Tips and Tricks you might not know about your LS
 

As we all know the LS has lots of bells and whistles. In this thread I would for the owners to contribute at least one tip that others may not know about. I'll start off.

When you open your truck, if you are in a rush just press the truck key again and you can manually open the truck. This is great when you are in a rush and don't want to wait for the automatic opener.

You can adjust the sensitivity of the automatic air filter by pressing and holding the air recirculate button (you may have to be parked with just the battery on so you may have to check the manual).

you must have the side mirror button pushed to either L or R in order to have the mirrors drop down when backing up....

You can adjust the sensitivity of the automatic air filter by pressing and holding the air recirculate button (you may have to be parked with just the battery on so you may have to check the manual).
can you give more information with photos if possiable.

Not everyone at once please!

Good tip on the side mirror settings....I had just wondered why my mirrors weren't pointing down while backing up.....very timely! I'm still new with this car to know any tips....but will try and absorb other's tips.

No kidding. There are definitely more things that people could share.

Using the window washer with the headlights on also activates the headlight washers. Guaranteed to mistakenly happen the morning after a hand car wash.

that's only if you turn on the headlight washers i believe. otherwise only windshield washer is on?

if you use the window washer WITHOUT headlights on, it will never activate the headlamp washers. if you use the window washer WITH the headlights on, it will activate the headlamp washers the first time.

if you just got a car wash, why would you wash your windshield :uh:

umm, maybe i gotta try it then. if that's the case, why is there a headlight washer button?

if i'm inside the car and i opened my trunk how i will close it while i'm using the smart card???????????????

OK, I will add another. AFS allows you to keep the headlights stationary (AKA: not swiveling with the curves).

And another: When you push the pollen filter button the car will go into recirculate mode when the weather is warm. When it is cold, recirculate is not activated to keep the windows from fogging.

>if you just got a car wash, why would you wash your windshield?

Habit mostly, I always give it a little squirt every morning going down the driveway to wash off yesterday's gunk. And this time of year, it is usually covered with pollen even when sitting in the garage.

>if that's the case, why is there a headlight washer button?

Confuses me too. I never think to play with it before I wash it, and don't want to mess up the clean car more when I "remind myself" the next morning.

for when yoy want to wash your headlights when your headlights are off, as in during the day....

I also keep forgetting to test the headlamp washers as well. I also always say I will try them when I wash the car:uh: but always forget. I guess for most of us that keep our cars clean it is a feature that will rarely get used. Hopefully on my next road trip I can test it ;)

honestly headlamp washers are pointless. i dont see any reason to use them unless they were completely covered in snow. they dont remove dried dirt from snowy roads at all.

my understanding is that they are heated?? headlamps washers. how long will it take for it to heat up, and melt the snow off my headlights before i can get moving? :rolleyes:

umm really? i really need to check, last time i pushed that button i didn't recall anything happened.

if that's the setup, that's pretty dumb

oh wait...i retract that statement. the button only works when the headlights are on. if the headlights are off, then the button does not work.

so i guess you have to have your headlights on in order to use the washers...but the thing is some people i guess only want to wash their windshield, or only want to wash their headlights.

oh that might be why then, maybe my headlights were off!

The headlight washers are present in US makes of the LS because European Union regulations require auto-leveling and headlight washers on all vehicles with HID headlamps.

I am not sure why, but it would seem they decided to maintain consistency and use the same setup abroad. I would imagine it would also be easier to keep them all the same as it is always possible for the US to adopt a requirement similar to the EU.

Just my 2 cents..

Ventilated Seats have filters..
 

My ventilated seats seemed to have poor airflow, noticed others talking about the air filters which are right under the front bottom of each front seat. Check the manual defined the replacement process.

Mine are running cooler now, but nothing like when it was new.

Ah, interesting. The LS 430 had optional headlamp washers....and I read that the brake flashing light on hard braking is only on the Euro-spec LS 460.

It was an option, so much for that theory.. I live in florida and bugs are more of an issue and like with dirt, they aren't very useful.

Is it possible to get your trunk to close while inside the car?

simple answer -- nop

Sure you can close it while you're inside. Just send any of your passengers to do it for you.
If you're alone, just drive a while with the trunk open and when you see someone walking down the street, do a "shout-out" and they can close it for you. No need for advanced technology.

Discovered this one by accident today
 

While driving with the rear sunshade deployed, it will close when the car is placed in reverse. The it will re-deploy once the car is put back into gear.:p
Pretty cool.

One of the things that annoyed me was the inability to rip .mp3 or .WMA files directly to the hard drive. But there's actually a really easy workaround.

I belong to a private audio hub, and it's got some pretty specific naming conventions and only allows full albums to be ripped.

So I simply converted all of the .mp3 files back to .CDA, which is what a normal audio CD uses. It ripped them back to .mp3 and kept everything in tact. I am assuming the same will happen if you convert a bunch of random .mp3 to .CDA and pop in the player, but I haven't tested it yet.

yup, that would work. but by doing that, might as well just burn a mp3 cd

Well, the goal is to not have to keep swapping discs. By ripping them to the hard drive, I can save the spots in the changer for my favorite DVD-A and DVD-V discs.

Loading Phone Address Books
 

I finally got a Blackberry (8830) that will transfer all the contacts to the car. Here is a tip (learned the hard way). You probaly have hundreds of numbers you don't want on the car but the cell phone transfers all at once. Tranfer all your contacts to ANOTHER GROUP (01,02,etc) and don't use the default "No Group" 00. This way you can reassign the numbers you want to keep to new groups and then DELETE the download group with all the contacts you don't want in one pass. If you dump into Group 00 (default No Group), you have to delete one at a time!! :egads:

i try to transfer my contacts to the car, when i hit the transfer button, my phone's bluetooth was disconnect from the car by itself and on the nav screen it show phone's transfer but it took forever to finish the transfer, I could not wait that long so I press the cancel button. I try this like 10 times already and they was took so damn long. why is this happen? anyone know?

^^ this happened to me too. i think that it just dont work with some phones. but i would like to know this too.

too add to this > automatic air filter DOESN'T work when outside temperature is lower then 5 degrees of celcius. It doesn't work on ALL lexus models. Only in LS it is possible to make it work is to turn the "Air Purifier" off if your ls has it.

In other way it shows that it works in auto mode but all the time it takes air from outside.

I founded this out after several months of complains of my ls, and at last Japanese answered that it should be like this. Going to complain dealer for lower price for next lexuses for this not fully working option..

Update on the cell phone transfer. When I first told thephone to transfer, the NAV system popped up the transfer in progress screen - BUT the phone then immediately said bluetooth connection lost. I found out by accident that I just had to hit the file transfer selection ON THE PHONE again and suddenly the NAV showed the transfer going on. I transferred over 550 contacts in about one minute.

Prior to that, I thought the bluetooth was really lost - apparently it was not and hitting the file transfer instead of messing with "re-linking" the bluetooth, it worked.

Hope that helps. Again it was Blackberry 8830 - Verizon (supposedly the worst one to do file transfers)

is there a quick way to close all windows and sunroof at the touch of one button? Like the roll down option works by holding the unlock button down on smart key.

i believe press and hold the lock button on the door? that's my guess, can't remember. otherwise you can put in the mechanical key and turn/hold in the lock position, which can be quite troublesome

Nope, Lexus disabled this feature on the US spec cars. Same deal on my IS - what goes down does not go up. :)

Interestingly, Lexus has most of the features discussed across the model line. My IS has the rear sunshine with auto retract, the smog detector w/sensitivity settings, ventilated seats, etc. Of course, no auto trunk.