patt

faoki, on another board someone said that their pull right was fixed by resetting the stabilizer (which I assume meant the computer that controls the handling/stablization). Apparently a number of the 400h's are having this problem.

The gas station cameras may be set up to overwrite the old recordings with new recordings so your incident may be long gone from them. I agree with SWE that the damage may tell the story. Just in case, did you get any witness names? Even if you didn't, the attendent may remember the incident. LexRexBlue, I don't see how them pumping the gas for you would have affected this accident. If I understand correctly, he was waiting to pull up to a pump.

On the subject of manuals, am I the only one who finds some of the pictures in the owner's manual to be less than helpful? They will show a picture to show where something is located (e.g. the switch that disables the power rear door or the light sensor for the auto headlights) but the picture shows such a small area that it isn't helpful in locating the thing. Other times the picture doesn't show enough resolution to tell what they are talking about.

There are also standard features like the power rear door where the owner's manual has the information for when the feature isn't there. I expect they prepared the manuals before they decided what the mix of standard and optional features for the US is. Perhaps they are also did this to allow for them to add an option during the 2006 model "year" which will be more like a year and a half. The reason I was told for not offering laser cruise control was that it was an expensive option and not that many people were getting it or finding it useful. Something was said about it not working well under some conditions like fog. I don't know if this was the real reason, speculation by the dealer or a convenient exuse.

I don't mind the Rx400H front plate. I hate the front plate position on my Camry. It hangs down below the front bumper so it acts as a "feeler" for the curb when I pull straight in.

jj, how has the temperature been since you got the car? AC adds a significant load. With our recent high temps, I've been running a bit under 25 mpg. We were running something between 26 and 27 before the weather heated up. Also short trips hurt mileage and the combination of short trips and lots of AC is even worse.

wwest, I don't see any sign that this is happening. If it was, then energy drain when the climate control was running at all would be the same as hot weather energy drain and it isn't. Where do you get the information?

Ours RX400H also was delivered to us with the front license plate mounting installed. California requires a front plate too. speedyg, what would you have used to mount the front plate if they hadn't installed it?

← Isn't the gallon a different measure in the UK. I believe the imperial gallon is larger than the US gallon. I think it is 10 pounds of water rather than 8 pounds of water or 25% more which at least partially explains the difference.

On freeway driving (65 mph) in really hot weather with the early afternoon sun shining into the car, the AC appears to cost about 1 mpg. I expect that at lower speed the mpg cost is more (less miles traveled per hour but just has much AC needed).

Okay, now I understand. I don't think regeneration stops below 10 mph, but at that speed the regenerated power is pretty small so the needle is only a little below 0. Since there isn't an exact 0 mark on the scale, it is easy to not see the deflection at all. The CVT doesn't provide an infinite range of gearing. As the wheels slow, it reaches a point where the generator just isn't turning fast enough to generate max power and the regeneration starts to drop off. If I release and press the brake pedal when rolling at a few miles per hour, I do see a small movement in the power meter needle so regeneration is happening but it is pretty tiny.

yes, there is a socket back there in the rear cargo area by the light ← ← ← 110v inverter is a RES feature. Ours doesn't have RES so it doesn't have 110 V.

I don't notice the bump you are talking about, though the roads around here are pretty free of potholes and bumps. One day I when I had to break relatively hard on a wet pavement I felt typical ABS type pulsations. Other than that the braking is pretty smooth. Do you really only see regenerative braking up to 10 mph? How have you determined that? I see regeneration happen any time I let off the gas or step slightly on the brake regardless of speed. If I hit the brakes harder (to the point where the power meter arrow stops moving more negative) then I assume it moves in to regeneration plus using the brake pads. If you aren't seeing regeneration above 10 mph, it sounds like something is broken. I haven't been on a long enough downslope yet to fully charge the battery so I don't know if at that point it would go to pads only or continue to run the generator and dump the power to a load resistor. From what some others have posted, it sounds like it might do the former.

I find suspend and resume (for navigation) to be useful - particularly when I know I'm deviating from the course I set for a while and don't want it to keep telling me to turn. Those two seem to work fine.

ON Rx400h no commands in instruction manual only a note to see the help screens :( I took a digital camera and took a photo of each help screen, several dozen to make my own manual. Ron ← Could you post the files with the photos somewhere?

My engineering background is more electrical than mechanical. Would you be able to back out the changes to return to the original engine cycle? If so, it would be interesting to get the car and drive it for 10 k miles or so with the original configuration and then try the altered cams to compare the mileage and performance. Mileage varies enough between individual driving styles and types of driving (short trips vs. long trips, percentage highway vs city and the type of city driving, etc.) that it would be difficult to know if your mod made an improvement without a control experiment. It seems likely that Toyota may have had other reasons than getting V8 power that drove the choice of engine cycle so it is possible that you won't make the savings you expect or you may find other problems. I think it would be pretty risky to try if you couldn't revert to the original operation.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence that that would make the car operate more efficiently. When one can have the engine operating in its efficient range, the most efficient way to get power from the gas to the wheels is the direct path. The battery is there to provide power in place of the engine when the engine would have to run below its efficient range (moving at low speed) or to provide a boost in addition to the engine for fast accelleration (presumably also helping to keep the engine in a more efficient part of its range in addition to providing V8 performance when called upon to do so). The most inefficient performance I see on my RX 400 is the first 5 minutes of operation when the engine is warming up. One reason the engine cycles on is to keep it in its warmed up region for efficiency. Using the engine less frequently might hurt mileage.

ON Rx400h no commands in instruction manual only a note to see the help screens :( I took a digital camera and took a photo of each help screen, several dozen to make my own manual. Ron ← And the really fun thing is that when I enter a voice command it doesn't understand it will often interpret it as something totally different and suddenly do something odd. For instance, I've had it announce that it was moving the temperature setting to the coldest - takes a lot of punches on the temp button to get the temp back to normal. My husband had it do the opposite - moved the temp to hottest. Sometimes I've not been able to come up with any connection between the words I've said and what it thought I asked for. At this point, I'm a little hesitant to use voice unless I'm sure what I'm using is in its vocab. I wish it was more like the phone systems that ask Did you say x? before they take an action.

Backing in to the garage worked for me, but my husband didn't like doing it. I thought about doing something with a pad on the garage door, but I was concerned about what would happen if the garage door was opened after the hatch was open and already up too high. We ended up doing some garage cleaning so the RX could park deeper into the garage. Now we can drive in forward and the hatch isn't under the garage door when it opens. Pushatam, you might have more luck with your question posting it separately. The 2005 models have power lift that opens the hatch all the way when you press a button in the car or on the key. It can also be manually opened in which case one has to lift part way and then the shocks can finish raising it on their own like what you describe. I don't know if the 2001's had a power rear door. Since the title of this thread is about the hatch lifting too high, people with the answer to your question might not read it.

What I have noticed is that highway mileage (for a freely moving highway) is more stable than city mileage. Not surprising since it covers a narrower range of conditions. On the highway, I almost always get about 27 mpg at 65 mph unless the AC is running really heavily which can drop it by something a bit over 1 mpg. Warmed up city mileage with moderate driving - normal acceleration, gentle braking I see 28 to 33 mpg. The problem is that at slow speeds this can vary. For instance, stop and go with a lot of AC on a hot day the engine is having to work to generate for the AC but the car isn't moving much. Short trips, traffic that behaves too abruptly for gentle braking and other non-optimum things can vary mileage a lot more than cruising along on the freeway. City milage is much more sensitive to driver behavior in my experience with this car so far. That's when I'll see 25 mpg. Last tank (the third one) we averaged about 26 mpg. On the first 100 miles of this tank I was running better than 27.5. Then I let a visiting family member drive and he pulled the number down as he checked out the performance and wasn't as gentle with the brake.

Our screen is fine for readability and contrast even in bright sun. The one problem I have is that it isn't as bright as I would like when viewed through my sunglasses so I end up lifting them for a second if I really need to see the screen well. The sunglasses are pretty dark.

All the RX400 owners who tried including me were definately registering a brand new car. And Lexus customer service checked ours in another part of their data base and the data matched us. The OP, jetman, said the same thing.

Apparently it takes a long time - weeks - for data to migrate from Lexus to the registration system so it will recognize your VIN. This seems to be a continuing problem at Lexus. The consumer service on this has been the most negative aspect of my purchase so far. As a computer professional it really bugs me as there is no reason it should take so long and Lexus seems to take no interest in fixing it. I got my Lexus RX400h over a month ago and it still doesn't recognize my VIN. I went through the same thing with customer service with the same result. There is a virtual tour. Most of the features seem skippable but I would like to get access to my owner's manual online instead of having to page through the book. I hope it allows download of the manual but I can't tell if it does. At a minimum if they are too lame to fix their computers so they talk to each other to transfer the data promptly, they could put up a message that says it can take a couple of months after buying your car before the system is ready for you. Instead their message suggests you are too dumb to enter your VIN right and need help! This topic makes me terribly grumpy.

Where do you put it when you are driving? I guess that isn't as much of a problem in the RX300 since there are no battery air vents.

dreamchaser, there is a little orange icon at the beginning of the titles of threads where something has been posted since you last read them (at least as I see the forum). If you hover your mouse over the icon, it says "go to last unread" and if you click on it it takes you to the last unread message.