Hello all its me again. I'm still looking for my 2006-2013 IS250 with a manual transmission. Since the only Lexus I'm familiar with is my LS I'm trying to understand body fitment on the IS. It seems about half the cars I see for sale have a significant gap between the grille and the hood. Is this "normal" or is there something I should look for when inspecting a car with this gap? Example picture included.

Thank you for your time and opinion.

 

Hood is mis-aligned. Simply loosen the bolts attaching the hood to the hood hinges and slightly pull forward. This probably means the hood was off at some point. Could be for repair work, body work, accident, or a respray. In my case, I had a re-spray done to my hood (previous owner loved following rock trucks I guess) to fix previous rock chip damages. When reinstalled, the body shop didn't take the time to re-create the perfect fitment. I HAD a similar gap to that, but then fixed it myself doing the above.

 

I had hoped that was it and it wasn't indicative of something worse. I don't understand why car dealers don't fix something like that just like many don't even restore the headlights.

Thank you for your time and opinion,
Jeffrey

 

By the way, those are aftermarket headlights as well. I'd start to look for signs that it was in a front-end collision.

 

Thanks for that tidbit. I'm going to spring for a carfax. It might be lighting but they look a lot like the headlights of other cars I've seen for sale. How did you spot the difference?

I had an inspection service check a different IS and one comment was "The engine does have a top end metallic tapping noise, further diagnosis required." Is this lack of knowledge of the IS? This car had 115K miles and had a decent carfax showing dealership service for most of its life.

Thank you all again. I truly appreciate it.

Jeffrey

 

In the picture there, you can tell by both the LED strip and the excessively large chrome-looking surround over the projector. Definitely an aftermarket headlight set.

 

I missed the led strip. Good catch. Thank you =)

 

Bump for another question. Sorry if this is problematic but this is a remote purchase. I had another IS inspected (I've paid for 3 remote inspections so far.. COVID sucks) The inspector came back with a comment: "The engine does have a top end metallic tapping noise, further diagnosis required." Is this lack of knowledge of the IS? This car had 115K miles and had a decent carfax showing dealership service for most of its life.

 

The 2IS has direct injection, and the high-pressure pump fuel has a prominently loud mechanical-like tick to it. So that could have been what the tech was hearing. If unfamiliar with these models, one could mistake it for an "issue". But that's not to say that there could be some other sort of noise BEYOND that.