Do you REALLLY think anyone knows they are distracted? You MIGHT THINK you aren't but that's your subjective opinion. Toyota is taking the safe and purudent approach which is probably heavily tempered by their lawyer's opinion. You show me a method to limit NAV or Phone interaction to only the passengers and I'll accept your argument. But I am not aware of any way to do that short of putting ALL the controls in the back seat right armrest perhaps.

I think you can downgrade by disconnecting the battery for a few minutes. You do not lose your phonebook, only your radio presets.

Assuming that you have the 5.1 Nav DVD, of course.

I believe the firmware is read off the DVD each time a DVD is removed and replaced regardless of level so if you had a 6.1 DVD, removed it and inserted a 5.1 DVD the 5.1 firmware would replace(downgrade) the 6.1 firmware.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. If your car came with the 6.1 version (and thus has the 6.1 firmware), it won't reload the firmware from the DVD when you put in the 5.1 DVD. It appears to check the DVD when it is inserted to see what version it is. The only way that we know of to force it to re-load the firmware from the DVD is to disconnect the aux 12V battery in the trunk for a few minutes while you have the 5.1 DVD in the nav system. When it loses power, this forces the system to load the firmware from the DVD even if the version on the DVD is older than what it currently has internally.

If you have 5.1 firmware, and you put the 6.1 DVD in, it WILL load the new firmware off the DVD, since it recognizes that it is a newer version.

The system already knows if someone's sitting in the passenger side, so in theory it's 1/2way there. It now only needs to know if the person inputting info is the passenger or not.


Why dont you put your wife's phone number in the speed dial? That's accessible whether you're moving or not.

If you already know the address, you can input it using voice recognition. it's accurate 99% of the time in my case. It messes up when I say "Redmond" and it thinks I say "Renton", but i just simply correct it. Besides, wouldn't you want to be stopped anyway when inputting addresses? I know in my previous car where I could input addresses while moving, I would end up passing several key intersections because i was driving "blindly" while inputting an address, only to have the NAV keep recalculating until I got on a street that was part of the route.

Again, I too miss the ability to input info while in motion. I'm simply saying that you don't necessary lose that ability with 6.1 -- you simply have to use the voice recognition option.

Isn't there reload inside service menu, I wonder if that wouldn't force firmware update ? I think service menu is still accesible under 6.1, isn't it?

The problem is that the service menu that allows you to reload the firmware is the one that is no longer accessible on the 6.1 version (at least we don't yet know how to access it). There is a service menu that can be accessed by pressing the info button and turning the lights on and off several times, but there doesn't seem to be any firmware-related items in that menu.

Wow, over $1000 (around $1025 possibly a universal DVD NAV one) for the DVD NAV disk (oh well, I am glad I do not have to pay for it, because I would not even bother) .... ok, today I went to toyota dealership as I was asked to have a technician diagnose if I had the issue so I could get the new DVD NAV map under TSB EL012-06 for my 2006 Sienna and indeed I will get one in a week possibly after ThanksGiving and hope it will be ver. 06.1 or later...

Picked up my new TCH in Toronto on Friday (November 17), it came complete or almost complete with navigation. The Navigation option in Canada is dealer installed, two parts, a connector and a cable that connects to the microphone are backordered and are not scheduled to arrive until next February!! The result is at the moment I do not have navigation or Bluetooth voice recognition.

Anyway I have checked the navigation disk, these are the part numbers:-

86271-53021

464210-0791

Data version 06.1

The Technical Service Bulletin EL012 - 06 shows part number 5-464210-092 so I'm not sure whether I have a later version or I need to upgrade.

Regarding the performance of the navigation system I'm so far quite disappointed, it is not nearly as good as my GPS PDA with TomTom software installed! Yesterday for example it advised me to ""exit highway left" when the exit to the highway was on the right! This misdirection has happened several times in the two days I have been using it. For $2,700 (the Canadian price for navigation) you would think it would be better not worse than my $400 PDA!

Sooty, it would be nice if you include in your location in your profile.