2000 Lexus RX 300 - Do I need 4 tires?

On a all wheel drive suv if one tire is damaged beyond repair do all tires have to be replaced.
Tires had about 20,000 miles on them

The simple answer is YES, all 4 need to be replaced. Look in your owners manual but I beleive it will say this.

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You can replace just one tire on an AWD RX300, it is done all the time.

It is pretty commonly the case. Most new hybrid crossovers use two separate drive systems, front and back, so those might only need two tires. There are also some shops and some dealers (Subaru owners report this for example) that will shave tires to the same depth, but I have little knowledge of that personally.

18 year old car. Not a hybrid

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How old are the tires? If they still have several years of life left, and I could find a reasonably matching new tire, and I could find a shop that did tire shaving, that’s what I’d do.

LOL, Yup. I was just adding in some chatter.

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The person the knows this works at Lexus. He should have put it in the manual, but that didn’t always happen. So the safe choice is to replace all 4 tires with same make, model, and state of wear - and follow that up with regular tire rotations so the wear difference (and therefore, diameter difference) is minimized.

We know that Subaru and Volvo had systems that were sensitive to difference in tire diameter, but Lexus? I can’t say for sure and since the cost of changing out an AWD system is HUGE compared to the cost of 4 tires, I don’t think it is worth the risk. Your mileage may vary.

Are all 4 tires same age? Were they all bought at same time? What is date code on sidewall? It should be 1415 approx? If you say 20k miles, maybe they are 3 yrs old? So, go to used tire store and find 1 similar tire.