Going to my local U-Pull-It junkyard this weekend. I want to upgrade some items in my 2000 RX300. Some questions:
Some questions - there is a 2001 RX300 and a 2005 RX330 in the junkyard.

1) How do I pull out the rear Altezza lights from the RX300. The hatch door is locked and of course there are no keys. There is no access panel in the rear hatch door from where I could open the hatch even if I crawled in. So how do I open the trunk?

2) The RX300 has a gearshift know with a Wood insert. Can anybody tell me how to remove the shifter assembly

3) From the RX330 - I want to pull the wood insert steering wheel. Will it fit my RX300?

 

1. You’ll have to crawl into the back from the side and open up the hatch’s side trims and eventually you’ll be able to access the rear trim. After all that, you’ll reach the trunk latch and cable which you should be able to pull to release it. That’s how it works in my 2002 Highlander so I imagine the RX300 is similar

2. It’s a bit of a pain but doable, you need to pull out all the trim around the shifter. Lots of screws you’ll need a star screwdriver. There’s a little panel you can pop open with a flat blade to activate the neutral safety switch bypass to shift it into a lower position. That’ll give you way more room to work with. There lots of electrical connectors to unplug too so might want to cut them off and keep them as spares.

3. The steering wheel and clockspring, air bag and hub are different from the RX300 but retrofitting it is possible. 2001-2003 Highlander and 1999-2003 RX300 have a different sized, larger hub than the newer 2004-2022 RX / 2008-2020 Highlander models. They went from a single stage air bag to dual stage, but it’s possible to just hook up the one wire to the larger “second stage” part of the bag. Splines on the wheels will line up, but I had to use some electrical tape around the original clockspring to fill in the gap. Works but is a little janky. The newer clockspring won’t fit unfortunately. However, I was able to add enough pins to the factory Highlander clockspring to get heated steering from a 2015 RX. Your RX300 probably has some unused pins too.

 

I have a thread on here called "shifter swap" where I changed out my leather shifter with a wood one from a 2003 model I found at Pull-a-Part. There are pictures of what I had to do, it wasn't terribly difficult, but it was a little time consuming. I also swapped out my leather steering wheel with a pristine wood wheel from the same 2003 RX.