Coastal Electronic Technologies

I know the folks at Coastal have had some bad press lately but I thought I would counter with my own good experience concerning a major problem I had with the navigation system in my 04 Prius. You can see the sad history of my brush with totally incompetent, possibly fraudulent, service from my local dealer - Stafford Toyota in Northern Virginia - under a previous post titled "Trashed Navigation Computer" in this forum.

I had attempted to put Coastal's Navigation Enhancement Kit on my car and blew a fuse in the process (this is a $4000.00 story - refer to the previous post mentioned above) so I called Coastal and left a message for them to offer some advice on how to deal with the problems because I guessed that they know more about hacking the Prius computers than anyone. We played telephone tag for a while but finally Kelly called me at home on a Saturday. She offered to put me on-line with a technician during the working week and also offered to refund my money on the Kit if I returned it to them. Kelly was very helpful and, along with some excellent advice from Forum members, I solved the problem before I needed to talk to Coastal's technician. However, Kelly's prompt reply and caring attitude really helped with this problem.

I decided not to install the Kit again and, also, didn't return it to Coastal putting the cost down to experience since the "failure" of the navigation system was nothing to do with their product. So, if anyone got this far, I have a new Navigation Enhancement Kit - at no cost - to the first person who sends me their mailing address and the answer to the question, "What does the Latin word Prius mean in English?" (tough eh?) to my Gmail account - [email protected]

 

Jim O'Sullivan of Naugatuck, CT was first in line. Thanks Jim.