Search the Community

"I HAVE A 2007 ES 350 ULTRA LUXURY PACKAGE WITH 170,000 MILES YESTERDAY I WAS DRIVIN AROUND 45-50 MPH THEN CAR STARTED TO JOLT A LIL THEN I CAME TO A LIGHT THE CAR WOULDNT MOVE ! I THEN TURNED OFF CAR AND ATTEMPTED TO DRIVE SO I WOULDNT B STICK AT A LIGHT AND THEN CAR MOVED A BLOCK UP AND THEN CHECK ENGINE LIGHT AND CHECK VCS CAME ON. NOW CAR WONT MOVE WHEN I SWITCH TO DRIVE OR REVERSE" PLEASE HELP COULD THIS BE A TCM PROBLEM? OR A SHIFT CABLE PROBLEM? I FOUND OUT THERE ISNT A DIPSTICK FOR TRANSMSSN BC ITS SEALED? Please help 🤦🏾‍♂️

Hello, I have a 2012 ES350, and I was hoping someone could help me identify a violent shaking in the wheel and car at 60-75mph. I took it in to two different shops, both said different things. It has 190,000 miles, and the only thing that has been replaced was the passenger side outer axle because of a torn boot. The first shop said it was the struts, and the other said it was the engine mounts. They both said the alignment was excellent. The first shop balanced my tires for me, and this made the problem dramatically worse for some reason. It does shake more when I accelerate at these speeds, but even coasting it still shakes. Strangley, the shaking goes away when I go around corners. It is not only in the wheel, but I can also feel it in the seat. I inspected the suspension components, and it all seemed solid, with no torn bushings or play, but I don't really know what to look for. The struts are not bouncy, and still gives a very comfortable ride. I opened the hood and filmed the engine as I shifted from reverse to drive several times, and it does move around 3 inches each way at the beauty cover, but I don't know how much movement is normal. I don't feel or hear any clunk when I accelerate from a dead stop, or put it in gear, it just feels as it always had. The axle that was used to replace the original was not OEM, and it does have a little play length-wise, but none when I twist it. This problem started happening a few weeks ago, and I want to know for sure what it is before I spend over a thousand dollars in repairs. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

After an accident on my 2011 ES 350 I replaced the front headlights, cannot afford the originals - so bought the aftermarket ones. They look OK but they not equipped with AFS system, so now I have this AFS OFF warning light constantly flashing on my dashboard. I did some searching but wasn't able to find much on how to easily disable it. First I tried switching AFS ON/OFF button - but it did not do any good. Somebody suggested removing the fuse, but I was not able to locate one specifically for AFS. So now the last resort is to find the AFS Module and unplug the wires. I checked one location on driver's side under the side carpet but it wasn't there. Anyone knows where the damn AFS module is located on ES 350 ???

Hi everybody, I own a Lexus ES350 2013. Recently, when stopped at a light there is a faint steering wheel vibration, has someone here ever encountered this problem? and do not know if anyone ever found the cause and got this resolved Thanks!

Hi, I’m thinking about purchasing a 2007 Lexus ES from this dealership, it has 168,500 miles on it. I’m looking to buy the Lexus with cash. The dealership said they’d take 4k cash plus taxes, but I think they’d take a bit less. If everything with the Lexus is fine meaning it seems to be mechanically fine, the exterior looks fine and so on, should I go ahead and buy it? I know that these Lexus’s are really good cars especially this gen. I thought I’d ask people that may know about cars than I do. (It’s one of those really big Nissan dealerships.) Could someone let me know common problems with this gen of Lexus’ too or problems they’ve had? And overall just let me know if the car is worth buying, Thanks! (No I have not checked the car out yet I live 2hrs away from where it is)

Retiring at 68 and thinking of selling my Honda Odyssey and getting a true Luxury car; a Lexius. Zeroing in on an older ES 350 or RX. Maybe even a Hybrid one. So, I ask you experienced Lexus owners, is this a bad Idea for a single woman who can’t fix her own car? And the closest Lexus shop is 2 hours away? I’d like to keep the price around 25,000 or less. Thank you for any insights, advice, etc Pam

I recently bought a used 2007 Lexus ES350 that has a melted dashboard. I’ve read everywhere that Lexus covered this problem until 2017 but the previous owner never took it in to get replaced. I got quoted at the dealership $1400 for the new dashboard plus an additional $800 labor fee to get it replaced. I’m not trying to spend $2200 to get a dashboard replaced so I am planning on replacing the dashboard myself if I can find a new one. I was wondering if anyone knows what part number the replacement dashboards are so I don’t end up buying another one that will melt?

I have a es350 2015 44k miles.. i feel a thud in the transmission going from R to N, R to P. I got a complete checkup from lexus stealership since my tranny is still covered. They said its normal and the teansmissin is designed yhis way. Want your guys say on this.

I have a 2015 ES350 with 8,500 miles, but a strong, chemical odor in the cabin. The Lexus dealer said to have it detailed and change the cabin air filter, which did not help. I had the carpet and sound insulation replaced (~$2500) and put an ozone machine in the car for a week. The odor is clearly coming from the seats. I left it in the garage for two weeks without cranking, and now the garage smells like that chemical, so it doesn't appear to be related to the A/C or engine. The Lexus dealer looked at it three times and said to contact corporate to get a field engineer inspection. Lexus Corporate said it was not covered under warranty (I have the 6-year extended), and that they could not help me. They suggested I try a different dealer. I can't be the first person with this problem. Any ideas? Thanks!

Is 235 55 R17 tire ok for Lexus ES350 2010 ? Standard tire is 215 55 R17. Also which brand is better and which store is best ? I am mostly in Houston TX so high temperature and rain ..mostly city highways ... -Shiraz

Hello, I recently purchased a ES350 in Vancouver (I am a Canadian here) but I've noticed that there are condensations and fogginess in both the headlamps and the tail lamps. When I bought the car from the dealership, they repeatedly told me that this is normal. But I have found that the condensations in the lamps seem to get worse over the past week. I really don't think that this is normal at all. I am a girl and this is my first time buying a car. I've done the homework and research on cars but I am still very lacking. The condensations seem to be an issue for the RX350 as suggested online. If anyone could please help clarify this lamp condensation problem a little for me I would really really appreciate it. Thank you in advance!!!

UPDATE: For anyone who needs a permanent solution for this problem, I'm making and selling these parts in a complete repair kit, on eBay and at my website http://www.bluemooseengineering.com I've redesigned the part a bit...nice strong radius sweeps at the bottom and a much nicer finish. The part in the original post was hand machined using a vertical mill. These parts are being made on a Haas VF2 so the finish quality is a lot nicer. Here's a .pdf of my installation instructions. This includes detailed steps and pictures for door panel removal as well:https://bluemooseengineering.files.w...eplacement.pdf ====================================================== Hi everyone,I've been lurking around the Lexus forums for a little while, and have come here for information off and on for many years. My father-in-law is a die-hard Lexus owner (I'm a Honda/Acura guy myself but I still really like Lexus) so over the years I've helped him fix his cars many times and the forums have always been very helpful. FYI - I just posted this same write-up over at Club Lexus earlier today. Our most recent adventure involves the now-infamous broken passenger window clip debacle. Our repair of this has gone so well, and I have seen nobody on any forum provide a similar solution, so I thought I'd share what we did and how we did it.First a little bit about me. I have a background in Quality and Engineering, and mechanical design and fabrication. I have worked at a few glass and plastics manufacturers in Southern California over several years, so I may be uniquely qualified to work on this specific problem. Currently, I'm the Quality Manager at an industrial flat glass manufacturer. We specialize in glass machining and specialty flat glass parts for aerospace, scientific, medical, display, and lighting.So here's a summary of what I know about this problem based on my reading. I'm providing this in case you are just discovering that your car has this problem, and this is the first thread you've happened upon. For the veterans on the forum, please feel free to correct any of this information: The earlier models of the 5th gen ES350 suffer from a chronic failure of the plastic clip that joins the window regulator to the window This seems to affect the passenger window only This seems to affect the first three model years (2007-2009) - is this true? The only real solution so far has been to replace the entire piece of glass, which comes with new clips pre-adhered to the glass - not a bad fix but also fairly expensive and now, most often outside of warranty coverage It is alleged that the clip was redesigned on later models and on replacement parts so the failure does not recur - can someone confirm this? We went through the process of reporting the problem to the Lexus dealer, and attempting to negotiate a free or discounted repair. They were not completely inflexible and agreed to fix the problem for the retail price of the part (sparing us the labor charge). This was still going to cost ~$400 and we thought we could do as good of a job for less $$$.Before I share our repair, I just want to comment on the nature of the failure.I have seen several posts in several threads that theorize about the root cause of the failure and how to fix it. Nearly all of this speculation is probably wrong. Some deride the use of a plastic clip - there is nothing inherently wrong with using molded plastics for these applications. This part is exposed to very little stress linearly or laterally so a properly designed molded piece should not fail...we know this because most cars use a similar system and do not fail chronically.Someone else commented that a hole should be drilled in the glass and the regulator arm joined directly to it. It's not that this couldn't work, but its important to think of holes in a piece of glass as defects, or potential defects. Drilling a hole in a piece of glass forever compromises that piece of glass, and for a moving part, should probably be avoided. I have seen this design fail many times so its not surprising that the industry has moved away from it. It is more costly and more likely to fail intermittently and unpredictably.Also the term "waterjet" was used...just an FYI - water-jetting glass is really a no-no. The initial blast of abrasive-filled water causes substantial chipping and flaking at the entry site and is not the proper way to put a hole, or cut any shape, in glass, unless it is going to undergo substantial further machining.So why does this part fail? Well not surprisingly, I believe it can be traced back to the design of the part, and keep in mind that this is just a theory. Take a look at the pictures below:First, you'll notice that the point of failure, at least on this part, is a very thin section at the bottom of the U. This does not defy expectations..there's absolutely no reinforcement in that area...it's very thin.I believe that since the window is curved, and travels on a curved path, and because the window regulator is straight, and travels up and down quite linearly, that at the extremes of the window's travel, there are very slight lateral forces being applied to the clip. The part was never designed to handle these types of forces repeatedly.That, combined with thermal cycling of a fairly extreme nature (depending on where you live) and the rate at which the passenger window is actually cycled up and down, leads to a failure of the plastic part. To me, this is actually good and bad engineering. It would be very difficult to overcome the problem of curved window and path/straight regulator. So the fact that the smallest and presumably cheapest part in the assembly fails, is in many ways good..you wouldn't want those forces being transferred through to the glass (although I don't foresee heat tempered glass breaking that easily).You could argue circularly for hours about whether the motion design or the part design is the true root cause. But, since the motion design would be very difficult to overcome, and the part design fairly easy to overcome, the burden of fault lies with the part. It's just weak.I have not seen the redesigned part from Lexus but I imagine that it contains bracing or is thicker in the area highlighted by the red triangles in my illustration above. Perhaps someone who has received a replacement dealer window can confirm?Either way, if you find that your car is suffering from this failure, what are you to do? Well most people will have to just suck it up and pay for a replacement window. We took a different path.I have access to machining capability and expertise so I decided to leverage that and just create a new clip. We machined this from aluminum (didn't record the grade - not particularly important for this application):Side-by-side comparisonAnother side-by-sideGrooved to increase surface area - this mimics the design of the original partThe new part came out beautifully and I couldn't wait to get it installed.The first step was to remove the door panel and speaker. There are numerous how-tos for this everywhere so I'm not going to repost all of that. Once the door panel was removed we dropped the window regulator low enough to access the site of the broken clip.The next task was to remove the old adhesive. This is a fairly soft rubberized adhesive (more on that in a bit) so it scrapes off very easily using a fresh razor blade:We did our best to get the area as clean as possible. It's tough to reach some spots. Once we removed as much of the adhesive as we thought we could, we wiped the surface with isopropyl alcohol (you could use acetone or equivalent solvent):Once the area was clean we gave the part a test fit:Looks great and it kind of clips right into place. It's obvious that the fitment is perfect. Then we removed the part and filled the gap full of adhesive. I spent a LONG time selecting an adhesive for this and finally settled on a 3M Urethane-based windshield adhesive for a number of reasons: This adhesive is designed specifically for adhering glass to coated and uncoated metal substrates - perfect - that's exactly what we are doing The adhesive in this application acts as both a damper and as a bonding agent, securing the part to the glass and absorbing vibratory forces transferred through the vehicle frame to the door and to the regulator so it needs to be thick and rubbery The adhesive should have a fairly short work time and a high strength bond - this has an ~15 minute work time and a 72 hour Lap Shear strength of 550psi - our bondline is going to be thicker than that used for the lap shear test, but the takeaway is that this is a tough application-specific adhesive The adhesive we used is 3M part number 08693 and is available off the shelf at O'Reilly/Autozone/Pepboys/et al for about $15. We used less than an ounce of it but you can just plug the tube and keep it for something else:MAJOR NOTE: WEAR RUBBER GLOVES - just touching this adhesive spreads it around like wildfire and it doesn't come off your skin easily - ask me how I know Once the entire gap is filled in with adhesive, I used one finger to press the regulator arm backward to make space, and using my other hand, slid the clip up onto the glass in the approximate location. I let the regulator arm come forward to its natural position, then moved the clip into place centered over the bolt hole:A lot of adhesive will be forced out. This is good. This is exactly what the factory job looked like. in this case, more is better! I smeared a little extra on and around the part just as a precaution. It looks messy but that's okay! Nobody's going to see it anyway:The only thing left to do was wait for it to cure then test it and put it all back together. We waited way past the actual cure time (24 hours) of the adhesive and went for about 60 hours before testing. Check out the attached video for our "test". The window operates totally smoothly with no noise at all. I call this a tremendous success.Additional note: For some reason taking apart the passenger-side door panel and control disabled the drivers-side switch for that window, and also the auto function on the passenger-side window switch. Maybe someone here knows more about this than we do (I believe it has something to do with "pinch protection"?) but we were able to get things working again by using the down +5 seconds and up +5 seconds trick.So what do you think?Honesty and transparency are important to me so I might as well just come out and say that I've been toying with producing and selling these. This whole thing started as me helping out my father-in-law, but the more I read, the more I realized that there are probably a lot of people in need of a more affordable solution for this problem.I'm making a few more parts and creating a CAM file then I'm going to talk to a machine shop about actual production.I admit that I didn't read the fine print so I want to say that my intent is not to break forum rules. I'm here to share my work openly with the community, and to perhaps sell some of these parts. If this requires vendor status and paying my due to the forum operators, I'd be happy to discuss that. Mods - please PM me if you want to talk about this. Window Test.MOV

I have a glare in the instrument panel on my ES350 2016. Has anyone else had this problem?

Hello, I have 07 ES350 with about 80k miles on it. When driving, I hear a weird buzzing noise from the right-front side of the car. The noise sounds close to how it would sound when I operate the side mirrors. It is short, lasting about 2-3 seconds at most. Its completely random and I notice it only when the car is standing.(waiting for a light to turn green, for example). I have asked my passenger to look for the noise and because it is sudden, short and random, then haven't been able to pin point the location. Its somewhere to the right. It doesn't have any impact other than irritating me for the past few years... Any ideas? Thank you for your time.

Hi, Everyone I am new to this forum. I read a lot on this forum before I registered. We are plan to replaced our 2007 toyota prius for a 2014 es350. I did a lot research on the certifed es350 recently. I never negotiate a deal on a cpo before. So Just hope anyone on this forum can give me some advice on that. I found one 2014 ES350 which ask for 31995 near my home. So can anybody has experience can give me a hint where should I begin to negotiate? a ballpark number will be ok. I just need a fair deal not a great deal. win win situation is good for both parties.Thanks in advance. Jerry

I chose the Matador Red Mica Lexus because I love to detail my own cars and the darker colors really pop when properly detailed. Blacks are great, but for someone OCD keeping it clean is a nightmare. But I would buy another black- a glutton for punishment :chairshot: . I prepped the car by clay barring to remove the 4 years of contamination on the vehicle, then used a Griot's Garage 6" Dual Action Orbital polishing machine and Adam's Polishing products for the polishing phase. Since this is a daily driver for me and having the swirl marks and light scratches removed with the polishes I added a sealant for protection. I will add 2 thin layers of wax this fall for the upcoming winter months. This CPO car was purchased 2 weeks ago and looks 10x better than the detailing job the dealership did on it before I picked it up.

Good morning! Yesterday I got a sweet deal on my very first Lexus! I bought a CPO 2007 ES350 with 68,000 mi and premium plus package for $16,250. I asked and they threw in the updated nav DVD for me as well. It was a great deal IMO, and I'm excited to have my first Lexus. One question: I'm getting satellite put in and having the dealer install it using the sat kit available for the 2007 model so that it will be integrated into the dash and system. Has anyone done this as opposed to putting in a mounted aftermarket satellite receiver? Are there any pitfalls I should avoid? Is the dealer the best place or should I go to an audio shop? Thanks for the help and (obviously) I'm beyond excited to be a Lexus owner! Jess

Just bought a 2011 ES350 from a friend and it's still sitting in my garage as I've yet to get insurance for it. In your opinion, what's the best company to go with? I'm only gonna be driving it on weekends (live in the city (Boston) and take subway to work), so I'd like to get some bare minimum basic insurance. Any suggestions?

Does it mean anything when lexus does not notify you of these service bulletins, and your car goes out of warranty for these items? then they cost you a fortune to repair? whats the legality of this? is there any recourse? even though my car has been to the dealer a couple times with these problems, at under the extended mileage limit, they should have checked for them and did not. thanks

On 6-8-12, I had the 20K service at my maintaining dealer for my 2010 ES350. I asked for the latest map upgrade. I was charged $169.00 for Part Number PT219-HDDG6-11 which is the Gen6 11.1 version of the North America map. I just took it back for the 25K service, and pointed out to the new service writer that my map data showed that I have 10.1 He said that he checked with someone in the Service Department, and they said I had the correct one. Now, I know that's baloney. I have been ripped off. They did give me an empty thumb drive w/ Lexus logo at the time of the supposed upgrade. Does Lexus have Area Managers where I can complain. My previous service writer (who I used for 7 years) was the Asst Service Manager, and we were always able to workout any problems. But, he was always straight with me. When I had Oldsmobiles, I got to know the Area Manager personally. Does Lexus have these? How do I find the one for Chattanooga? Thanks for any help! Charlie