Gen 4 Infotainment re-booting itself while driving?

8 months now with my Prius Three model.

I am happy to report that I've never seen the "rebooting" problem. Maybe because I never hooked up my cell phone to the system? Is that what's fouling yours up? Toyota got too fancy and too complicated, and now the system has bugs in it?

When the salesman asked, "Would you like me to install your cell phone for you?"

"Hell no!!"

I don't have JBL. I don't have or use Entune. I don't stream music. I don't use Bluetooth. I don't have text messages pop up on the screen. And I don't do distracted driving by using a cell phone in the car.
I'm fine with just a basic radio... Keeping things simple with just AM/FM and Sirius XM. (and everything WORKS! )

~The old dude
​

 

Just got back from the Dealership and my Entune system is at the most recent update level already. You may have the answer there, according to the tech since the firmware is up to date the next troubleshooting step is reset the head unit in the car and don't hook up the phone via bluetooth to see if that cures the issue. It seems that the head unit is very sensitive to "special characters" in contacts and messages, and random emoji or odd characters in names/addresses such as foreign (non-english) characters or accent marks can cause the system to crash and reboot when it reads them during syncing or normal usage. He mentioned that some of the newer emoji in SMS messages can do this too.

If so that's some incredibly poor programming on Toyota's part. I've owned several cars with factory systems that connected and synced contacts and messages via bluetooth and never had any issues like this.

 

Just to rant a bit: if you go back twenty~thirty years, cars had nothing but mechanical controls, cell phones were unheard of, you were happy with an AM radio (or nothing), and everything was fine.

 

Yeah, and they needed full overhauls at 100,000 miles, got miserably bad fuel mileage and were horrible polluters too.

I much prefer newer cars, the manufacturers just need to get on their game when it comes to things like this. This kind of an issue is software, and is indicative of very poor development practices on their part.

 

Yes but: you could drop-kick all these infotainment bells and whistles, the obsession with turning the dash into a giant touch screen, just keep the mechanical, environmental and mpg improvements. Once upon a time people got into cars to get somewhere, lol.

 

I'm not a "technophobe". And I can only speak for myself, but I would have to be very careful when driving so as not to be distracted by all that info/communications technology. (I've already drifted in & out of lanes a few times while watching the Eco indicators, or playing with the Nav.)

Also, are there any issues or concerns about privacy when your cell phone is hooked up to the Toyota system? All your contact info (and who knows what else) is downloaded into the head unit? I'm not paranoid about privacy, but somewhere there is a Toyota computer that has all your personal cell phone info in it? And who has access to it? Big brother Toyota is tracking you.... (Not to mention the bored and nosy Toyota mechanic, or parking valet who is scrolling through the phone screen and looking at your contact list and addresses.)

I mentioned this a long time ago, I think it might be nice if there was a PIN code we enter before using and accessing all the phone info/settings screen.

 

With 3rd gen this is the default info display, the Energy Monitor Indicator:



(Don't laugh, it's all we got.)

But I much prefer the Hybrid Synergy Indicator:



(Again, please hold the chuckles.)

The HSI you can sneak glances at, that's all you need. The default EMI on the other hand, takes dedicated, protracted attention, it's really a menace. Not that useful either.

 

I experienced this for the first time today. Took a short trip down to Home Depot and the head unit rebooted about 5 times. Ditto on the way back...I updated to iOS10 a few weeks back, so that can't be the cause (I wouldn't think)...

 

Experienced this for the first time yesterday. Rebooted 6-7 times in a matter of 5 mins. So annoying. We had 2 iphones in the car with me, both which I have paired in the past, but only 1 that was actually paired/connected at the time. Once we turned off the bluetooth from the second device, it stopped. Could be coincidence? But I will need to get that software patch downloaded that everyone is talking about when I take my car in for it's first ToyotaCare service. Urgh!

 

My new 2016 Prius had this software defect. My navigation system was useless for the first six months of my car ownership. I have other issues related to software in my new car that Toyota refuses to correct and two Toyota safety recalls that there is no current remedy. This is frustrating.

 

Had the problem for the day. So I deleted the Entune app of my iPhone to see if it would stop the problem, which it did. I then redownloaded the Entune app again and no problems so far for one week. It does look like a software problem, but we will see.


iPhone ?

 

Revisiting this thread, it occurred to me that some of us who reported this issue never followed up with our personal updates.

For my part, the rebooting happened multiple times on one drive that was about 100 days and about 11k miles ago.

Its been fine ever since.

If it happens again, I hope it is before I reach 36,001 miles -- which should be in January.

 

When I first got my 2016 in March, the Entune system would reboot every few weeks. However, before yesterday (Sunday), it had not rebooted since before the last update.

However, yesterday, in the course of an 84-mile round trip between Oakland, CA and Woodside, CA, the system rebooted an minimum of 6 times (1 or two of those reboots had multiple restarts). The reboots were evenly distributed between trip directions and occurred during the trip segment in the middle of the trip. The northeast end of the problem was downtown Hayward, The southwest end was just south of the Highway 92 I-280 interchange. This segment crossed San Francisco Bay at the San Mateo Bridge, passing under the runway approaches to both Oakland International and San Francisco International Airports. There was intermittent rain in both directions.

Obviously, this raises several ptential causes of the reboot behavior. I'm curious if there are some common characteristics among current reboots that might narrow down potential causes and help isolate the issue:

Do recurring reboots tend to happen in particular locations? Under certain weather conditions? Do they happen where there tends to be high-powered radio traffic (i.e near airports or radio transmitters)?

Is there a way to provide this feedback to appropriate departments at Toyota (rather than just bellyaching here)?

 

My navi/entune did this several times yesterday while I was driving, but then finally stopped, and has not happened for over 24 hours. At the time, I was bluetooth streaming music from my iPhone. It was very weird and annoying.

 

I'm only going on month 3 but I haven't had any reboots either and I also declined hooking up my cell. I don't even like talking to passengers while driving much less on the phone. I don't like realizing I don't remember turning onto a road because of the conversation or not knowing what the subject of the conversation is about because I was concentrating on merging.

The one thing I do love is listening to music while driving. If cars didn't have stereos I'd bring a portable one.

 

I had the rebooting problem about once a week for the first six months of ownership of my Gen 4 4T with JBL. After a discussion with Toyota, the dealer reflashed the firmware about three weeks ago and so far so good. The details on the work order follows:

TSB 0103-16
Old software version 01017D
New software version 010182

Lou

 

I've been having this reboot problem as well with a 2017 Prius V.
After it crashed a dozen or so times today over the course of a few minutes, I took it into the dealer.
They updated the firmware on my Entune unit.
Since the problem is fairly random (crashes when playing off USB on my iPhone, occasionally garbled Bluetooth), it's hard to know if that fixed the problem without some time passing.

 

Mine was fine for three months. I only connect my I phone via Bluetooth. I view who the incoming phone call is coming from on the screen. Only occasional answer a call from the car speaker phone. So tonight I decided to try the car voice reconnection to make a call. Amazing it actually did it (previous test it was bad). I hung up the phone and the radio came back on for a few minutes. And then it appeared to reboot and lock up the screen. Minutes later the radio came on, then off again and locked up again. I recall others saying after powering down the car was helpful. Yep it worked, no issues.

So maybe voice recognition for phone calls got this wonky. Any one else find things they do is the cause for the crash?

 

I googled up the technical service bulletin that others noted:

TSB 0103-16

And found a PDF copy on a Tacoma web site:

Radio reboots constantly | Page 5 | Tacoma World

Might be worth a read. TSB describes particular conditions.

At first glance it looked like like the update is something you could do yourself but on reading it again, It references the dealer inserting something (SST?) into the USB port.

My Entune did update automatically over the air a couple of months ago-- I will see if it shows the latest version noted in the TSB.

 

In my case, the automatic over the air update did not make the change to the latest version shown in the TSB: