the Walnut Diary

In May of 2019 I rode the train to Hamilton to meet a fellow who had a 2014 Lexus es300h he wanted to sell. I was delighted to get access to this scarce car, and I drove it home later that day. The only difficult part was removing and replacing the licence plates in a sweltering parking lot. The car was and is great.

But a month or so ago, my neighbour Grant Stone, who has a mechanic’s eye for these things, commented that the left inner tail light, the one on the trunk lid, wasn’t working. I put it out of my mind until my friend Les took it for a drive this week and I saw the light out as he entered the garage. Funny, that bulb blew on the previous Lexus, the 2005. It was the only bulb to blow on the car in 14 years of service. And now this one.

I looked up the bulb so that I could be sure I had the right one before taking the liner out of the trunk to access the socket. I tried to do this right, so I called Kingston Lexus, parts department. I died on hold after ten minutes. Next to RockAuto.com, a reliable American catalogue of auto parts. It didn’t seem to know, and assumed all of the likely bulbs are amber-tinted. I called the Napa in Smiths Falls. Those guys are pretty good. The fellow on the phone couldn’t make sense of the same listing that had confused me. “You’ll just have to take the bulb out and bring it in.”

So there I was on a drizzly day, in the auto shop at the farm, with the trunk open, trying to figure out how to remove the twelve plastic plugs which pin into place this soft but stiff blanket which lines the trunk lid. It looked as though a screw driver might pry the top loose, or rotate it 90 degrees to free it. Nope. Broke the top off that one. My phone suggested using an upholstery tool, and the first one I found was one of those red prying things that come with a set of premium Mastercraft screwdrivers. I jammed it under the plug and wrenched it out without mishap. O.K., ten more. Of course I peeked after four and found the two halves of a wire coupler floating around in there, not connected, but I thought I should check the other side first, just to be sure. Then I came back, connected the couplers, and fixed the problem.

Maybe they don’t list tail-light bulbs for the car because they never fail. No kidding. Once I had the 2005 es330 to an indy shop in Kingston to repair a power steering leak. I had examined the evidence on our hoist and concluded that it needed a hose which cost something like $1100 at Lexus or Toyota. I decided to bite the bullet, but to have a pro look at it and make sure that was what it needed.

Actually, my wife insisted.

The car went onto the hoist and Brian, the shop owner, drove over to the Lexus dealer for the part while Derrick, the other guy, looked carefully at the repair, discovered it was the low pressure return line with a hole in it, snipped the bad part out and used some copper brake line and a couple of clamps for a perfectly effective repair. The golden power steering line went back into storage at the dealer, and the whole repair cost $200 in labour and shop supplies. The guys said that some parts are priced extremely high because the dealerships have to stock one, but they never get used.

It’s coming up to our fifth year of ownership of the hybrid, and this is the first thing to break, and it might have been the result of enthusiastic trunk lid slams over the years. The hood latch does require oiling, however, or it will put you right out of the car with a flashing warning signal indicating that the hood is not fastened. It is quite alarming. Lexus needs her few drops of oil on the hood latch, every six months, or else.

I had insisted that Les take the car out for a test drive because I was convinced he didn’t believe my mileage claims. So away we went with me coaching him to loaf and coast, and press the accelerator as if there was an egg shell under his foot. He was tolerant, and quite amused by the graphic display indicating just when the car was on battery power. I switched to sport mode so that he also had a tachometer, which often reads zero during gentle driving intervals. On our round trip he averaged 4.8 litres per 100 km, which was somewhat better than my claimed 5.1 for this route through quiet country roads.

The bonus is that all Toyota/Lexus hybrids burn regular gas.