Canadian Option Packages

I encourage you to write to Toyota Canada, expressing your unhappiness with this bad decision they made. When I wrote to Toyota Canada, the mealymouthed response that I got was that their surveying indicated that Canadians didn't want that option.

My reply was that I was surprised. I would have thought that Canadians who paid the comparable (currency adjusted) price for the top options package would want the same options included. Alternatively they would want to pay a lower price if they were going to receive fewer features.

I'm hoping that Toyota Canada will reverse this bad decision for 2005, although I have no reason to believe they will repair the adverse effect on Canadian consumers for 2004.

As much as I like my car, I have had to advise people to defer any purchase they contemplate until Toyota Canada is willing to provide the same car at a comparable price.

If I were making the purchasing decision today, I would likely get myself onto a waitlist at a US dealership and do the importation into Canada.

There is a bit of a thread on this issue, starting around December 2003, on the Canada-Prius group at Yahoo.

 

same thing here in hawaii, their top package "BC" does not include the dvd nav / bluetooth. not offering dvd nav here is understandable :roll: but the bluetooth would've been nice. there was this one buyer who bought his prius in the mainland then had it shipped here simply because of the dvd nav/ bluetooth.

 

In the Canadian version of Prius, there is only one option package you can pick, not two. That includes the JBL radio upgrade, extra air bags , skid controls and others.

Toyota can not offer the Navigation as the maps availbale in Canada were not complete, there was only a few big city has the detailed maps available. It is until earlier this year a more complete version of all region of Canada is make available thanks to those GPS maping supplier.

I'm sure Toyota will make that available inthe coming year.

 

That's not much of an excuse if you ask me... The DVD nav system is software-upgradable (insert a new DVD), so they could've included the Nav system, then just issued a new DVD when the better maps became available.

I strongly doubt that they will offer any way to retrofit a genuine Toyota nav system into the car ("Oh, you want Nav? Buy a new car!").

Dave.

 

There seem to be a lot of odd marketing decisions around the world. Here is Australia, we get NAV, but not voice reconition (must be the accent), and the Brits don't get smartkey. I wonder who makes these decisions. I do believe that some of them are dictated by local government policy.

 

This is not accurate. There are plenty of GPS maps available for Canada. When I wrote to Toyota Canada I posed the phony issues of "voice only available in English, not French" and "not enought mapping available". Toyotal Canada did not give either of these as a reason, presumably because a Lexus model is being delivered with NAV.

Firthermore, I suggest that the vast majority of Prius purchasers live and drive in the major urban areas. There aren't a lot of Prius drivers in Iqaluit.

Toyota Canada's orly reason for not providing Canadian purchasers with NAV/voice/Bluetooth was that their surveying indicated that Canadians didn't want it. Hooey. I say it was better profit to charge Canadians the same price as Americans were charged and give Canadians an inferior product.