I recently came back from a road trip where my car needed a boost around 7 hours from home. My two options were to keep the motor running while at the gas station on the way and deal with it later or find a parts store and replace the battery. I decided to get a new battery on route. In the past I have replaced the battery a few times with no issue. This time the infotainment system would not reboot so no GPS, or radio but the backup camera worked. On the way home the screen would flicker every 5 seconds. The next day I disconnected the negative lead from the battery a few time anywhere from 10mins to 2 hours. No difference, the system would not reboot and the flickering was gone. I did some research online and decided to remove the radio and drop it off with Danmax in Mississauga, ON Canada. They called me to back to let me know the repair will be $950CDN and I will need to replace the navigation micro sd card. Do I have any options here or do I have to go the dealer?

 

Did they tell you what exactly is wrong with it or what are they going to service in it?

 

I am going to pickup the unit tomorrow ($950CDN plus tax) and I was told to order a new memory card ($250 plus tax). When I called Lexus the memory card part# was a Toyota part number and Toyota had the better price.

I asked if it was the main board they replaced and they said no, Lexus does not sell the main board on its own which means you would have to buy a new radio. I don't know specifically what they replaced but they said they get a lot of calls on Lexus radios and apparently the software is also an issue. I did some reading and when you load a new SD card in the radio it marries itself to the radio so you cannot use the card in another radio. If the SD card boots the radio every time you start the car I can see there eventually being issues. They also recommended not loading phone contacts into the radio or streaming music.

I have owned my car for 6 years, connected and disconnected batteries a few times and never an issue with the radio/infotainment system booting up. The bluetooth and radio worked fine. I did start streaming from Tidal about two months ago but I am not sure how that would be an issue. The radio died after a battery replacement so I assume that is what killed the radio but who knows.

 

duplicate post

 

They did not share what they repaired in the radio. They did say they do not replace the main board. They repaired it in a few days, I installed it with a new memory card so I am back up and running.

 

Interesting, thanks for the update. It looks like more and more from what I’ve read, there may be NAND/IC chips that may be replaced. I suspect majority of the cost being the labour. If only we could get photos of the internals before and after a repair, we could pinpoint the faulty components.

if they could share what was repaired, it would be great to know and could help the community for DIY repairs.