I have a June MFG date on my TCH and therefore, have the v5.1 DVD. I'll spare you the horror stories regarding my conversations with the dealer and Toyota, needless to say Hoffman Toyota of Simsbury CT doesn't care much about their customers.

Any way in the last exchange, the dealer told me that corporate Toyota had told him that V6.1 is a firmware update only, with NO NEW MAPS at all. It was just released to fix bugs with some Prius's. I told the dealer that if it just a release to fix bugs, why charge $250? He, of course had no answer.

Can someone confirm whether v6.1 is only FIRMWARE upgrade only? Obviously you will have had to see both versions, so there may not be many of you who know, but any info would be appreciated.

I can't answer your question, but I can tell you that the generally accepted practice when it comes to software releases in general is that bug fixes get incremented in the 10ths or 100ths column only. Not in the ones column.

So a bug fix for 5.1 might be 5.11 or 5.2.

6.1 would normally NOT be a bug fix, it would be a major release.

I think Toyota has been using the first digit as the year in which DVD was first introduced. The original Gen2 2004 Prius' were produced in late '03 and the NAV software was 3.1. They issued a free upgrade to fix a database issue in 2004 and the upgrade was ver 4.1. If memory serves me.
Camry and Camry HV produced in the first half of 2006 still had the previous year's NAV software ver 5.1. The newest rev and the first one actually issued in 2006 is ver 6.1 and started showing up in cars produced in the 3rd quarter 2006.
I've owned a Prius, conventional Camry and Camry HV and have experience with versions 3.1, 4.1 and 5.1 and have never seen anything other than a dot one software release.

Are you missing some streets in particular, hoping new software will have them updated? Because from experience most upgrades are usually 2 step forward and one step back. In this case they got rid of system overide which is very important for me and I would rather have older maps from ver. 5.1 with overide, than new ones without it. I believe the 6.1 maps are updated a little but I was wondering if you would ever notice the difference. As a matter of fact I have yet to find any error or discrepancy in the 5.1 maps in the areas where I drove so far in the last 5 months. In theory, if the ver 6.1 has mostly bugs fixes, as your dealer told you, then your map upgrade should be free under 3 yr warranty, shouldn't it be? Anyway, the only way I would use 6.1 DVD is if I could burn my own copy with 5.1 firmware and 6.1 maps data.

Well, my TCH came with the 5.1, and I have recently been using the 6.1, and I can tell you, that at least where I live, Tucson, AZ, there are some significant map differences. Several major new roads are now included, and this makes the upgrade to 6.1 important to me, however, there are still some (even newer) roads that do not show. Tucson is growing rapidly, and I can't imagine that any map company can keep on top of them all. With that said, I would not have upgraded to 6.1, if I had lost the "override" capability. Several Toyoya/Lexus owners have created "hybrid" copies of the DVD, retaining the override capability of 5.1, and the newer maps of 6.1. See http://www.clublexus.com/forums/show...&postcount=124