I had a new battery installed yesterday and to my dismay, all of my radio stations are still there. I thought that I would have lost that information? I never checked out the battery before so I can't tell by appearance. Is the radio station thing enough to tell me they forgot to replace it while doing the other services?

PS. I have the Nav system and on that nav screen the stations are all the same. I wasn't sure if the Nav one would work differently then the non-nav...

 

Did you have your car serviced at the dealer and is this your first replacement battery? If this was the original battery and you didn't have it replaced at the dealer then you would know by the fact that the battery wouldn't be a Lexus battery. If you had it serviced at the dealer, check out the "new" battery and make sure that there is no dirt anywhere on it. That should give you a clue, even if it was cleaned. Believe it or not, some of the dealers are acutally on the ball enough that they make a note of your preset radio selections and then reprogram your radio so that you are not inconvenienced. I remember reading a post about that on here a while ago.

 

No, I did not take it to Lexus. Also, the battery before was not the original one so it was not a Lexus battery before.

 

Many batteries have a label on them that contains a "punch"-style date code (month, year). Retailers punch out the date code of purchase in order to validate future warranty claims.

Inspect your battery for this date code.

 

i got my LS400 from Lexus of Cherry Hill in NJ and at first i didnt notice it...but when i went to drive it home and i was half way there i put the stereo on and the salesman had programmed all the stations from my ES300 i traded in into the stereo on the LS400. i called him back to thank him and he said its a courtesy they practice. so im willing to bet that the dealer reprograms the stations when they replace a battery!!! just a perk of ownership.

 

a better item to check is the memory seat postion. I believe these are lost when the battery is removed.
Does the seat feel like the placement where you left it. If so, move it way out of whack. Press your stored memory. If it moves back, then it may not have been replaced. Try both memory buttons. if you originally stored two different settings, it would be hard for the dealer to guess the second one. He could easily reprogram one to the current position when the battery was replaced....again as a courtesy. He would have no idea what the second stored postion was.

you could look at the shelf the battery sits on and see if there is a footprint of the previous battery. I find it hard to believe that the service tech would take the time to match up the placement of the new with the footprint of the old battery.

lastly, look at the bolt or mechanism that secures the battery to the shelf. If it is the long bolt type, see if the threads have been recently worked. Soemtimes they get rusty. It the battery was replaced, the removal of a nut would score the rust or oxidation that has accumulated.

steviej

 

I recently replaced the battery on mine as well. The radio settings were not impacted at all, which had surprised me at the time. AC settings had changed though, as did the stored memory positions for the seats like steviej pointed out. Hope this helps...

 

animala: so if you didn't take it to Lexus and you had a non Lexus battery in there before....where exactly did you take it?? Did you buy the battery from them, too? I have a hunch that if you took it to a place like say, Discount Tires, etc, there's a chance that they may have charged you for services not done (happ'd to me). Batteries are like Tires, in the sense that there are strict codes and serial #s stamped onto them that should let the original manufacturer (or you) know the manufacture date. If the date on this new battery is "fresh" (like w/in the past year), then you know that they changed it out for you. If you bought the battery from some place like Pep Boys, they go by serial # for batteries (for battery warranty purposes). Call them up and ask to check up on that battery #.

 

the GS has a temporary memory for radio stations. I personally always write down the settings on a piece of paper before disconnecting the battery...but every GS I've worked on retains the settings if the battery is only out for a few minutes....

 

There is no sure way to verify that a battery has been replaced. When you pay the dealer to change your oil, how do you know it was done , short of watching it trickle out of the pan? You have to trust people do to what they are paid to do or do it yourself!

Assuming that you are really going to disconnect the battery from the car, I offer the following procedure to eliminate programming issues. With todays' computer based cars, it is best to always maintain 12 volts to the cars electrical system while changing the battery, The way I do this is I attach a small motorcycle battery via a power cable with alligator clips to the cars' battery cables BEFORE I remove the old battery from the car. That way, the cars' electronics never loses power and there is nothing to reprogram. As an alternative, many automotive parts stores sell a maintenance trickle charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter. Virtually all dealerships use one of these approaches because it ultimately saves them time and enhances customer satisfaction. Many cars have security radios, memory seats, mirrors, steering wheels that lose there settings when power is disconnected. The procedure I'vedescribed eliminates all of these potential problems.

Jeb

 

Paranoid people like me mark their stuff. After many lessons learned from going to cheap and unfriendly oil change places, I used to look under the hood after every oil change to mark the new filter w/ a little silver marking w/ a permanent liquid pen. on the battery, just for convenience, i mark the date it was installed. Makes you stay on top of things, sorta.

 

Most people replace the battery when it's no longer providing reliable service. So it's hard to fake a battery change. Personally, I think it's far easier to determine whether a battery was changed, than whether an oil change was done or whether the tires were rotated (all assuming you took no measures to identify and/or mark the items in advance).

 

regarding the codeof manufacture, I believe the year and month is

A-L = month

03= year 2003