Anyone else have this happen? I keep my 2013 ES 350 in the garage but I do drive it in winter, and it seems after some cold weather ALL of the exterior plasti-dipped ‘chrome’ is bubbling and warping.

 

haven’t seen this before , why the plasti dip?

 

I just assumed it was plastic with a ‘chrome’ coating since I haven’t ever seen real chrome do this.

 

yes, it’s plastic…

 

You can see I’m just west of you and I believe st is not far away. I’ve never seen that and like you I keep the car in an unheated garage and drive it all winter. That actually looks like something extreme heat might cause, not cold. Weird. Is that the only spot?

 

I have no idea what would have caused that problem, but I recall a thread on one of the CL boards about similar deforming on plastic trim parts. And it turned out that the damage was the result of reflections from the reflective coatings on windows from a nearby building, and the car being parked in just the right spot so that the sunlight reflecting off of those windows was striking and damaging the plastic trim pieces.

 

The problem is that where Davebot and I live on the Canadian Prairies, we’ve been experiencing daily high temps in the -25 to -35C range recently. You’d have to use a bowtorch to heat the plastic up that much and I think you’d see evidence on the nearby paint. Maybe he just did not notice the damage until now but I think that’s “grasping at straws”. Be interesting to hear what the cause was and I hope he finds out.

 

I just did a search of the CL forums and found the thread to which I was referring to.

I don't think that the ambient temperature was a factor. What seemed to be the case was that the building's low-e windows were concentrating the rays from the sun in much the same way as a magnifying glass would concentrate them and essentially melting/deforming the plastic trim.

Here is the thread from the Generation 1 NX forum.
https://www.clublexus.com/forums/nx-...na-melted.html

If you read through that thread you will find posts backing up the theory that the reflections off of a building's low-e windows can cause such damage. One post links to a lawsuit related to such damage.
https://www.usglassmag.com/2016/11/l...-vinyl-siding/

Frankly, before I saw such documentation showing that this was a possibility, I recall not believing that this kind of damage could be caused by the reflection of the sun's rays reflecting off of low-e glass.

 

Definitely has not been anywhere that this could have occurred from reflections/heat it was only apparent to me in this last week so I’m stymied as to what would cause this unless it was a manufacturing defect in the coating. I’m going to follow up at the dealer and see what this is, don’t want to out of pocket for that front bezel.

 

On my suv I get the same plastic chrome deforming (front grill), is the freezing weather.