Warning for buyers

I don't want to minimize the task Toyota faces to bring state of the art product to market while maintaining the high reliability that's been Toyota's hallmark. In my opinion and experience, Toyota's software is significantly more reliable and trouble-free than anything I've ever seen from Garmin or Apple. I don't think you'd be too pleased if Toyota ever parked a disaster like Apple maps on the i-Phone 5 in your driveway. Other than marketing, the only thing Garmin owns is routing algorithms and GUI (graphical user interface).

The scope of R&D development necessary to bring a car like a Prius to market is simply staggering. The development is 'owned' by a chief engineer who could best be equated to god. The chief engineer needs to actively direct and coordinate the activities of diverse engineering assets toward common and coordinated goals. It takes consistent focused coordination on a daily basis over a five year span to yield a car.

This process takes place in Nagoya Japan. Making it work successfully means everyone needs to be speaking the same language and be routinely available for detailed face to face team coordination. Introducing a third party development asset in another country speaking a different language with a different culture would complicate the task significantly.

Nippondenso is an enormous company that has a handful of excellent engineers and lots of pedestrian ones. Like any other company, the best engineers are applied to emerging, high gross margin business units, and the pedestrian ones to existing, maintenance business units. I think it makes more sense for Toyota to turn up the fire on their existing keiretsu supplier to appoint or acquire appropriately gifted engineering assets for the navigation business unit who possess skill-sets to write working routing algorithms and develop a vibrant, interactive, and effective graphical user interface.

 

The problem is that operating the GUI on these devices is incompatible with the task of safely operating a car. I don't think that cars will ever become an open platform for 'brought-in technology' until we have cars that drive themselves. Distracted driving along with pedestrian and cyclist deaths are an epidemic in this country just with cell phones.

Certainly customers are using i-Pads in the front seats today by themselves, but if Toyota were ever complicit to facilitate the practice by providing cradles and data ports, they would be sued out of existence by the endless battery of lawyers in this country.

 

If you're referring to Entune features; the key point is that the HMI (Human-machine interface) is controlled by Toyota.

 

You can upgrade Entune yourself. Either get a usb upgrade stick or download it yourself. There is an instruction video.

After 2.1.0 upgrade, I heard the upgrades will be over-the-air. I think that means the updates are done over cell phone internet connection.

 

Thanks for the clarification!

 

See this thread.

Updating GPS | PriusChat

 

All OEM GPS units are horrible. You will find many people with a built in GPS in their car and a Garmin on the dash for window.

I also got the Model IV but without NAV and I use a 5” Garmin for Navigation.

 

We also have a Honda Odyssey with OE navigation and the unit is wonderful with great and intuitive HMI and GUI. Fast to program, calculate and reroute. (This is an Alpine-made unit). The Alpine navi is everything the Nippondenso isn't. I'm sure that the Nippondenso hardware is perfectly reliable but every part of their software implementation resembles a creaking old boiler.

 

I think you may be turning blue quickly. Intellectual property that navigation companies hold includes expertise to collate an attributed map database (from Navteq in Toyota's case) in a manner that will facilitate rapid access for route calculation and rerouting protocol. The key expertise navigation companies hold is for the routing algorithms. It takes a lot more software development engineers than hardware engineers. The R&D development for a top class navigation system costs a bloody fortune so you really need to have a significant volume base to amortize those costs over. What I'm saying is that you ideally need to have a significant footprint in consumer AND OE markets to provide the volume to achieve necessary cost/scale.

Aside from Toyota OE, the only other venue I'm aware of for Nippondenso navi is through Kenwood OE headunits in Subaru for example (which helps explain why Subaru navi sucks as well).

Once a car is on the road, the engineering development work is done and development costs have been expended. The only reasons for Toyota to reengage development for a released product is to safety net significant safety, legal, or warranty concerns.

For the sake of argument; let's assume that Toyota were to decide to 'fix' the navi firmware (despite lack of a significant safety, legal, or warranty concerns) and could justify a business case (which you couldn't). Keep in mind that what you're paying for in a map update is Navteq's significant royalties, Nippondenso's costs to compilate the data and consolidated profit from Denso and Toyota. There is no place to absorb additional development costs. By the time new code was developed and written, QC validated and deployed, we're at next generation Prius.

Sorry to advise, but the light at the end of the tunnel is the gleam in the eye of the monster. Hopefully Toyota will wake up and smell the roses in time for next generation Prius (and that should already be in the can at this stage undergoing validation testing).

 

IMO, portable navigation devices (PNDs) in 2013 are difficult to justify as standalone PRODUCTS. Navigation has migrated to a FEATURE that rides on another device such as a smartphone. If you're considering a PND as alternative, I'd suggest looking at a smartphone-based FREE navi app such as Google Maps or Waze. If you haven't looked at it, Waze is a cool community-based navi app with real-time traffic and road info including gas prices from an Israeli start-up company.

 

GM uses Denso nav for some of their units. For example, Google for site:chevrolet.com denso copyright or site:buick.com denso.

You'll notice many similarities to the nav Toyota nav systems (at least on 04 to 2011 Prius, previous gen HyCam and some Lexuses). Examples: the info and dest buttons, pressing the compass icon to toggle north/heading-up view, 3 route choices after you select the destination, the UI conventions on page 42 of http://www.chevrolet.com/content/dam/Chevrolet/northamerica/usa/nscwebsite/en/Home/Ownership/Manuals%20and%20Videos/02_pdf/2k12volt_nav.pdf and so on.

Re: Navteq, I'd be curious to see the credits/acknowledgements on '13 Prius nav systems, both the more basic one and the advanced one. I am curious to see if both TeleAtlas and/or Navteq are named. As I posted earlier, numerous Toyota nav DVDs newer than mine had BOTH of them printed on the disc.

 

Perhaps another reason to regret having bought the Chevy?

 

Who me? I don't own a Chevy and never have. My parents have owned 3 GM cars in the past (2 Chevys and 1 Olds) and one of them I got to use, the Olds.

BTW. sure Toyota's based in Toyota City (near Nagoya) but I'm not so certain that everything is as Denso-centered as you assert, at least for nav/infotainment system. (FWIW, I have taken a tour of a (the?) Toyota Tsutsumi plant and on the tour bus, they did point out to us Toyota HQ and one of their R&D buildings.) See What brand is my navigation system? | PriusChat, What brand is my navigation system? | PriusChat and What brand is my navigation system? | PriusChat.

Funny enough, one of my former coworkers (haven't talked to him in years) works for Tweddle Group (mentioned above). On his LinkedIn profile, he made a reference to Toyota Entune under his Tweddle Group experience.