Hey I have a 93 and the temp gauge doesn’t move at all, it is stuck at about the half way mark just a bit below it, the light in the needle is also off and it’s also off on the rpm gauge but the rpm gauge works and the speed and fuel guage work perfectly fine. I’ve replaced the temp sensor, and thermostat and have flushed the system all to no avail. I did find a big piece of calcium kind of stuck in the old thermostat and thought maybe that was the issue but it didn’t seem to fix it. Could maybe the temp sensor wire be faulty or shorted out somewhere? Or could a fuse or something be blown for that gauge. I just got this car a bit ago and would like to fix my temp gauge. It also doesn’t blow hot air, which I was told was due to the heater core, I know there’s ways to flush those to clean them out and it seems there’s a decent amount of build up in the radiator so I have a new one coming but it’ll be a week or two. Any ideas or tips are greatly appreciated thank you.

 

Hello,

Older Lexus models were .. renowned for electrical issues popping here an there after about 30 years of use, particularly when it comes to Instrument Clusters, technology wasn't quite there back then, seems like yours suffered a similar fate. There are only two ways around it - get a new one, but there is no guarantee that it won't come with the same problem, or fix the old one, TaninAuto appears to be a solid place to go, but they are priced accordingly.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

Get a code reader that reads live data to see if it reads the coolant temp. If it does, the gauge in the instrument panel may be busted. If it doesn't, something may be wrong with the sensor, wiring, and/or a connector. If the former, consider an UltraGauge, ScanGuage, or similar OBD device.

 

Good idea, but two issues, the first one is that I am pretty sure a 1993 model never came with an OBD2 port, and while it is possible to get Live Data out of OBD1 protocol, it is considerably more involved, and comes with a bunch of its own caveats, biggest one being an unavoidable 1 Second delay between packets.

The other issue being the fact that those came with not one, but 3 separate Temperature Sensors, or rather 2 Sensors and 1 Switch, remnants of the convoluted past. The Switch was there for the Radiator Fans (shown as 89428), the first Sensor is for the ECU (shown as 89422), it came with 2 Wires, and then there was a separate Sensor dedicated for the Instrument Cluster (shown as 83420), it had only 1 Wire coming to it, routed directly to the Cluster, no relation to the ECU, so you won't get any readings out of it with a Scan Tool.

The only thing you can do at this point to see if it's the Sensor at fault is Disconnect it and see what changes, but seeing that the Gauge is stuck almost exactly at the Middle Point and doesn't seem to go down even when the car is Off completely, my assumption ended up being that it is the Cluster that's at fault. I must apologize that I didn't clarify my line of reasoning, jumping straight to the conclusion of a faulty Cluster, hope this clears things up.

Hope this helps and best of luck!