Featured Toyota Wants To Upgrade Your Old Car Instead Of Selling You A New One

Reflecting on my own experience, if the 2017 version of TSSP had not been so bad, I might not have been captured by my 2019 Tesla Model 3. That was my third Prius, one of two new Prius that I’d bought.

Now just idle speculation after two BMW i3-REx and 183,000 miles in the Model 3. A shame to lose +3,000 lbs of Prius due to weak control software. I bear no animosity to Toyota but a road not taken.

Bob Wilson

 

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At $300 just for a map software update, how much is this really going to bring in? And the memory stick the dealer had was corrupted so it took weeks before I had a working updated car. So how much training and stocking will enable this capability?

 

This is coming from the same country that replaces whole engines around 50K miles that gets shipped here for a second life.

This just goes to show you how far out of hand new car prices has gotten.

YMMV

 

do they keep their cars longer in Japan?

 

They put on less miles; since they have a pretty decent public transportation system.

 

In Japan you have to be wealthy or a farmer to keep an old car legally on the road.

their vehicles are generally in much better condition than ours

 

Yep; we've seem to have forgotten that driving is a privilege NOT a right.

 

No, it's the opposite. They have what you might recognise as excise taxes on cars, and they go up every year to encourage people to buy newer, cleaner-running cars and help prop up their car manufacturing industry.

If you see somebody driving a 20 year old car in Japan, know that they are paying through the nose to cling to that classic.

 

This is mostly so they can have tracking and data gathering on the older simpler cars that didn't have it.

 

I’ve basically resigned myself to the fact that because deer and bear are continuously attacking my cars, I have to keep ancient easy to keep running after getting rammed old vehicles on the road indefinitely.

without a hitch and a cow catcher these newer non-repairable cars are simply a no go.

and the above is before we get into stupid pointless tracking bs, that wastes money and reduces safety.

 

For the most part, this is two separate systems they've bundled together.

The original part of the system applies to new cars and was started about three years ago. For quick background for those that don't work on their own cars or haven't worked on newer cars like the gen4s and gen5s, a key difference between trim levels in modern cars is their various wiring harnesses. Gone are the days where all trims shared a single harness and the lower trims had a bunch of empty connectors. And it's the electronics that are the real differences between trims these days. So it's basically impossible today to add a system from an upper trim to a lower trim without a ton of work.

This is what Toyota started changing a few years ago in Japan. For an extra fee on a new car, you could basically get the wiring harness from the top trim in your lower trim. This would make it feasible to add options from the upper trims at a later date. Want the Panoramic View Monitor system(360 cameras) a few years down the road? Now you can do it. Advanced Park(auto parking)? Same thing.

This is the one I basically did myself a few months ago: プリウス(2023～)(TOYOTA)のカスタム 後付けToyota Safety Sense機能拡張｜TOYOTA/LEXUS UPGRADE FACTORY
By installing front side radar sensors(my car already had the wiring), I was able to add Front Cross Traffic Alert and Lane Change Assist.


The newer, second half of the program applies to older cars. It's basically just a centralized collection of the upgrades and replacement parts Toyota already had in their system. Look at the earlier gen Priuses and you'll see what I mean. Gen3? Only option is a leather wrapped steering wheel replacement. Same for the Prius v. Gen4? Steering wheel, different wheel covers, 1500W inverter, some glue-on fins for the underbody to supposedly help with cleaner airflow. Prius c got the steering wheel and wheel covers. Not exactly earth-shaking stuff.


Just remember that the key for modern cars is the wiring harnesses. That's what Toyota is changing in Japan and would have to change here to bring a program like this over. Honestly, it's why I bought a Limited with the Advanced Tech package. I knew the only way to get those options was to buy it that way from the start. But wouldn't it be nice to buy an LE with a maxed out wiring harness and then add only the high end options you really want? Panoramic View with cloth seats and 17" wheels? Being able to buy an XLE without the glass roof and still get the Advanced Tech package?

 

Don't they also require expensive inspections at specific age checkpoints? Expensive enough that it significantly encourages used cars to instead be sold for shipment to foreign markets.

 

I don't know about an inspection regime, but it wouldn't surprise me because they are very committed to the philosophy of frequent replacement with domestically-produced cars.

 

I wonder if that would include safety feature updates. In my experience. TSS experiences start as poor and get better as they refine software. Radar cruise on my 2026 Camry is much better than my 2017 Prius, for instance/ As Toyota is aiming toward self driving, they have introduced features that need refinement. Lane Keep Assist, Radar Cruise braking needs to be programmed for efficient hybrid driving. Speed sign detection needs expansion on signs recognized and adjusted for longer timeouts to match real world sign placement.

 

Yes/No/It depends

What the upgrades do is add new hardware. So if a TSS subsystem needs a particular piece of hardware that your car doesn't presently have, then you can add the subsystem when you add the hardware. In my case, adding the front side radar sensors automatically enabled the Front Cross Traffic Alert subsystem.

But what the upgrades won't/can't do is improve an existing subsystem. You're not going to be able to go from TSS 3.0 to TSS 4.0. The radar cruise in your '26 Camry uses totally different hardware/software than your '17 Prius did. And we're talking core hardware/software that can't be upgraded. The best you can hope for there is limited software/firmware upgrades for the existing hardware. And that would be handled by over the air(OTA) updates or recalls. Think very mild improvements, not generational leaps.

So the "it depends" category would be systems not originally installed on your car that got mild software updates over the intervening years. In that rare case, the newly installed version would be better than what would've been installed back at purchase. But the thing is that a mostly identical car purchased with that system back then would have gotten the same updates over the intervening years. So there was no benefit to waiting other than not spending the money for the system back at original purchase. If any of that makes sense. It's one of those situations that's better explained using a whiteboard instead of a text paragraph.