Hello everyone,

Car is an 07 with 120K miles

I’m having an issue with my second generation IS 350. I’ve never ran into problems for the nearly five years that I’ve owned her but lately something strange has happened.

Sometimes the doors won’t unlock with the fob
Sometimes they do, but the motor won’t crank

Sometimes the alarm goes off when I touch the door handle unlock sensor
The alarm has gone off seemingly on its own only once before at 3AM

The car will sometimes sweep the gauges while I’m driving, ding, and display “check complete” and other times the dash will flicker and the engine will shut off and turn back on in motion. Other times it won’t come back on at all, and the instrument cluster dials will remain stuck in place, say 20mph @ xAmount RPMs

When this happens the car will stay disabled with frozen gauges for sometimes seconds, minutes or other times hours. The clock dims and the driver window button flashes.

The electronics will then randomly wake back up, gauge dials will sweep, ding, and act like nothing ever happened. Starts right up.

Sometimes it will do the dial sweep while I’m driving and illuminate every light on the dash, and I’ll be without electronic assist until the engine is shut off and started again. Sometimes even the power steering will go, but rarely.

Doesn’t have any codes, the Lexus dealer says she’s healthy and it never acts up when other people drive. Independent mechanics have replaced the ECU, BCM, key, alternator and battery. Nothing fixes it.

I think a GPS kill switch was installed, any guesses as to what’s wrong?

Nobody knows.
Any input is appreciated.


EDIT: The very first time this happened, the car jolted into this mode where all of the dash lights came on, power steering went out, the headlights and tail lights started flickering and flashing not unlike a police car and I was limited to ≈20MPH roll. People in front of me were actually pulling over to the side of the road on my drive home. It never did this again.

 

Try to disable the alarm, meaning temporary disconnect (unhook) and see if it happens again. Good luck.

 

At first glance, I'd start by pulling anything aftermarket that could be causing such an issue...including that GPS kill switch item that was mentioned. If there was an aftermarket alarm system installed, I'd rip that out as well.

Good luck!