patt

I personally do not believe that you are doing anything wrong. I have about 2000 miles on my RX400h and the average is 24.6 MPG. I coast whenever possible and do not use the AC even when it is hot. I practice painfully slow starts whenever there are no cars behind me. It is frustrating...the car just does not even come close to the advertised mileage. I expected more than this. ← There is a big difference between averaging 24.6 MPG as you are and never getting more than 24 MPG as Judy reports. Averaging 24.6 may be consistant with the EPA MPG numbers depending on how different your driving is from the EPA city and highway numbers. I get the EPA numbers when I drive something close to the EPA profiles. Our average over the life of the car so far is just over 25 mpg though that includes using AC . By the way, I have found that painfully slow starts don't seem to be the best thing for mileage. I get as good or better mileage when I go fairly promptly up to speed and then cruise. And why would you spend 50K to drive a car where you can't use the air conditioner?

You might not be doing anything wrong. Do you know if they did the proceedure in TSIB EG010-05?

I'm under the impression that more things can be adjusted with CBEST settings than the list of door settings and such they give you with the car. I've seen a more extensive list of those settings posted for the RX330. I assume the more extensive list is what Jerry is asking for. uthorns, putting those terms into google is bringing up a lot of hits and none of the first 30 or so appears to be the pdf you mention. I've tried narrowing the search and I don't get the pdf either. Is what you found the CustomerSelectionForm pdf or something more extensive? If it is the latter, can you post the pdf or a link here?

Those getting poor mileage might want to check into this TSIB (from the Rx400h Dead Battery, Warranty thread, http://us.lexusownersclub.com/forums/index...howtopic=22797).

Our ivory interior has stayed nice with no problem. The black interior would be very hot around here so I wouldn't go for it even though it looks sharp. The information I've seen both directly from Lexus and from a couple of dealers says that all the California cars have the ML stereo and the heated seats so you may find it difficult to get without them.

Only some dealers are trying to load on extras. Our dealer didn't assume we would add anything and they didn't install any extras. We were given the pitch on the leather preservation/paint presentation when we picked up or car, but it was up to us whether we wanted to add it or not. Same for lojack and extended warranty. I'm pretty sure that is their standard process for all the cars they sell. Neither of the local dealers was doing a formal list with deposit in the early days and they were undecided on how they would distribute the cars when the time came. Therefore, we put a deposit down with a dealer in the LA area in early '04. We were 7th on the list. When March 05 rolled around, one of the local dealers decided to use the informal list (without deposit - just anyone who had walked in and asked to be kept informed) in order and we were pretty far down on that one. The other set a day when they would take deposits and purchase information (color, RES or no RES) and worked from that in order. We dropped off our form and were number 2 on that list. When their tester arrived, they called me and we went for a test drive of about an hour. Our salesman was great about encouraging me to spend as much time putting the car through its paces as I needed to be certain. Meanwhile, the dealership where we had put down our early deposit was seeming a little flakey. They were talking about it maybe being a month even though they are a large dealership who would be getting a good allocation. Some of their first shipment wasn't going to the list. (They are one where I've since heard that they were loading extras on so perhaps they were taking some of the cars and doing that rather than selling them to the list people at MSRP as promised.) They did call at the last minute and say they had a car available on April 16 because someone higher on the list had passed, but by that time we had a VIN number with our dealer up here so we weren't feeling like dropping everything to run down to get a car - especially with some doubts about their credibility and the salesman up here had put in a lot of time with us. Our car from the local dealer was ready for pickup April 22. No funny business. They gave us back our deposit check which they hadn't cashed. The other dealership gave us back our deposit though they were a little cranky about it and I had to remind them at least once before it got sent.

I've wondered about that as well - not for our RX400H yet, but over the years our Camry bumper has gotten enough minor bumps that I wonder if what is under the skin has gotten compressed or less protective.

Stevskc and jj, I suggest you look at some of the older threads: http://us.lexusownersclub.com/forums/index...mileage&st=135# particularly post 149 which has a good explanation of things that effect mileage. And this one: http://us.lexusownersclub.com/forums/index...pic=19829&st=30 post 34 has an explanation of why the batteries and motors don't get used more. Also, take a look at the profiles for EPA city and highway mileage tests on www.fueleconomy.gov The highway test is a lot slower than freeway speeds. The city test is probably not much like your off freeway driving either. There are also some ideas of what people are doing to get better mileage on this thread and other threads on mileage. The driving habit I find most important is to anticipate the need to brake and brake gently enough that most of the energy goes into regeneration rather than into wearing my brake pads down. Our commute is between 15 and 18 miles. With that plus some short errands, we are getting between 25 and 27 mpg per tank. Instantaeous mileage during acceleration is low - when you start to accelerate, you aren't traveling many miles per second and you are putting in a lot of energy per second. However, you don't do that for very many seconds and only for a small fraction of a mile. When averaged with the lower energy demands during cruising you can still get good overall mpg.

Note that the article author LexRex is talking to is not the same as the one that wrote the review. The article on why real mileage isn't as good as EPA for most people was pretty well done. The chart indicates that the $23.50 was calculated by Edmunds.com. The $23.50 per gallon comes from the gas savings necessary to make up the difference between base price on an RX330 and base price on an RX400H. The base price on the RX400H contains a lot of things that are optional on the FWD RX330 so it isn't a fair comparison. It isn't even clear to me that the base price is real because they don't seem to let you configure the RX330 in California without at least some options. It is a pretty bogus comaprison.

So it did come in on Wednesday, just not the one you thought. :( Glad to hear you are finally on the road to getting your RX400H back.

That article looks fine and factual to me. The things he points out are all reasons why real mileage is different from EPA numbers. That applies to all cars but, as he points out, the numeric difference with a more efficient car is more startling. I think it is useful to people that he pointed out the conditions for the two EPA tests. Until I looked at fueleconomy.gov (an EPA web site he might inform readers about for more information) recently, I assumed that "highway" in the EPA tests meant "freeway". The actual test is more like driving on a rural road. Who averages 48 mph on the freeway? Our objective in buying this was to get a car that would be good both for our commute and road trips and had at least as good mileage as our Camry. With the RX400, we got a car with better gas mileage than our Camry even though it is larger and more luxurious. We are happy with the fuel usage of our RX400H. I didn't expect to get quite as good numbers as the EPA and I was surprised how close we get. For freeway when we got the car in April, we were actually getting the EPA highway number of 27. Even now with the AC runnning we get around 25 to 26 mpg. The adjustment they did to the EPA number really seemed to work for highway. I find the freeway cruising number is much less sensitive to driver style since one isn't accelerating and braking. (I don't understand how the NYTimes review managed to get mileage under 21 mpg for a mostly freeway drive of 500 some miles. It was numbers like that in both the review articles that make me feel they are so slanted - either that or they are driving a car very different from mine.) The city mileage varies a lot more. When I'm driving something close to the EPA test profile without AC, I see something around the EPA city number. (We got our RX400H in April and it was a cool spring so we didn't need much AC for the first two months.) Unforunately the lights around here aren't synchronized so I often end up having to stop more often than the EPA test profile. The speed limits are higher than the EPA test profile too. Therefore much of our city driving is harder on mpg than the EPA test. Also, you take a bigger hit, in terms of mpg, for the AC in city driving than in highway. The air conditioner is having to cool as much per hour but you are driving fewer miles per hour so the mpg cost of the cooling load is greater. He missed one of the major factors that produces the difference between EPA and real numbers - the penalty on engine efficiency for short trips. This seems to be a significant factor for the people who are getting really disappointing fuel economy numbers from their RX400's. Our RX400H has been getting between 25 and 27 mpg per tank with our normal mix of normal length drives (11 or more miles) and short errands. Recently we had two tankfuls while we were preparing for a big family event with all the driving being short errands (1 to 6 miles) in hot weather. For those two tanks we got a bit over 22 mpg. There is a significant cost to getting the engine up to the temperatue where it is designed to operate. In hot weather where that is happening at the same time as maximum AC demand to cool the passengers down it is really bad. He also missed the most important factor in driving style for improving mpg in a hybrid - braking. I find my mpg is more sensitive to that than to the acceleration. If the driver speeds up to the stop light then stomps on the brake, energy has to be dumped into the brake pads. If you can anticipate stops enough to brake more gently, then much of the energy goes to the generator for storage and reuse. To get the best mpg in the hybrid, one has to get use to doing that. On the other hand, reasonably brisk acceleration doesn't seem to cost as much efficiency in the hybrid - one ends up drawing energy from the battery plus the engine instead of reving up the engine as one would in a gas only car.

The RX400h needs at least some energy in the 12 V battery to start. When the ignition is off, the high voltage traction battery is disconnected from the rest of the car by a relay. My recollection is that the 12 V battery is used to power the transition of the relay. Part of the reason for the difference between your RX 400 and RX 300 dome light experiments might be battery life as you suggest. Also, it seems likely that the amount of power needed from the RX 300 battery to turn the starter motor and get the engine going is more than the amount of power needed to start the RX 400 where it may only have to supply a trickle to keep memories alive and a jolt to switch a relay.

I picked up my RH400h on June 3, but the Lexus site would not recognize my vin number until July 15. Lexus may not enter your vin until several weeks after you bought it. ← We got ours in mid-April within the first week of RX 400 sales and I wasn't able to register until early July - it was a lot more than a few weeks. They have fixed that finally, but the owner's manual still isn't available on the site. They really seem to be pretty sloppy about maintaining that site.

That picture looks the same as my dash. The thing that the Lexus pictures don't show well is the exterior colors. I think the idea of the kW guage is okay, but the execution could be improved. In theory, I don't mind having it instead of a tack. In any high power output situation, a lot of the power will be coming from the engine so its position should be somewhat proportional to how hard the engine is running. Like Philly, I find it useful for guaging my braking pressure. In particular, I watch for the point where pushing harder on the brake doesn't move the needle more since that means the pads are providing the additional braking. In the other direction, point where it goes from the dashed area around the zero to the solid is the point where it will usually turn the engine on (though if the batteries are low or during initial warm-up it may turn the engine on sooner). What they did wrong, IMO, was to have so little resolution on the guage. As you can see from the picture, only 3 numbers are marked on it (and only the 100 even has a tick on the circle - the 0 and the 200 are just fuzzy locations). Also, in the same space they could have added some indication of how much of the energy was coming from the engine versus the motors which would give a closer idea of how fast the engine is having to turn over.

Black exterior isn't a great color to have in California since it heats up a lot in our sunny hot summers. Also, my very practical husband likes to stay with a light color for night time visibility. We went with Savannah. Silver tones have become so widely used that the silver looks too ordinary to me - perhaps also because silver is so common. Also the silver only comes with black or grey interior and I prefere the ivory. The savannah is light enough for us and we like the color. At first I liked Bamboo slightly better. In some light conditions it is difficult to tell the difference between the two. After looking at the colors for a while we both decided we liked the savannah more. That exterior only comes with ivory interior. As you point out, it wouldn't really go with the grey interior. The bamboo allows you to choose either the ivory or the grey but I think the ivory goes better with it. The blue is really pretty but darker than we wanted to go. The Lexus white is really nice for a white with its pearl effect, but it still looks too stark for my tastes. My least favorite interior is the grey. It just doesn't seem to go well with the brushed aluminum. The colors are too close to each other for good contrast but not the same tone enough like they make a good tone on tone effect. The color patches in the brochures and on the Lexus website don't look much like the actual colors to me - especially the savannah and the bamboo.

dcfish, I think those prove my point. I think the first one is Bamboo Pearl or the Savannah, but I can't decide which from the picture and it doesn't look much like the color in real life. Also, even with the best picture, I find that the color makes a different impression when you look at 5 inches of it on a picture or paint chip versus 8 feet of it on the side of a car. I forgot to mention in my post that the RX400H colors are a subset of the RX330 colors. The dark green color for instance isn't offered.

Dan, For the exterior colors, we just went to the Lexus lot and looked at the RX330's. The exteriors are the same colors and we found looking at them in real life more useful than pictures. Since we were on planning on the purchase for a long time before they came out, we did this several times to see them under different kinds of light. The colors used are all too reflective and affected by the ambient conditions to get a good idea of how they really will look from a picture. The harder one is the interior color since the colors do look different with the brushed aluminum. I think the black interior looks sharpest but we have the same problem as uthorn's brother - it is climatically undesireable for us. In any case, for some of the exterior colors, there is no choice on the interior color. I thought the black (or actually very dark gray/charcoal) dash looked weird with the ivory interior at first, but after driving the car for a bit I realized it is more practical than a light dash because it avoids the reflection of the dash in the windshield that one gets from a light dash with the windshield angle. I'm happy with the ivory interior. The floor mats do show dirt but since much of the dirt we have is tracked in leaf matter so would black ones. If you can, you might want to visit dealers to see the three interior colors.

I've got a data point on longer trips versus short trips with the same drivers in hot weather. We have been consistantly getting between 25 and 27 mpg during our normal driving - 15-20 mile commute trips plus a smattering of short 1-5 mile errands, AC as needed, about 70% suburban, 25 % freeway. For about two weeks we had a family event going on for which we took time off - no commute, all short errands up to about 6 miles at most, a lot of drive a mile here, two miles there. I did try to daisy chain errands where possible, but there are still times where a stop is long enough that one starts again with a cold engine and a hot interior. The daily highs were in the 90's and 100's. For the two tanks we drove that way (an awful lot of short errands) we got between 22 and 24 mpg. For reference, the Sacramento area is a typical water sculpted valley. A lot of rolling little ups and downs. The uphill costs some mileage but I get some of it back on the downhill. If your usual driving is very short trips, don't expect to get EPA numbers (which are both done over 30 minutes or so and one of them with a warmed up engine). That is probably true of every car, but this car is the first where I've watched the mileage so closely. It is a very nice car and we are very happy with it. Its mileage is a lot better than the small SUV rental I got for one week recently on a trip and it is a lot nicer.

From what I've read, Lexus did more sound deadening on the RX400 than they have on the RX330. The article mentioned things like sound deadening windshield glass. Ours is pretty quiet. It is quiet enough that I have to be careful to watch my speed because the noise level at 65/70 is significantly lower than that in my Camry and it is easy to let the speed creep up without realizing it. I haven't driven an RX 300 so I can't comment on the comparison.

gtfrench - I agree about underwhelmed. The one feature that was the primary reason I wanted to get on the site was the ability to access the online user's manual. I'm hoping it allows download or at least I can print it to pdf because I would much rather have a searchable electronic manual than a paper one. (It is kind of disappointing that they supplied us a CD with the manuals which had tutorials but it didn't have a pdf of the manual which would have been so easy to put on.) The manual has been "Temporarily unavailable" for several days now. I wonder what their definition of temporary is.

That is my interpretation too. Basically, they want to let you know that stability control doesn't make you impervious to skidding. If you want to drive like a maniac on slippery surfaces, you can get to a point where the car goes out of control.

We were also given a separate little brochure on it and it was pointed out to us several times during the car delivery. It was on the checklist of things the salesman was suppose to tell you. We did find the car delivery process at Lexus to be burdensomely lengthy in its attempt to be thorough (I think it took about 3 hours and we were paying cash and no trade-in). I can see where some sales people might try to cut corners and streamline.

Finally - after 2 and a half months, it worked for me too. The first thing I noticed is that their profile doesn't accomodate two owners (e.g. husband and wife) on a car nicely. There is one first name slot and one last name slot. The same thing annoys me at the dealers. I hate that I get addressed as Mrs. X when that is my husband's last name, not mine but they just don't seem to comprehend joint ownership of a car or that some women don't change their names when they marry.

The edmunds forums have discussion areas for both Highlander Hybrid and Rx400 hybrid. The average mileages reported on the Highlander Hybrid board do seem to be larger than the Rx400H mileages. 31 and 32 don't seem out of line with what is being reported there. It is surprising given that the EPA ratings are the same for the two cars, but I guess we are paying something for the extra features, comfort and weight of the Rx400H. While individual drivers may exaggerate, the aggregate reports for the two vehicles being different leads me to think there is a real difference.

If the tires are the problem and Lexus knows it, then they should put Goodyears on every 400h out there and switch the tires on already owned 400h's for free!!! :( :( Obviously, they're not going to do that. Also, in my opinion, it's rediculous for them to suggest that it's the tires but I'm not a tire expert. Can anyone say definitively what the "stabilizer" is??? I remember when I drove my brother's 400h on the highway for 3 1/2 hours, the steering wheel was slightly off center to the right even on straight, flat road. If I tried to center the steering wheel, there was a lot of resistance. As I understand it, the power steering is electronic (no belt involved). Correct? ← I think by stabilizer they meant the VSC (vehicle stability control) that is part of the vehicle dynamics integrated management. My understanding also is that the power steering is electronic I would also be surprised if the switch between the tire brands helped the pull problem. Given what Roland said, perhaps the orignial set wasn't balanced properly. Or perhaps when they switched brands that also caused the VSC to reset.