Local Toyota dealer service departments

I will certainly not lump all dealers or their service departments together, I can say that my dealership has made an improvement.

When I took delivery, one of the things that they did was walk me around the dealer to meet all his 'buddies'. Of course, it passed the time while my car was being prepped. When I got to the service area that day, I asked a few specific questions, and as expected (this was June of last year, and the 2010s were just starting to trickle in during the prior two weeks), they did not know much about the car, and promised to get back to me.

To my surprise, the very next day, I received a call from their head of service, and he answered all my questions. Fast forward about 40 days, when it was time for me to get my first oil change, and I reported at that time (Mid August 2009) my finding with 3 issues that I had with the car. The braking sensation, which has ultimately been recalled for this ABS ECU update, which my car is getting today was one of them. I tried to describe it, and even made the first post on the blog about it, last June. (The other two issues were one with my Navi system occasionally not seeing the disc, and a complaint that gentle braking was not releasing the cruise control).

At that time, they did not seem to believe my description of the braking problems, and I felt that they dismissed it. They looked at the car twice since then, and could not recreate it. Last night, I finally brought my car in to get the ABS ECU Update, and then took them for a ride, to recreate the cruise/braking issue. Finally, they seemed to take me a little more serious, and were able to recreate this issue.

Also, as to the issue with my NAV, where it would sometimes, and for no apparent reason, suddenly tell me to "Insert the DVD", it seems as though they are taking me at my word, and are finally replacing this unit. Hopefully this will resolve it. The last time they looked at it, all they did was eject the DVD, and tell me that they cleaned fingerprints off of it. (They were not mine, as I did not even know how to eject the disc until recently).
So yes, I would say that the dealers are being a little more cautious right now.

 

Is that a problem? My unit seems to do that about twice a week, but within seconds it starts navigating normally. What is the downside to ignoring this?

 

The reason that I find it problematic is that in addition to temporarily losing all my GPS ability, I also lose radio, phone (via built in bluetooth), SAT, etc, until it resolves itself. According to the folks at Toyota, this 'should' never happen. Also, each time it seems to take several miles for it to reset. Then, I am without GPS data for another 10 minutes or so, before everything syncs up. Finally, it has lost many of my preferences (including which region to default to, in my case 6)(

If it does, you would probably want to eject the disc, and make sure it's clean. If that does not solve it, you would be better off having it looked at while under warranty than waiting for it tor it to run out.

Other than the hassle, I do not think that there is much downside to ignoring. But I figured I paid $32,000 for this car, the GPS better be as close to technically perfect as possible. (or I would have bought a top of the line after market unit for a fraction of the cost).