mileages and their average is significantly below 24. Either they are always driving in worst case conditions in some way (which seems unlikely to me since I easily and repeatably get 26 to 28 in freeway cruising) or there is something wrong.

Right, but the battery may have died during shipping and needed to be jumped then. You might ask if the dealer would give it a try. On a recent trip to the Bay Area, we got 27 MPG even on the return trip when the temperature was over 100 degrees. That was on freeway most of the way, 60 to 70 mph. Unless you are always doing short trips or really bad traffic, you should see better than 24 mpg for some kinds of driving.

And the battery gets its energy from where? The AC is electrically powered. That power can come from the engine turning the generator directly when the engine is running. When the engine is not running or more power is needed than the engine is generating, it can come from the battery - but all the energy in the battery came from the engine initially. If that energy wasn't used to run the AC, it could be used to get the car moving. At freeway speeds this is a fairly small impact and you may not notice it - maybe 1 mile per gallon. When you will notice it is sitting in traffic with the sun blazing or when you start driving with a hot interior - sometimes the battery will get run down enough that the engine has to run when normally you would be on the motors. At city speeds and stop and go, the impact on mpg is much more noticeable. Any electrical power used to run the AC, the stereo, the lights, etc. uses energy that came from the engine and otherwise could be used to turn the wheels. It all impacts mpg. The only exception would be when one is going down such a long downgrade that the battery gets full and the regeneration energy would be lost if it wasn't powering accessories.