Why I Love My Lexus LS600h And How Much It Cost Me So Far [TCO]

if you ever wonder where somebody would spend 60 or maybe 90 francs on a number plate holder here's the reason these are quick change now I'll play told us you just open up you take a number plate out and then you put it back in very important if you have multiple cars where you're gonna switch number plates around it's not fiddly its fast you don't get your hands dirty and also you might notice with number plates they are a bit smaller than other number plates from other countries so you can't really buy a number plate holder in Germany or something like that because they won't fit so so with number plate holders tend to be a bit more expensive ciao I'm Mario Swiss car guy on YouTube and I want to start this video by giving a big thanks to viewer macho mater because he suggested in comments of my last video that I changed my channels name from Swiss review to Swiss car guy and since this made a lot of sense I rebranded so now I am Swiss car guy which should be pretty easy to remember today I'm driving a 2008 Lexus LS 600h a car I dearly loved and in my last video I asked you to write the reasons why I love this car in the comment section and that I would post you know the people who got it right and there were many many good answers but it's usually not just a matter of one thing it's a combination of multiple things and in this video I'd like to show you to explain to you why I love this car all the various reasons and then in the second part of the video I will go into cost of ownership because I've owned this car for pretty much exactly 1 and a half years now and I've just got some bills and I think it's a good moment to make an ownership update I apologize for the length of this video because it's gonna be long so if you're only interested in the cost part just skip to the time codes that should appear somewhere around here [Music] the code now just thought I was gonna crash reason number one why I love this car well I'm almost a bit ashamed to admit it as a car guy but I have what I call a Lexus LS fetish I absolutely love the cars and I've always loved them since I first saw the first one in the early 90s I was absolutely fascinated by the car because I never seen one of those I've never seen that brand and it was like this Japanese luxury car was something that wasn't really there before and then I learned about the cars the way they were built the philosophy behind them and I got absolutely infatuated with Lexus LS s the other thing is Lexus LS s in Switzerland at least they are quite exotic and now you might think wow Lexus LS is an exotic car is this guy crazy well if you're from America from other parts of the world yes then I sound like an absolute nut job but in Switzerland they have not sold a lot of alessa's for example in the last seven years 2013 up to 2019 Lexus sold a total of 53 Lexus LS s in Switzerland and now you might think well you know Switzerland is a small country 53 is probably not such a bad number well in the same time period Mercedes sold over 3600 s classes so for every 68 s classes you see on average you are likely to see one Lexus LS therefore the Lexus LS is pretty pretty exotic and a voiceover Mario will tell you about more facts in comparison to show you how exotic this car actually is I'm just a voice in your head there is no voiceover Mario grow up so let's look at data for entire year 2019 despite having a fairly new model on the market Lexus managed to only sell six LSE's for comparison in the same period rolls-royce sold nine phantoms they also sold ten Dawn's Bentley sold 166 Continental GT s Aston Martin sold 57 DB lemons Lamborghini sold 35 Aventadors ferrari sold 164 88 and 92 812 superfast mclaren managed to sell 12 sent us in that period and even the bugatti chiron managed to outsell the lexus LS by two-to-one here in Switzerland so there's that driving a non mainstream car take lexus LS but then there is also the other thing that it's probably some psychological issue I have but I'd like to think that I'm driving the best car in the world with the LS with the top-of-the-line models usually they are the best cars the car company can build and I really like the idea of driving a car that's as good as it gets that they didn't have to make worse because there's another model on top of it I find that really really appealing and it's probably also the reason why I bought the fairphone back then because we W set out to make the best car in the world it's questionable whether they actually achieved it but I still like this kind of philosophy in cars I really like the way the Lexus LS look especially the older ones here as 400s the LS 434 6603 facelift I didn't like the two facelift seated on the car because the first one they replaced the classic fine elegant Lexus grill with such a chunky one and in the second one they basically changed the entire car and changed the entire interior and I think it's still nicely made but I prefer this old style interior with the touchscreen which cars don't have they have some stupid touchpad controller thing that I personally think is terrible they should have stuck with the touchscreens but also I like this bit more conservative style these cars they don't shout about themselves they are just there to serve the purpose of you know you getting from A to B in luxury in comfort without attracting attention and I like that I also really really like the plastics that was used in these old lexus LS s this this texture it's kind of soft but also not it just I love the way it feels it's on all the button I like the way the buttons feel I really just like the way these cars look inside and out a strong point of the Lexus LS s have always been how smooth they ride and most of them are fitted with air suspension they are big comfortable cars they have no pretension of being exported even though the car has a sport button for the suspension but you know it doesn't do that much it's still a big old boat and this is something I really love because in a luxury car I want comfort I don't want handling if I wanted handling I get a sports car which I do I own a Nissan GTR but I always end up driving this car because for normal driving comfort is something you want and the thing is the car still has power as well it has a five liter v8 which produces 394 horsepower and it also has an electric motor producing 224 horsepower the combined output is rated at 445 horsepower and yeah the car can actually move Plus being a v8 you can even get a bit of a nice sound when you accelerate or when the engine turns on it it just burbles there and the car being a hybrid of course has to your task EC BT transmission which means it's constantly variable it can adjust the ER PM's to basically almost any level which means that when you step on the pedal it revs up and it stays in the optimal rev range giving you the ideal amount of torque and power and when you're not stepping on the accelerator it basically drops down to a thousand a thousand five hundred rpm so the engine is just ticking over and at certain speeds it even shuts the engine off and drives fully electrically which is really nice it's very smooth it's very nice to drive and it follows the long tradition of Lexus LS s with their 1uz engines in the LS 400 they are just smooth rev-happy engines and in this case with electric assistance and with the CVT transmission it's just it's just support a battery smooth it's so nice to drive being a hybrid you might expect a fuel economy to be pretty good and to be honest it is but this is still not the Prius the car it's a five liter v8 it weighs two and a half tons so you already start out expecting high fuel consumption in fact this car in the 20 odd thousand kilometers I've owned it until now has used twelve and a half liters in 100 kilometers on average which you will see what it means in like gallons and stuff right somewhere out here and you might say well it's not that great mileage but then again if I compare it to my feta that I used to have that car is similarly heavy it was similarly powerful and that one did 17 and a half liters in 100 kilometers so the Lexus actually uses about 30% less fuel and I do way more city driving in this car than I used to do with that one so the fuel economy in absolute terms is not great but in relative terms it's really really good the other 600h is also only available in all-wheel drive which if you know me you know this is a bonus because I like to drive my cars all year round and rear-wheel drive can be done but it can also be a bit of a hassle I did it once I owned the Lexus LS 430 which I drove one winter and I only got stucked twice so there's that but then again I also spun the car out in a straight while it rains really heavily and yes part of it is surely because I'm an idiot but with four-wheel drive you're just less likely for that stuff to happen so I always prefer four-wheel drive when it is available there for another reason why I like this car the cars smooth ride and general luxury feeling also means it's quiet and it's nice having a car that's quite because you know it's less stressful while you drive and the other thing is you can enjoy the stereo and this car has a mark levinson branded stereo it's good it's actually really good it's not the greatest area in the world I mean there's always better of things out there but for my taste it sounds really good and what I think is the best thing about it is that it doesn't sound strenuous so you can listen to it for hours and hours and hours even at high volumes and you don't get tired of it and this is really important to me because I like listen to music in the car and also at high volume so there's that and speaking of the stereo this cars from 2008 so you need not that bang up to date yes it's got a touchscreen but it doesn't have a USB bluetooth can only be used for calls yeah it can read I think mp3 files from CDs and maybe also from DVDs but who really handles media anymore so what I did I installed an Android player in the car it's called the Grom V line 2 and it basically connects to all the factory equipment you can control it through the touchscreen you can control it through the controls on the steering wheel and I absolutely love it because now my 12 year old car not only does it have all the feature of modern castle it has your favorite streaming apps like a Spotify or Google Play Music in my case you can use Google Maps it supports Android auto it supports car play I think even Wireless Capri might be coming but I think it's even better than modern cars because what this thing can do it can play video while you drive so basically I could watch YouTube videos especially buy some Swiss car guider I think makes pretty decent videos no but if I wanted I could watch YouTube videos my passengers could watch the YouTube videos not that I advise doing it but if you do a long boring motorway journey it's kind of nice to watch your favorite you know vlog style channels where you don't really have to watch where you just can keep your eyes on the road but listen to what is being talked about and this in my opinion makes the car better than even a new car because a new cars all these features are usually blocked you cannot watch video while in motion you cannot watch YouTube in the background or stuff like that and with this car by only spending six hundred and thirty dollars for the v/line - I can do all these things and this is another reason why I love this car I also installed an app called macro droid on my Android phone which automatically enables the Wi-Fi hotspot once my phone connects to the car's hands-free Bluetooth system that way the v/line always gets an internet connection and I can use all the services another reason why I love this particular car that I bought and why I most likely it will paid for the car is that it is the exact specification I would have ordered if I had bought this car new so it's star fire pearl metallic on the outside light grey leather inside with dark bird's-eye maple woods and this car also has the extended leather package which means the dash is covered in leather and also the lower parts of the dash another thing I really like is that the lower part of the dash is is this light gray leather and the top part is black because I don't like it when the top of the dash isn't black because it always reflects in the windscreen and it's really distracting and this car has my perfect chromatic combination because I love bright interiors and this I couldn't have expected better myself and as I mentioned before I overpaid for this car because if you remember what I talked about before they sold probably about you know less than a hundred Lexus LS 600h s in Switzerland and to find one that's in the very very color combination you might have wanted it's like winning the lottery so I just had to get it and in fact I did a big no-no when I bought this car because I bought it sight unseen over the phone and this is something you should basically never do as it is yeah it's really stupid to do the main reason why I went ahead with it is that when I was talking with a guy on the phone he was very very reluctant to sell me the car sight unseen because someone I mean I made him an offer and he went like no no no I'm not gonna negotiate you have to see the car first I don't want you to be disappointed in something like that and to me that inspired a lot of confidence because if he was a scammer if he was you know not very reputable seller he would have just said oh yeah sure yeah comment but it took some time it took some explaining this I had to tell guy I'm in Zurich you're in Geneva I'm not making this three-hour trip to Geneva to to inspect the car and then come back another time to pick it up so if I come down I'll take the car with me and then we finally agreed on a price and a few days later I was in Geneva and was driving home in this car but of course there are also things I don't like about this car and Lexus LS 600h s in general first of this car because magic condition is not great there are some some blemishes and scuffs on the front and rear bumpers which should be taken care of but you know this is basically an almost 200 thousand kilometer car and I don't really want to spend money on unnecessary cosmetic things so the car is if you battle scars and I'm I'm not worried about them same goes for the wheels I now have the winter wheels the OEM wheels which are basically wheels I really like but in this case the previous owner had them painted black which I don't particularly like and also the wheels are in pretty bad condition because Lexus OEM wheels in my experience they tend not to fare very well in heavily salted areas like Switzerland where I am in and therefore they are very corroded and very ugly and basically would need a refinishing and I would personally love to bring him back to stock in the original gunmetal gray but I also really really hate spending money on like unnecessary cosmetic things I mean the wheels are ugly but they are they are safe and they work I'm probably never gonna spend money refinishing these wheels the previous owner did a few more modifications besides the black wheels he also had all the windows tinted which personally I don't like but I can't be bothered to take it off and also it's useless because the car has sun shades so why do you need to tint the windows yeah another thing is the owner also put on a little spoiler on the rear which I'm probably gonna leave there because it doesn't bother me that much and because I'm worried I might not get all the glue off if I try to remove it so it's gonna stay and he also did the spoiler lip at the front which yeah I'm gonna leave there I'm already happy I managed to remove all the f-sport patches that the previous owner had stuck on the car that was the very first thing I remove from the car but another thing I inherited from the previous owner are the summer wheels these aftermarket not very pretty 20-inch wheels and also I I don't like the way they look they are not great quality wheels and with 20-inch I think the ride gets worse because standard is 19 on this car and those I might do something about them I might replace them but the tires are still good so I may still drive them for a season I really don't like spending money on cosmetic things even though it makes probably no sense because I spend a lot of money maintaining the cars in general so there's that another disadvantage of the Lexus LS 600 is that the trunk is really small this five meter long car only has a 350 litre trunk so it's about half the size of what you would expect from a car like this and this is because the hybrids batteries are stored somewhere in there therefore reducing the trunk space but also I find it actually quite funny that despite having such a small trunk underneath the trunk there is a full-size spare which I mean is always nice to have but maybe if you have such a tiny tiny trunk why not use that space to increase your trunk I think they did this with a facelift version of the car but mine still has the full sized and unused spare another thing I don't like about the LS 600h is I can't program the headlights come on automatically when I turn on the car there is of course the auto mode that turns them on or off depending whether it's day or night or something like that but I always drive with my headlights on just I'm just used to do it and I think it improves visibility because when you turn the headlights on instead of just having on day like daytime running lights or something like that they're real lights turned on as well and I think that also helps a bit with visibility and with not getting rear-ended but this is a setting this car doesn't offer I even tried with the tech stream with the Toyota dealer software there is no option to do this and for example in my fashion this could be done via VCDs the programming software and in my sl55 AMG it could actually be programmed from within the menu on the car itself so on this car I have to turn on the light manually each time I start the car and then I have to turn it back off so yeah that step bothers me many people commented that the reason for buying a lexus LS is because it's gonna be reliable and yes I agree but thus being reliable also mean that the car is cheap to own I think this is a good moment to go over to the cost of ownership portion of this video and for this I will hand the mic over to voice over Mario because I cannot read off a spreadsheet right now I am busy driving the car and also voiceover Mario is definitely real and not just a figment of my imagination all prices in this video are in Swiss francs for your reference one Swiss franc is about one US dollar or 95 Euro cents or 80 pence sterling I bought the car in September of 2018 with 166 thousand 150 kilometers for 19,500 francs at the end of October I wanted to mount the winter tiles but I realized that I was missing the correct lug nuts for those wheels the complete said that Lexus costs 500 francs and so I ordered the fitting aftermarket set from eBay it cost me 73 francs and 33 cents I changed to reuse myself this time see even I can do some basic DIY in June of 2019 I had a major service done on the car at one hundred and seventy nine thousand four hundred and sixty-eight kilometers usually I have that done right after purchasing a car but the car was running well and it had been serviced just a few months before I bought it however that servicing had not exactly been up to my standards I had the garage flush all the fluids including the transmission and replaced the spark plugs spark plugs on the LS 600h are normally due for a change at two hundred thousand kilometers but it's good practice to replace them earlier as they tend to completely seize up and remain stuck in the cylinder heads and my car was not far from that he took two garriage a considerable amount of time and finesse to get the plugs out without them shearing off altogether it took them seven hours of labour to get the service done and together with parts and fluids that service cost me two thousand three hundred and forty two francs and eighty cents but I am happy they managed to get the spark plugs out eventually even if it cost some money in September of 2019 at one hundred and eighty three thousand four hundred fifteen kilometers I bought new winter tires as the old ones were completely worn I bought Michelin pillowtop in five which were very reasonable 816 francs and forty cents did it at the same time I had also new TPMS sensors fitted to the winter wheels because they previously didn't have any I bought four sensors on Aliexpress for a total of 80 francs they were cheap Universal ones and they work fine shortly after I had to take the car to its periodic inspection and I was fairly sure the car would not pass the inspection as I knew the front suspension bushings were quite worn I also wrapped off the tint from the taillights before going through the inspection as that would have been an instant fail I even made a big about that not only did examine our notes to warn suspension bushings he also found that the aftermarket daytime running lights installed by the previous owner were not wired correctly and did not dim once you turn the headlights on as they apparently should about suspension I told him the job is already planned and in regard to the daytime running lights I asked him if I could just remove them as I didn't like them anyway to my amazement the car passed inspection anyway one suspension bushings are bad as the car will clunk and the tires will wear unevenly so was something I wanted to be taken care of I also knew well before buying the car that this is an expensive job on an LS 600h the car is eight control arms in the front and you can only get the upper ones from third party manufacturers the lower ones are only available from Toyota as they are specific to the all-wheel-drive LS models and are not the same as a regular LS 460 at Toyota here in Switzerland the parts alone cost around six thousand francs so I obviously shopped around and I bought the four lower control arms the lower ball joints sway bar links and silent blocks Oh II am from a seller in Japan called Amma Yama they cost me one thousand and fifty francs delivered the upper control arms I bought from a third party manufacturer called fattest I originally wanted to go om as well for those but the OEM would have been an up of thousand francs at a Miami while the fattest were only three hundred and twenty francs delivered so I bought parts for 1307 t francs which is already pretty decent compared to the six granted field I wanted for the pulse he took me some time to order the parts and the garage was quite busy so I did not bring the car in for that job until February of 2020 now some of you might argue that I could have just bought bushings for less money and just replaced those instead of the entire control arms well yes but while you can replace the bushings you cannot replace the ball joints in the control arms and chances are that after one hundred and ninety thousand kilometers they are not in great shape anymore to me it would not have made any sense to put the control arms with the old ball Jones back in the car so I opted to replace all the control arms also I cannot press out bushings myself and I have to pay a mechanic to do it the cost escalates quickly as a mechanic hair costs around 155 francs an hour speaking of labor cost this is what this job got really expensive as my car had been driven for one hundred and eighty eight thousand seven hundred twenty kilometres and through all the seasons at the time of that job all the bolts fasteners and other parts were completely seized and rusted he took the garage brute-force some new tools and a total of 17 hours of labor to get this job done once they had everything reassembled they could not align the car since the track road ends were completely seized up as well and they had to order new ones together with two new axial joints those parts were another nine hundred and nineteen francs and 97 cents so in total this suspension job cost me a whopping five thousand seven hundred eighty-three francs and eighty cents and this is how much the car has cost me so far in maintenance alone nine thousand and ninety six francs and thirty three cents or five thousand six hundred seventy five francs and forty-nine cents per year or thirty-seven cents per kilometre but of course that is not the whole calculation I also spent six hundred thirty francs for the Grom v-line Android player granted that's not something necessary about it's something I wanted to have and of course there's the running costs fuel cost me five thousand fifty two francs or twenty cents per kilometer taxes worth two thousand four hundred and eight francs and sixty-seven cents 1508 francs per year insurance was one thousand six hundred and thirty-three francs 20 which is 1022 francs fifty per year altogether the running costs were nine thousand and ninety three francs eighty-seven cents if we add them to the maintenance costs we get the cost of ownership which in this case is eighteen thousand seven hundred and forty six francs and eighty-seven cents eleven thousand seven hundred thirty six francs and eighty-nine cents per year or seventy six cents per kilometre now if I wanted to calculate the total cost of ownership I would have to estimate how much I could sell the car for now I reckon the car is realistically worth about twelve thousand francs that will mean a depreciation of seven thousand five hundred francs and give me a total cost of ownership of twenty six thousand two hundred and forty six francs and eighty-seven cents or sixteen thousand four hundred and thirty-two francs and forty three cents per year or one franc and six cents per kilometre so far the LS 600h has only been about one thousand three hundred francs per year cheaper to own then that other car whose name always invokes the sound of all wrong at one Frank and six cents per kilometre this is currently the most expensive car I've ever owned but I see currently as I have just done this very big-ticket job with a front suspension and that is something I should never have to worry about again hopefully therefore as I put more kilometres on the car I am fairly confident that the average cost will come down but even if it comes down considerably owning an LS 600h will never be cheap the running costs alone being at 37 cents per kilometre means that even a reliable at a 600 H cannot realistically be owned and maintained properly in Switzerland for under sixty cents per kilometer I reckon that once I sell the car sometime in the distant future my average cost will be around 80 cents per kilometer so the LS 600h has not exactly been cheap to own for me until now but then again I think the cost will come down over time as the job adjusted with the suspension bushings in the front is basically one of the big jobs that exists on this car and it should be good for hopefully a long long time because now is the first time these things were replaced after one hundred ninety thousand kilometres so I hope I don't have to worry about it for a long time and therefore in the future not having these expensive jobs to do the average cost should drop down and I plan to keep this car a long time because I don't know if it's come across in this video I love it and maybe also because I'm an idiot but I'm am I an idiot for loving this car is there a car that you love irrationally so please comment down below tell me about it I'm very interested to read about that and this video is basically finished if you found this video interesting please leave a like maybe share do somebody who might be interested in it and if you want to see more self proclaimed car guy rambling on about his fetish for old Lexus's then please consider subscribing to my channel anyway it's finally over thank you very much for watching and have a nice day nobody's watching this and you're talking to yourself again stop it you're still crazy [Music]

Channel: Swiss Car Guy

Views: 187,401

Keywords: Lexus LS600h, Lexus LS, LS600h, Cost of ownership, running costs, car ownership, Swissreviews, Swiss car guy, Mario, bald guy talking about cars, car ownership in switzerland, Lexus LS review, Lexus hybrid sedan, hybrid, V8, 2UR-FSE, hybrid v8, LS 600hL, Lexus Sedan, Luxury car ownership, Lexus ownership, How expensive is it to own a lexus ls600h, total cost of ownership

Id: tnOBKku4eU4

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020