Ricky and his Rattle

As the last several entries on this blog indicate, I recently bought myself a new car. This time I really went for it and got myself a brand-new Lexus RX 350h in Premium+ trim, striking 'Copper Crest' color with 'Palomino Leather' interior. His name is Ricky.

Sheesh, what a wonderful car. The cool thing about the Lexus RX 350 is that it offers an incredibly quiet interior, smooth ride and handling, all kinds of driver assistance goodies, rock-solid reliability, low maintenance costs, and excellent trade-in values. Ricky is a revelation in how much the right car can ameliorate a lot of the stress attendant to daily driving. He's a delight to roll around in, not in some crazy-fun way, but just in quiet purring satisfaction and comfort.

However, about three weeks into my ownership I became aware of an annoying little rattle that responded to any kind of vibration, such as driving over a rough patch of pavement, or even when flooring the accelerator and fully engaging the 4-cylinder engine.

The rattle came and went, got worse, got less. From what I could tell it was emanating somewhere inside the roof just behind the passenger-side sun visor. For a while I wondered if it might be in the sun visor, since there's a little lighted mirror there with a pocket-style sliding cover. But that wasn't it.

In fact, I couldn't find the source of the rattle. I tried pressing all around up there, moving the sun visor around, leaving the sun-visor mirror partly or all the way open. No dice. Just that rattle. It was predictable in that it happened only when there was some kind of vibration.

It started driving me bats. After all, this is the sort of defect one associates with cheap cars that are cranked out by bored assembly-line workers. It's not supposed to happen with a Lexus, built with care and extra oversight and all that.

So I sighed a bit and made an appointment to take Ricky to Lexus of Concord to have them look at it. Doggone it, I thought. Dang, I thought. Brand-new luxury car from one of the classiest class acts of the automotive world, and it has a dinky little rattle. What a bummer.

And then I found what was causing the rattle. It wasn't Ricky. There wasn't anything wrong with the car. The culprit was my metal-frame sunglasses up in the little cubby up behind the rear-view mirror. I had put those sunglasses in there loosely and they were buzzing against the side of the cubby in response to minor vibrations. In the cloistered quiet of an RX 350 interior, the buzz not only sounded a lot louder than it was, but it was emanating from the side of the cubby towards the passenger-side sun visor.

I removed the sunglasses from the cubby. That was that. The rattle was no more. Ricky had regained his magisterial composure. The cabin was once again a haven, a sanctuary on wheels.

I feel relieved, of course. But also a bit sheepish. Not so much because I didn't remember about those sunglasses up in the cubby, but that I spent about 3 or 4 days mentally blaming this superlative new car of mine for a defect that it doesn't have. I misjudged Ricky. I'm ashamed.

But at least I figured it out before taking Ricky to Lexus of Concord. They probably would have spotted the issue in about 5 seconds, to my everlasting chagrin. Instead, I cancelled the service appointment and took Ricky on a nice long drive.

Which was an unalloyed joy. Ricky is so silky-smooth, so comforting, so composed, and, above all, so quiet.