toneman

FWIW--all four rubber plugs are on my vehicle, and I still can hear road/tire noise from inside my vehicle. As far as the tire noise goes, I think much of it has to do with the crappy Michelins. I mean, in my car there is no way I can't hear any tire noise--short of wearing earplugs--once I get up to speed.

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but--how quiet is/should it be inside an ES 350 at cruising (50-70 mph) speeds? "Quiet", to the point that you shouldn't be able to hear a big rig if it was riding alongside your vehicle...or "quiet" so that you don't hear just any wind and tire/road noise?

Kaius88

Ya see, I was wondering the same thing. I'm kinda comparing it with the big Lincoln towncar I rode at my wedding, and that thing was pretty darn quiet. The ES350 is comparable to that at local street speeds. I cant imagine any car being completely silent on the inside at 70+ mph. From the laws of physics, that's not possible. Especially since the ES has significant wind drag compared to a bullet train. I dunno.... i need to drive a whole fleet of ES350s to compare...

LexBob2

There was a thread on this forum a while back, as to whether or not the ES350 made a pleasant growl when accelerating, as mentioned in a review of the car. Like that, whether or not a car is quiet, is pretty subjective, and is in the ear of the beholder. What I think is quiet, might sound loud to someone else.

MD350

I have about 3500 miles on my 7/06 build ES. I am not sure if I have the wind noise issue or not. Can you please describe it in more detail for me. Is air coming inside the car? I took mine up to about 90 mph today and the cabin seemed air tight.

wanderer99

If you had the issue, you'd know it. You'd be cruising at 60mph and wondering what the hell that noise was coming from both the driver and passenger sides of the vehicle.

wanderer99

The Michelins can either be dead silent - almost ZERO noise - or they can be extremely loud. In my driving experience, its all related to the road surface. Around Lynwood north of Seattle they have just resurfaced South I-5. Driving on that is fantastic - at 80mph there is zero road noise coming into the car. Wind noise yes, for those who have that issue. But no tire road noise. Its eerie.

Anywhere north of that heading to BC is pretty bad. At some points its almost painful its that loud. And the only thing that has changed is the road surface, to some awful coarse chip type of material. Obviously the Michelins have real problems with this type of surface and just seem to amplify noise.

toneman

wanderer99--FWIW the Michelins on my car do not give me zero road noise, regardless of pavement type. Yes, I agree with you that the amount (i.e., volume level) of road noise picked up by the Michelins can vary depending on composition of pavement surface...but even on "quieter" roads I can still hear some road noise. Nothing ear-shattering, mind you...but I can still hear it. No big deal for me, but still somewhat annoying to accept, especially when I read posts like yours stating that there is no road noise at all (on certain pavements).

toneman

Also--I finally had a service tech foreman at my local dealership ride along with me so that I could point out the wind noise (at speeds greater than 50 mph); he agreed that there was wind noise but then proceeded to explain how, due to the fact that the ES 350 body shape was designed so as to offer a pretty-low drag coefficient, one of the things that arise due to a low Cd is that the air flow "sits" much closer to the body of the vehicle...thus it could theoretically be possible to hear wind noise. Whether that was a bunch of BS on his part--I dunno; is there a physics engineer in this forum who can either agree or refute the tech's explanation?

In any case, he also had me fold the side mirror in so that I can see how the position of the mirror housing affects how loud the wind noise can get; needless to say, when I folded the mirror housing the wind noise got louder. He also asked me that, had the noise been more of a "whistling"-type noise--then maybe they could look into it...but since it wasn't, there wasn't much he could do other than document it into my vehicle service history.

Also--we drove another ES 350 to see if it suffered from any wind noise...no difference from mine (i.e., it had wind noise too).

The end result--not much they're willing to do about it. I'm not gonna push it since based on what I've read in this thread and elsewhere, it's probably gonna be a pointless battle to get it completely resolved to my satisfaction.

On a side note, totally unrelated to this thread--while I was at the dealer, I asked the service tech to disable the DRLs and the seat belt chime...both of which he was able to do successfully--although at first he told me that he wouldn't be able to disable the seat belt chime because apparently that particular dealership had not had a customer make such a request, and he hadn't even heard anything indicating that such could even be done. Well...apparently he found the instructions since I have confirmed that there is no more seat belt chime! The DRLs were a different story--he had no reservation about disabling them; in fact, he told me that he gets quite a few requests from customers asking to have them disabled...LOL!!!

twister

Just want to "chime in" about seat belt. I'm driving RX loaner now, and I usually keep my bag on a front passenger seat. Its not that heavy, a regular messenger bag with a laptop in it, no more than 10 lbs. Well, the chime was driving me crazy cause it was thinking someone is sitting in the front seat without a seat belt LOL!!! I had to kick my bag on a floor...

wanderer99

I agree that 99.9% of the time you can hear the tires. But there is that one stretch on South I-5 that was very recently resurfaced and its just silent on that road surface. If not silent, then it would be 0.5% road noise as its just creepily silent. It goes for a few miles so you appreciate the solitude, then get slammed when you go back to the old surface again!

wanderer99

My plugs were reinstalled at the dealer. They said that both were pushed up into their holes, but I don't know how that would be possible with the smaller round one. Anyway, they're apaprently installed properly now and I hope to get out onto some dry roads for testing in the next few days at speed. I'll visually verify this first of course to make sure they are there. It seems quieter in the car, but I'll report back on this later.

glock22x

Anyone tried recording the wind noise with their cellphones or digital recorders? Just thought it would be interesting to compared noise clips. My mom complains about the wind noise at the passenger side, but I find it normal at the driver side

wanderer99

This is possible. If its the lower speeds wind noise where the window doesn't seal properly with the door rubber, then that can be isolated to a particular window. To rule out the plugs being an issue, look under your car and see that they're all installed as well. All 4 of the ES350s I've driven have this in a different way, so there is no easy solution answer. First place you should go is your dealer, and get them to look at the 'shim' solution. What built month is your vehicle?

wanderer99

UPDATE
Higher Speeds: Now that I've had the plugs reinstalled correctly, wind Noise that seemed to originate from inside the A pillars at high speeds (60+mph or 100km\h) seems to be gone. My car is now considerably quieter now at high speed. I haven't done a really long distance run as yet, but the short run I did tonight for 20+ mins was much quieter than before. Thanks to e-man for the great links to the GS forums.

Lower Speeds: For the DIY crowd here, I'll post in a few days some pictures of some easy 'counter measures' you can perform to try to fix this yourself. This is for the window rubbers and how its not quite pushing against the window enough to block the sound. This may or may not work for you, but I'll post it anyway.

e-man

That's great news, Wanderer. Glad I could help. In case anyone was wondering why a GS guy like myself is hanging out in the ES350 forum, well, let's just say that I have an ulterior motive. Maybe not today, next week or even next month, but I'm pretty sure at some point in the future I'll be joining you guys.

e