Ignoring all Alan Partridge references, what's good about a first-gen Lexus IS200?
Let us count the ways. Like the BMW 3 Series against which it was bravely pitched back in 1998, its engine was an inline six driving the rear wheels. It handled well, steered pretty sharply and had a very good driving position as long as you weren't that far over six feet tall. It looked smart and boasted a state of the art dash that took its lead from Swiss watch design. It was also one of the most reliable cars you could get in the first few years of this century.
Here you get Lexus lights as standard!
What wasn't so good? Well, you had to work the 24-valve 2.0-litre six quite hard to get anywhere, and the automatic only made things worse. 30mpg would be deemed a result.
Now we get to this particular IS. It's a Sport. This is where things start to get interesting. IS Sports came with a sweet, well-ratioed six-speed manual gearbox and a limited-slip diff. So that's a compact, free-revving, 155hp six driving the rear wheels through a slick manual box and an LSD.
Let's now look for the black lining in our silver cloud. As Darth Vader said when Darth Sidious was trying to fit him up with a dodgy secondhand Death Star, the MOT is short on this one. Why might that be? What might be a-lurking beneath those smooth Partridge-approved panels?
From the MOT history, it seems the car had some fairly significant de-rusting work carried out on both sides of the car to get it through last year's test. That MOT trace is interesting. Last autumn it passed its MOT twice in the space of a month. The first time it had advisories of non-critical windscreen damage and light oil misting of the nearside front damper, both of which had been on the advisory list since 2014. In the 1,800 miles between those two 2015 MOTs it lost those advisories but acquired a couple of new ones, namely slightly worn front brake discs and thin rear brake pads. It's done another 10,000 miles since then. The ad phrase "good service history" doesn't really tell us if that braking work was ever carried out.
Wheels might need a refurb. Or replacement
Thing is, the IS is a lot of car at this money and that goes all the more in this comparatively rare Sport version. Having said that, the IS does have generic issues, and braking is one of them. Seizing front brake calipers, warping front discs and 'whistling wheels' will all be familiar to IS owners. What sounds for all the world like a failing wheel bearing often turns out to be disc corrosion.
The other IS biggie is front end knock. That's usually traceable back to either the brake pads slipping in the calipers or (more likely) failing suspension lower arms. Front ball joints go too. These suspension problems can all contribute to excessive inner wear on the front tyres.
The downside of the nice manual 'box is that the clutch has a tendency to judder. Power steering and water pumps conk out, and a sunroof drain hole in the inner left boot well can get blocked, wetting the boot.
Embrace the chrono style!
More leakage issues can come about if your IS has had a replacement windscreen. The ones manufactured by Pilkington are known for leaking onto the main relay/control board. Signs of water under the corner of the dash on the driver's side are a dead giveaway, as are central locking/alarm malfunctions and front lights being unwilling to turn off.
This Shed's alloys have seen better days. The flaking you see here is very common, especially in our wet and frosty land. It's rumoured that 90 per cent of alloy warranty claims came from the UK, and that at one point Lexus dealers were doing a wink-wink alloy swap service at £50 a pop. More importantly you'll want to ensure that the alloys' locknuts haven't been mangled by neanderthal air-gun operators and that the security key is present.
All IS nuts and bolts look rusty, but that's normal. The CD player often doesn't play but you can easily chuck an iPod cable or whatever in the back of the unit.
Having said all that, a well-tended IS will shrug off big mileages just as easily as its bigger brothers. Even the belts can last for ever, though the idler roller did get itself a reputation for causing premature wear by pushing the belt onto the cover. It's best to stick to the schedule as cambelt failure will be catastrophic. Lexus began by quoting six years/100,000 miles but later eased that back to 60,000 miles.
If you're a dealer-only sort of owner, you might want to think carefully about buying an IS as Lexus repairs are not going to be cheap. If you're not that bothered about keeping the service history pukka, and why should you be, then there are plenty of non-OEM parts around at reasonable prices, for example Brembo brake discs.
The dealer's comment in his ad that "you can drive it on the road to get it home" is slightly unnerving, suggesting an imminent meltdown of some sort that only he knows about. But surely it's worth a gamble? After all, this is the car that gave the world the wonder of blingy chromed-up tail lights.
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