Samanator

Let me start by saying that I think JM Lexus in South Florida is an awesome dealer. We have been treated first class with the purchase of two vehicles over a 6 month period. They are a class act and the whole dealership is state of the art. Now the bad... Last Saturday while washing the SC in the morning I discoved scratches on the right front wheel with a bunch of yellow paint on the wheel and tire. When they took my 2007 SC430 into the service bay they hit the wheel on the new yellow lifts. These are the optional Tourmoline wheels and I allowed them to have a repair service fix it. If it did not meet my inspection they would replace the wheel but that was not needed. After two hours with the wheel guy the wheel had no more scratches. After this I went home to wash my wifes IS250. She had been complaining about the milage since she had the 5K serviced done on the car and put nitrogen in the tires. The car since new has not gotten less then 28 mpg even in stop and go city driving. Now it could not get over 24 on the highway. (We generally get between 34-35 mpg when cruising around 80mph.) I checked the tire preasure and while it was less than we ran before it was only 3 psi less. I did not see this eating up almost 10 mpg. I looked at everything they did and then decided to check the oil. It was reading about a quart high so I took it back to them to have it adjusted (Rather than make a mess in my garage). At first they said there was no way this was the issue but they rechanged the oil and we both verified the level as correct. We're now back to 33mpg. What this tells me that the tolanances on these cars are very tight. A small variance can really affect the car. They have even verified my results and have notified Lexus of this. Watch out there if your dealer has those mass feed guns to put oil in. One slip of the trigger to many or too little could be bad. I watched them while they did the oil changes on a few other cars and there was a lot of cars that they did not pull the dipstick on. Kind of scary. As a note we bumped the nitrogen preasures back up to what I had been running with compressed air and we are now back at 34mpg highway. I really did not plan on spending most of the day at the dealer fixing things they did to new cars. They did follow up yesterday and had stated after what happened with me they are asking thier service writers to check oil levels before the cars are delivered to customers. Just like my dad taught me, he would be proud.

tonydt1g3r

hey good for you! JM has a really nice service department. On another note after visiting 3 different tires plus for an alignment I found a really good one in Lake Worth. On the other hand they got some pretty bad reviews on their sales men if you are in the market for some springs let me know I got an extra set of teins laying around. Plus if u need any advice or want to see some parts in person I've got quite a few mods tonydt1g3r@aol.com

Pearlpower

iTrader: (2)

Good to hear they took care of you. I have been seriously thinking of running nitrogen in my SC as soon as I can fit in the time in. Any real noticable differences?

rominl

iTrader: (4)

nice story, glad to see that you were well taken care of!

and that's some very interesting facts on the oil level!

i thought the idea of nitrogen for tires is that they have larger molecules and harder to "leak"?

Samanator

My back ground with Nitrogen goes back a long way from race cars in the 80's. The molecule size is one point. Temperature stability but the other is the difference between how it is bottled through a sealed process verses air from an air compressor. An air compressor also sucks in the moisture in the air. Some of it gets trapped and filter out but not all. So now you have air and water which react different at temperature. If you live in a high humidity area like I do you can see the pressure variations with a tire gauge. Depending on the mixture of air and water in a particular tire, I have seen up to a 4-6 psi variation with compressed air versus a negligible variation from the nitrogen.

Samanator

My SC430(2007) has had the nitrogen since delivery so I can't say. My friend has noticed 2 more mpg in his RX8 after switching to the nitrogen in the tires. I get 25-27 on a run (cruise between 80-90, with a few burst in the tripple digits). Im not certain what is normal for these and I'm just happy to be getting what the sticker says (Our Lexus's are the only cars I have had since they started putting milage on window stickers that meet or exceed the claimed EPA milage). If your looking for a performance gain other than milage look else where.