I knew going into shopping for a used Prius, we were going to give up Carplay on our current aftermarket head unit in our 05 Matrix. In looking online and Youtube videos, I thought the navigation would be adequate, and at least we would have Pandora integrated. Well, nope. After taking delivery of a certified 2017, we discovered that Pandora had been removed from Entune. A big disappointment in an otherwise amazing car. It's mind boggling how advanced and refined this car is in so many ways. How Toyota skipped adopting Carplay, and removed Pandora is big head scratcher.
Nothing is mind boggling about software. The switch from phone-centric to auto-centric for Android is a good example. You're switching from a mostly touch to a mostly voice interface. That's something just coming into the practical stages now. It took years to get there and some older hardware simply doesn't meet the requirements. Those that do will need the software upgrade.
By "mind boggling" I am referring to the choice Toyota made not to adopt Carplay until years after others did. It was introduced in 2013 btw, and there were units on the market by 2014. Also, while Carplay supports voice, it is primarily touch based. The only reason the current infotainment unit does not support Carplay was by design. Numerous units of lower quality hardware were built to run this technology.
Am marginally excited that the 2020 Prius Prime supports CarPlay because the voice recognition and navigation system is horribly unintuitive to use. Even the Yelp and Fuel app are more useful than the navigation system.
Yup, Toyota is known for being slow on high techs and/or cheapskate on features. For example, my 2020 $30,500 MSRP Prime XLE didn't come with BSM (Blind Spot Monitoring) system. And my 2017 $37,000 Tacoma 4x4 had drum brakes in the rear. $tingy!
Toyota makes pretty decent cars, they just have no idea on how to really make customers happy for the long term, their assumption is that as long as it is a long lasting car, thats good enough. Great example is Car Play and Navigation, 2016 and beyond, many car companies were installing Car Play. And, since 2016 even a few car companies are offering updating systems to Car Play, with a reasonable charge for needed parts are labor. Not Toyota.
I don't understand all the complaints regarding the infotainment system in the Prime. I was expecting a disaster after reading all the complaints before I purchased, but I've been pleasantly surprised. I think it's very functional, responsive, packed with the features that I want (don't care at all about Android Auto or the Apple thing, had them before and found them mostly useless), and I like the big screen. I like the navigation too.
The radio itself is fine, but the natural language processing capabilities of the navigation system leaves a lot to be desirable. Even with training it has a hard time recognizing voice commands (one of the few ways you can operate the system when the car is in motion) going through the menus is way too distracting and too many clicks. That's part of the appeal of systems like Android Auto and Apple Carplay. Both those systems create a simpler interface and opens it up to a broader range of development to add or remove stuff. Which I guess was Toyota's original intent with their Entune path but it didn't quite get off the ground. Apple Carplay or Android better leverage their search tools and connectivity as well to make navigation to be much more up to date and real time. To get the same from Entune you would have to get periodic map updates for an expensive added cost.
The Toyota infotainment system is notoriously bad. Best way is to give yourself aftermarket options, which is one reason I chose the base model Prime. (Not my car)
I have this model in my 2018 Prius Two. With the Mastreo kit, I retained all of the steering wheeling controls and backup camera.
