In January of 2023 , I bought my first seriously nice car, a 2017 Silver Lexus IS 350 F Sport with lovely red interior. I chose this car after a very extensive car search, read about it here and here
The car’s nickname is SILVER BIRD. It’s silver, and FLYYYYYS
The car came with ONE after-market modification declared by the dealer clearly, and observed on my test drives , that being a “muffler delete”. You can read about it here, I’m not going to waste time talking about it, and NO, you should NOT do this to your car. EVER. Don’t be a noise terrorist. our lives are too loud already
TBH, I didn’t fully understand how annoying driving a car with a muffler delete would be long term. I made peace with it for a while. However, with the purchase of the IS 350, I fell in love with driving again ; drives to the grocery store , night time drives listening to Eric Johnson, day trips, drives out of town for work. I’ve prob put about 3000 KM for 2023 so far (it’s now late September)
The more I drove, the most the noise from the back-end with the removed mufflers annoyed me. So, on Friday Sept 22, I took the car to my mechanic VF Auto (◀ Link) to remove the magna flow custom exhaust piping and add back the stock Toyota mufflers and baffles. BTW, these guys are great. Fast / efficient and extremely well priced. unless you’ve got something with serious vendor lock-in – like a Tesla – I’d recommend them for your car mechanic needs.
The custom exhaust system featured a quad-tip exhaust and NO MUFFERS. TBH, the quad tip exhaust is over-kill for a 3.5 L V6, but the real annoyance, was SOUND. Anytime I got up to about 2000 RPM, the muffler delete DRONE kicked in. To me, your car making noise when you’re doing something sexy, like accelerating fast in sport mode is perfectly fine, the muffler delete / custom tips made the car loud ALL THE TIME, and I live in quiet neighborhood. Worse, on the highway in cruise control, it created a sub-bass sound, that rattled the windows and parts of the dash. I’ve got near perfect hearing, so the effect was tainting the experience of driving an otherwise beautiful car
Here’s a BEFORE pic of the quad-tip monkey biznuzz 🙉🐒
And a lovely pic with the stock Toyota baffles 👼😇
I had the guys at VF-Auto do a before / after dB test for me. The results do show a significant difference
BEFORE
AFTER
However, the real test was the 20 min drive home in silver bird. WOW. How do you quantify SILENCE outside of a dB test when you’re all alone? For me, I just kept saying ‘IT’S SO QUIET, OMG’, all the way home
As the say, SILENCE IS GOLDEN
have a nice day, everyone 😎
Owen
Owen Reynolds Personal blog 
3 responses to “Un-doing the muffler delete on my Lexus IS 350 F Sport”
[…] I mostly understood the difference / relationship between torque and HP, but what I didn’t understand until I’d reached the end of my test drives, was how the weight of the car against it’s HP impacted the driving experience. My final test drive was a BMW 3 series x28i. This 4 door sedan has a curb weight of 3600 lbs, but only 240 HP. So, in when driving it, it felt under-powered against the Lexus IS 350 F Sport that I had also driven that summer. After my under-whelming test drive of the BMW 328i, I went home and added a new thrust, I came up with a simple formula to explain it. Divide the weight of the car by the HP to get what I called the “thrust to weight ratio”. I went back to the top 5 cars I’ve driven from the full list of 29. Sure enough, the ones I had written “SEXY” in my excel sheet all had a similar “thrust to weight ratio” between 11 and 12. I refocused my car search , and purchased a 5-speed 2011 Subaru WRX (related blog post) in August of 2022. After some time, I realized the manual transmission life was no longer for me, so traded in the WRX for a 2017 Lexus IS 350 F Sport in January 2023 (related blog post) […]
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[…] out of my sun roof. I’m sure the wind wasn’t great for the plant. I love Silver bird (my Lexus IS 350 F Sport), but I do need to look into changing to a compact/mid-size SUV with proper cargo […]
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[…] The Lexus IS 350 F Sport has a trunk size of just 13.5 cubic feet. This tiny ass figure is comparable to other cars in it’s class: Such as the Infiniti G37 & Q37, Acura TLX, BMW 3 series, Mercedes CLA, etc, but it’s a real burden when you’re visiting home depot twice a week or more to haul dirt, wood, plants, etc. Don’t get me wrong, the IS 350 F Sport is TONS of fun to drive and god bless Lexus for continuing to produce non-CVT V6 naturally aspirated V6 engines when everyone else is moving to eco friendly alternatives. However, it’s not the right car for me as I approach 45 years young on July 1, 2024 […]
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