BoredInNC

Wow, I am having the exact same problem as of yesterday evening.
I live in Asheville, North Carolina. It was an unusually hot day yesterday. I guess about 90. I was leaving work and pressed the button, it turned green, the steering wheel started to move, then everything stopped and it went back into the normal off position. I pressed the button about 5 more times before it actually started. I was upset, so I called by closest Lexus dealer which is 2 hours away in Greenville and spoke to someone in service. My car is 500 miles out of warranty...figures.. he said it could be the starter, the battery or the even the computer. I had the starter and the battery checked today and they were fine, even though I do believe in bad spots in a starter. I searched all over the internet and have seen the possibility of a bad starter button or loose wiring to that button. I went home last night and tried to make it fail and it started up every single time. It never gets cold in the garage, so I don't know if this is a heat or cold issue. I am going to monitor it and if it happens again, I am going to record it... Please let me know if you fix your issue.........

jack260

I'm not sure this is the problem, but it drove me crazy for a long time. My ES350 would do this intermittently until eventually, it was steady. It would start, run smoothly for about 1 second, then shut off. A code reader would show all ignition coils were bad, but in different orders. I solved the problem by unplugging the ignition coils one at a time, and tried to start it. When the bad coil was unplugged, it stayed running and ran on 5 cylinders. (I got lucky in that it was one of the front coils that was bad and I didn't have to remove the intake manifold to access the back 3 coils). It turns out that there's one line to sense a bad coil that is common to ALL coils. If a coil fails properly, it pulls that line down, and the computer compares it to the coil that was instructed to fire to come up with the code. But if it fails by pulling that line down permanently, the computer has no choice but to believe that all the coils are bad. It then shuts the fuel off and kills the engine.