I currently have a 2001 LS 430. It came without the NAV system option. Picture attached.

I am wondering if I can replace with the factory NAV system for the same year and make.

 

Uh there is no way that's factory since I see the UL only air suspension control and rear AC controls switch in your picture. Someone already must have switched to a non nav unit.

EDIT: Holy crap I never have seen anything like that, do you have more pictures of the rest of the car? What country are you located in? Was the car a custom ordered one? You selling it? That's insane, I never thought something like a non screen UL exists and if it's real that would be my personal "unicorn" since I hate screens in cars.

 

Hawaii UL cars didn't come with navigation, think about it how useful would the nav maps be in Hawaii haha!

 

I was about to say. Hawaii and I believe Canada did not get the Nav in their Ultra Luxury models. I'd say I'm a bit envious of that.


The Mark Lev Amp in my UL kicked the bucket, led me to bypassing the system altogether in favor of a single-din radio in place of the CD changer and a new 3rd party Amplifier. Needless to say I miss my steering wheel controls.

 

That's amazing honestly, I always thought the higher trims forced the screen no matter where you have the car.

 

You'd be surprise....

 

No way to get the factory nav screen/system to work unless you rewire the whole car and add/change all the associated electronics. My 01 has nav but the car is originally from the mainland and was trying to change to the non nav with the consensus being theres no reasonable way to do it.

 

I would guess that it IS possible to install Nav in your car but will be incredibly difficult.

Check the various harnesses behind your panel - if you're lucky, you should be able to plug most of them into a nav unit. Otherwise, you're going to have to figure out the pins required by the nav unit, and wire up new harnesses on your end. The trunk nav DVD unit is probably not in your car already, and if the wires aren't pre-run, you are going to have to strip the car and run the wires yourself, which involves tying into the speed sensors, GPS antenna, audio system, and other systems.

Given that your ML system has analog controls for fader/balance/bass/mid/treble, and nav means these functions along with AC are integrated into the touchscreen, you will likely need a new amp and associated new wiring. If you're lucky and Lexus deployed the same wiring bundles for all trims, then the wires may already be running through the car and all you need is to remap some harnesses on either end.

In Techstream, does your car show 28 ECUs? If not, and the missing ones are related to AC/Nav/audio, this will be an extremely difficult project as you'll need to acquire the correct ECUs and rewire everything.

My 2002 Canadian Ultra Luxury comes with Nav, and the Nav allows you to switch between Canada and 9 different US slices. Don't recall if Hawaii was one of the slices but would guess not. Lexus made different LS430s for Hawaii, US, Canada, Australia, Europe, GCC countries, and Japan, so if you venture outside the US, you'll see some configurations rare to US/Canada.

 

My advice is to use a large sized cell phone, a good, large screen cell phone mount, and employ a BT/FM unit to access the audio system.. Sometimes there are models that have a mount with transmitter built in.

Lot to chose from on Amazon.....

The OEM nav is not ideal and the update disks are ridiculously priced.

I employ a separate mount (using the font tray 12v receptacle) with a separate BT to FM transmitter product plugged into the 12v receptacle in the arm rest. Then, whatever map/nav app on your phone (I use Waze) and your favorite music app (like Pandora) transmitting to an open FM frequency.

Works extremely well, inexpensive to acquire, and if you don’t like it you have not invested a ton of money or time.