Head Unit Reboot while Driving

No Head Unit Reboot since the new firmware was installed, but the delayed power-on that I cited on 27 May happened again Sunday 19 June. I turned the car on in the garage, advanced out of the garage and waited while the door came down, proceeded down the driveway (~40 ft) and down the street a few hundred yards to a Stop sign. This whole time the Head Unit was completely dead (Black screen, no sound). At the stop I turned the car off for a few seconds then back on. This time the Head Unit powered up with the chime, welcoming screen, warning screen then map, and the audio started playing.

Trying now to report to Toyota and dealer. Also restored the 'black box' camera to service to record any future episodes.

 

NOT FIXED! 12 July saw another Reboot 1 1/2 minutes after the fourth start of the day. The first three were early in the AM and the 4th was in the evening. This time I captured the episode on my front-and-rear facing camera with sound that you can hear cutting out followed a few seconds later by the starting chimes from the head unit. Today I'll again call the "Brand Engagement Center" and the dealer to report the incident and offer them the video clips to confirm the episode. Such Shoddy software...:-(

 

As I mentioned earlier, this has occurred with USB music, Bluetooth from my phone (same files) and with just the radio. I make my own MP3 files in Linux and there is no corruption issue. There is a software/firmware issue in the Head Unit.

 

Hopefully this will be the last update, but if not I'll let you'all know. After two reboots and a delayed power-up in July, the Toyota 'Brand Engagement Advocate' scheduled a meeting of the dealer's Service manager and the Field Service Tech which occured on 16 August. After reviewing all that had happened, the Service Tech agreed that I had made my point that there really was a problem and agreed to swap out the Head Unit. This happened today (30 August), so after re-pairing my phone and inserting my USB drive with all my great old Korean Trot and Gayo music, I'm back where I was and will hope that the random reboots are a thing of the past. I just wish that it would display cover art without having to put the emergency brake on :-(

 

Since the Head Unit replacement at the end of August, things were going well until the weather turned cold. Since then there have been two reboots, but different than the relatively predictable ones before. The first one was right after the car started and music started playing, it suddenly quit and the unit rebooted. The second one was a couple of weeks later and well into a 20-minute drive. In both cases, this resulted in reboots that resulted in the media selection screen where I had to manually select 'USB' to regain my music playing so this may be the result of bad error handling in the play software. The roving 'factory rep' alluded to this when he initially blamed my USB stored MP3s for reboots even though the previous episodes happened with Bluetooth and even over-the-air radio.

So, I will now report the two incidents to the dealer the next time I have maintenance, but have no hope that Toyota will exert any pressure on the programmers to implement more robust error-handling software to their multimedia. We'll probably just have to live with their programming incompetence for as long as we drive their vehicles. Too bad too, I'm getting used to 300+ MPG average from my car :-/