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Nice investigative work there!!
I never hear of that issue on the IS before, but then again, it wasn't an issue for me so I never looked into it.
On mine (LE #324), it's very light separation, I know it's there because of this thread, but nobody notices it. I'm planning on removing the wheel well and take a look in there, on mine, only a small upward force on the bumper puts it back where it belongs, so I'm wondering if some kind of tie down could be use to apply that small force to keep it where it belongs.
I'm a believer! Nice article. You should google translate it to Japanese and send it to Morizo.
I did notice one odd thing last weekend about my car between the 2 sides that I'll have to take a picture of later to show you, but it's the alignment with the A pillar.
Do you see this crease that the arrow is pointing to? It starts in the front hood or fender and goes into the A pillar. Well on my passenger side, the crease is aligned between the 2 body panels (fender/hood and A pillar). However on my driver's side the crease is off by several mm. I can't remember which is higher or lower, again I'll have to double check later. If you want to make a hypothesis about which it is that might be fun. Do you think that has anything to do with your findings on the body twist?
Granted, I don't have the front apron separation. But I do have this. I'm wondering if other owners can check out their cars to see if they have the same thing, or whether there's a correlation between that or not and the front apron separation.
I did some in-depth research and have some findings. I am pretty sure this is a structural issue. I wrote an article with detail information and analysis here:
This issue is not just specific to the IS500, searching the whole clublexus forum you will see owners of the previous 2nd gen and also current gen IS have mentioned this problem many times since more than 10 years ago.
Good article. But entirely misses the actual cause, which is INCREDIBLY simple. There is one specific bumper tab at the front edge of that driver side area that, for many of us, was defectively manufactured and lacks the lip needed to properly clip in.
I’ve personally seen this on not only my bumper, but on the OEM replacement bumper that was meant to replace mine. The other bumper tabs all had the needed lip necessary to properly clip in. Come summer months and after some extended higher speed highway driving, the cover starts to separate exactly where the defective bumper tab is. You can push it back in, but there’s no audible clipping sound as there should be. Heck, you can even see the defective tab on some of the photos in this very thread. It’s just a flattened tab unable to do its actual job. Simple as that.
If lack of chassis rigidity or the 13 extra lbs of the V8 over the AWD iS350 were the cause, we’d also be seeing the opposite side’s passenger side apron gap being pinched in closer, which it’s not. Or we’d be seeing it on the far, far, far less rigid (previous gen) IS-F or on the many supercharged IS350s, but we’re not.
Lexus does have a known history of weak body tabs, made worse by their increasingly heavy front bumper covers. And a flat tab definitely just compounds that problem.
Similarly, it’s incredibly difficult to perfectly align the upper edge of the fender with the bottom of the windshield. That’s a very hard area to line up perfectly, and even if you do normal driving over thousands of miles has a tendency to take things out of alignment. Inspected my cars and everyone has a similar issue, with the IS500 looking by far and away the best of the lot as far as that goes.
Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things. Especially when those who have actually gone through the problem and witnessed the undeniable culprit multiple times are giving you the actual answer. Or just keep being a one man army for a false cause regarding a vehicle that you presumably have zero first hand experience with.
Whoa! Now I believe jororo. I’m crossing to the other side of the room.
this is like a good old fashioned high school debate.
The jororo post is correct. Mine was already separating within 1k miles and I definitely didn't stress the chassis during that time. Also Occam's razor at play here
Good article. But entirely misses the actual cause, which is INCREDIBLY simple. There is one specific bumper tab at the front edge of that driver side area that, for many of us, was defectively manufactured and lacks the lip needed to properly clip in.
I’ve personally seen this on not only my bumper, but on the OEM replacement bumper that was meant to replace mine. The other bumper tabs all had the needed lip necessary to properly clip in. Come summer months and after some extended higher speed highway driving, the cover starts to separate exactly where the defective bumper tab is. You can push it back in, but there’s no audible clipping sound as there should be. Heck, you can even see the defective tab on some of the photos in this very thread. It’s just a flattened tab unable to do its actual job. Simple as that.
If lack of chassis rigidity or the 13 extra lbs of the V8 over the AWD iS350 were the cause, we’d also be seeing the opposite side’s passenger side apron gap being pinched in closer, which it’s not. Or we’d be seeing it on the far, far, far less rigid (previous gen) IS-F or on the many supercharged IS350s, but we’re not.
Lexus does have a known history of weak body tabs, made worse by their increasingly heavy front bumper covers. And a flat tab definitely just compounds that problem.
Similarly, it’s incredibly difficult to perfectly align the upper edge of the fender with the bottom of the windshield. That’s a very hard area to line up perfectly, and even if you do normal driving over thousands of miles has a tendency to take things out of alignment. Inspected my cars and everyone has a similar issue, with the IS500 looking by far and away the best of the lot as far as that goes.
Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things. Especially when those who have actually gone through the problem and witnessed the undeniable culprit multiple times are giving you the actual answer. Or just keep being a one man army for a false cause regarding a vehicle that you presumably have zero first hand experience with.
REVISED: After examining the front bumper I know what the "lip" you are mentioning about. No, that lip is only for limiting the bumper cover piece to move horizontally, it does not take gravitational (vertical) load/force and cannot stop the bumper cover from moving upward or downward. So whether the lip is intact or not has nothing to do with the sagging symptom.
The missing "lip" you see, is because Toyota engineers know the structural thing all the time (even I as a normal consumer can figure it out, no way they do not know), they let that tab be like that. So that when the front structure flexes, that tab will let go the bumper cover and "save" other tabs from breaking. Bottom line is, when the IS500 came out fresh from the factory, everything was properly secured and aligned, and the clips all over the bumper cover have extra redundancy to make sure, if the shape of the fender that it intends to clip to remains the same, even with minus one of the clips, all the rest of the clips will still be more than enough to hold the cover at the original place without any sagging or separation. More specifically speaking, there are multiple clips at the top of the front bumper cover to secure it to the radiator support bracket, so one clip on the side won't make the difference if everything keeps its shape.
As I have mentioned in the article, for that red IS500 on display, I used my hand to lift the cover, it was hard for me to make it fit (I exercise everyday so I can lift pretty heavy stuff), so that means the driver side fender has deformed slightly, not because the lip of the tab thing.
The same happens to the A pillar and fender gap that macmaster has pointed out. I owned 2 IS of the 2nd gen and the 3rd gen respectively, I see that gap on both cars are prominently wider than those upper scale models such as the LS. Back in 2017 in the LA auto show I encountered one of the principle engineers from Toyota and I asked him specifically why Lexus did that. The answer from him is due to greater stress flex that IS has, they intentionally make that gap slightly wider so that when the flex happens, those 2 pieces of metal won't rub against each other.
The extra weight of IS350 AWD comes from the center differential, which is bolted to the transmission, which there is a separate mid-section brace to support. So the penalty of the extra weight is not falling into the front engine cradle, but instead absorbed by that transmission brace which is bolted to the transmission tunnel, a completely different stress distribution model than the IS500 we have seen here.
The jororo post is correct. Mine was already separating within 1k miles and I definitely didn't stress the chassis during that time. Also Occam's razor at play here
You do not need to do spirited driving to "stress" the car to make it happen. The 2UR-GSE can develop more than 80% of its peak torque at 3k RPM, so even starting at the traffic light and you press the gas pedal lightly, you are already stressing the front chassis at a much higher rate than the V6 or I4 turbo cars. Running over a small bump at 40mph, the extra weight of the V8 will easily put an extra hundred pounds of stress to the strut tower.
It's hard to really pinpoint the crease in that photo. Maybe use a flashlight or something to better highlight it? But I want to say my IS 350 looks the same. At first I thought it was off by a little, but it just depends on the viewing angle.
It's hard to really pinpoint the crease in that photo. Maybe use a flashlight or something to better highlight it? But I want to say my IS 350 looks the same. At first I thought it was off by a little, but it just depends on the viewing angle.
I didnt think its that hard to see but I drew a line where they are to help.
I didnt think its that hard to see but I drew a line where they are to help.
I was looking at the wrong crease - the one lower down
I will have to check later on and see how it compares on my non-V8 boi. I think it's probably perfectly lined-up - I probably would've noticed otherwise while I was looking at it. That does look a little suspect to me.
The A pillar itself looks to be lined up correctly so I'm not too concerned about where the body crease lands. I'm not going to bring my car into Lexus for this lol. Everyone has bigger fish to fry.
10-05-22, 05:15 AM
