how far out are you because this should be covered up 70000 and with it being a known issue they may help you out still.

 

Managed to get the PDF!! Enjoy!

 

^ Thanks for posting it Sango!

 

Whoa, thats an intense repair process.

 

or 72 months, I sent mine to the dealer twice already for a carbon clean but I'm getting the rough idle again. I'm nowhere near 70k miles but I'm running close to 6 years, hopefully they'll change out my pistons.

 

I did some research on the BG GDI service and have a sales rep trying to find a place that will perform the service. He said that it takes about 4 hours to do and the chemicals for the job run around $150 + whatever the shop charges so it cost hit between $300-400. He also said they dont install the service in too many places because its not something that gets done often. If you want to find a shop that does it in your area i suggest going to the main bg site and looking up the main distributors in your area and work from there. They will have the info for sales rep that will be able to help you out.

 

Nice, just saw this, thanks for the info Sango. I'm looking at how many pages this thread is, and how many times various folks have asked about this info and how many times various other folks have tried to say there were no production changes in mid 2010. Although I realize this is not necessarily confirmation that these changes are a part of the mid 2010 and beyond, it seems nuts to believe that they would not implement such an expensive change on the assembly line going forward (and obviously they knew about it for a while).

Seems like confirmation that post-TSB VINs already have the new parts. Am I wrong?

 

TSB VIN ranges are for what the TSB applies to, that doesn't mean that they necessarily fixed anything at that point, just that the TSB does not apply (yet). It may be updated in the future to include more vehicles. Newer vehicles may or may not still have the older design parts.

Jeff

 

As I said, it seems nuts to believe newer vehicles would not have the new parts. Just from a sheer financial common sense perspective, why would they continue to put defective parts into a newly produced vehicle, knowing that there will be such an expensive rebuild later? Once they've issued the TSB they've admitted there is a problem and are going have to bite the bullet and make the fix. Continuing to fix it as an after thought rather than on the initial assembly line where it's exponentially cheaper to implement would be beyond retarded.
Would ANY car manufacturer do that? Much less Toyota/Lexus?

Even if you look up the part numbers on Sewells using the bulletin posted, if you search for the old part numbers you'll see they come up as 2009 original equipment and and the others come up as 2011 equipment (I guess because it was a mid-year change, they don't want to create confusion around 2010 so it hat year is not listed in a search that is not based on VIN). That seems confirmation enough to me.

 

thats not how it works at all. there is specific reason TSB applies only to certain VINs, and thats because they believe issue to be fixed.

 

Jeff does work for Toyota, so what he is saying is correct.

Also I had the camshaft TSB done to my 07 even thou the TSB for it was not applicable to my car. Lexus decided to do authorize the repair due to how I described the problem with my car and reference to that TSB was enough to justify it without having to replicate the problem.

 

There are various reasons that VIN ranges are used, sometimes it is because they don't want a ton of cars pouring into the dealership to get a repair done when they only have parts for so many vehicles (released in stages), or they have done an update already at that production point, but the TSB is a different change, etc. There are also other TSB's that update an original part based on specific circumstances, where there is an alternate part available, but the original part is still being used in production, these are often updated as new model years come out that are still using the original part (for example there is a TSB for the manual transmission/clutch on the IS250 to change it to a sprung disc, but new cars are still being built with the unsprung disc).

TSB's are often updated later to include newer years and/or a newer VIN range, etc. It happens frequently. There is the possibility this TSB will be updated in the future to include 2011-12 models, however looking at the parts catalog information, that seems doubtful at this point:

The updated piston rings listed in the TSB were used in production from 10/2009 to 11/2011, there is an even newer piston ring part number from 11/2011 on (13011-31240). The production dates of the VINs listed in the TSB do correlate with those dates, so with that information I would say that yes VINs after the ones listed in the TSB DO have the updated parts, and newer 2012 models have an even newer piston ring set.

Jeff

 

How has the car been working out so far? Any issues? And how many miles have you put on the new pistons?

 

Jeff, do you know if people who get the tsb repair for the pistons today get the newer pistons from 2011 on?

Thanks for all the info. At first I was furious about the whole carbon buildup and Lexus' refusal to just automatically swap everyone's pistons, but I know it's all about business, and they need to see the problem before fixing anything.

Unfortunately for my wife's is250, we got the carbon cleaning done right before they released the tsb, so we have to wait for the next misfire to happen.
...sigh...

 

Has the vehicle miss-fired before or done any rough idle? If it did, the tech's could probably capture the data if it its still in memory.