kudzurunne

I've got a 2013 RX-350 with the standard audio system. 114,000 miles. I purchased it at Lexus of Memphis but have had all service (every 5K, as per owners manual) performed by Belk Ford Toyota here in Oxford, MS. The car has been absolutely trouble-free since the beginning. No complaints! But several months ago, during 110K service, I purchased a navigation update and the folks at Belk, after charging me the $165 or so, said, "Unfortunately, we're unable to install it. You'll need to drive up to Lexus to get this done." They handed me a green-and-black pamphlet: Denso Navigation Map Update. "Give this to Lexus," they said.

So I did that earlier this week. Drove the 75 miles up to the dealer. I was told on the phone that the install would take 2 hours and that I would be charged $65 (half an hour of labor). All good so far.

The update took two and a half hours, but I was fine with that. They handed me the keys, I drove out of the lot, parked by the side of the road next to the dealership, and inputted my next destination--a chiro in Germantown--into the nav. There was no sound. No familiar "boing." Nothing.

I turned right around and drove back into the service area. A technician came out and quickly discovered that nav sound wasn't the only thing missing; the entire sound system--radio, CDs, etc.--was down. They took the car for what I assumed would be a quick switch-on-the-thing-you-forgot-to-switch-on revisit to the guy who did the update. I waited for another half hour in the lounge, then went and found my service rep and told him I had a chiro appointment. "We thought it would be a quick fix," he said. "It's not a quick fix."

The Lexus of Memphis (LOM) folks were great about ferrying me to my chiro and back while they worked on the problem. When I got back, right at closing time, my service rep and the head of service were waiting for me. "Apparently your amp is blown," they said, "or overheated."

"But I was listening to the stereo the whole way up from Oxford," I said. "I turned it off sixty seconds before pulling into the lot."

"These things happen," they said. "It has nothing to do with the nav update. That's just pure coincidence."

The head of service said, "We checked online to see if this was a known issue. If five out of ten vehicles blew out an amp during a nav update, we'd know it was an issue and WE would be telling Lexus, 'You need to send us a free amp.' But it's not a known issue."

Long story short: They sent me home, in my car, with no sound and with apologies. A new amplifier, they said, cost $337. They would be happy to order one for me, would install it at no charge, and would pick up and deliver my car to Oxford--they've got an employee who lives here--and would give me a loaner while the install was happening.

How would you feel? The amplifier just "happened" to overheat and blow out at exactly the same moment as the nav update was taking place, but they insisted that it wasn't their fault, wasn't a "known issue," was pure coincidence--"one of those things," they said several times--and was therefore in my court. Except they were willing to do the install for free ("And it takes some time," they told me), which suggests that they knew they were at least partly responsible. "Maybe it'll start working when the amp cools down," they suggested several times. Which suggested to ME that they didn't actually know what the heck was going on. The amplifier had stopped working, in other words, but they couldn't actually say for sure that it had blown out. It just wasn't working.

I drove home. The sound continued to refuse to work. I spend an hour online, trying to suss out--here and elsewhere--some indication that there could be a connection between a nav update and sudden failure of the sound system. Nothing showed up. Apparently the Lexus service folks were right.

I went out in the morning and started up my car, hopeful. Still no sound. Nothing. Dead as a doornail. I noticed a red screwdriver, not mine, in the back seat. Apparently the Lexus service guy, prying around to check out the amp, which is behind the back seat, had forgotten his tool.

At 1 PM I got in the car and started things up. And the sound system was working. Just like that.

What happened? Why this miraculous resurrection?

The first thing I'll say is that I'm 100% convinced that the "failure" of the amplifier--really, the temporary failure of the entire sound system--WAS, in fact, absolutely a function of the nav update. This wasn't "overheating." (If it was, then the system would have worked the morning after the update.) This wasn't a hardware problem. It certainly wasn't a "coincidence" for which I should have been charged the cost of a new amp. This was, I'm almost positive, a software problem, of a particular sort.

Remember Y2K? Remember all the worry that computers around the world would suddenly freeze one second after midnight on January 1, 2000? The idea was that computers had been programmed in such a way that the rollover to 2000 was indistinguishable from a rollover back to 1000 AD, and that masses of computers would suddenly stop working because their software would be paralyzed by an internal contradiction between those two dates. They'd be skewered by software that was simultaneously telling them "move ahead" and "go back a thousand years."

I believe that some weird variant of that software timing glitch could explain this. My hunch is that the nav update contained within it some timing-element that basically--and mistakenly--said to the sound system, "You don't exist." My hunch is that that glitch kept the sound system off until 12 noon on the day after the install, at which point the timing glitch went away.

My evidence for this hunch is something I haven't yet told you, something that roused my suspicions during the whole long silent drive home. Understand that the way the "amplifier" problem presented itself, on the screen of the nav unit, was that when you pressed the button to turn the sound system on, no volume numbers showed up. And if you clicked the "sound" icon on the lower right side, which takes you to the screen where you adjust the sound balance and tone controls, all that stuff was greyed-out. You could see it all, but it wasn't operative. And if you clicked to the next screen where the Digital Sound Processor (DSP) setting can be accessed, and you clicked on DSP, nothing came up.

The fact that all this stuff wasn't working made clear to me that the problem wasn't the amp--unless a blown amp would, of its own accord, render all the sound system controls inoperative. That's possible, but it didn't seem likely to me. At the very least, it raised the possibility, in my view, that a "blown" or "overheated" amp might not be the problem.

So that's my story. I'm quite sure in retrospect that the Lexus service folks had absolutely no idea what was going on. They were trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to preserve their customer reputation, but they were also shading things in a direction that would do the least damage to their bottom line.

I've gone on at such length because I want to make sure that no other Lexus owner confronted with the same bizarre situation is told "It's not a known issue." There IS an issue. I want to put it on the table.

Your thoughts?

salimshah

Not trying to defend the service department, but giving you another perspective.

Dealership makes money on repair charges and parts markup. As you give them the final payment, see if they charge you less or more than the time they spent on it. The next thing to consider would be did they charge you for the 'expected' time or the actual time. It should be the 'expected' time as there can be incompetency or once in a while things do go haywire.

Next thing to consider would be the attitude and dealing. Did they behave like a typical repair shop or went above and beyond to take care of you. Please do not cloud your thinking by .... but it was their fault.

Tool left behind:
There should have been a predelivery clean up .. typically wash and vacuum. That was not done. I always ask these to be not done for my vehicles. If delivery was done in a hurry or the vehicle 'looks' prepped .. one party assumes that it has been done.

Trouble shooting:
Current repair process is module replacement. So a tech would trouble shoot and the steps would be ...
Look for input coming to the Amp --> Pass
Check voltage present at the Amp --> Pass
Check Mute is off --> Pass

Still no sound --> replace Amp

Now they have to deal with who caused the problem and who should pay for the cost & labor for the Amp replacement,
Tech --> He claims he has done nothing wrong and followed the process.
Update process -> Check with Lexus and other dealers if they encountered it.
Customer -> It was working when I brought the vehicle
Net --> Inform customer they will absorb the labor, the cost fo the part to be decided by Lexus corp and the customer.

Y2k problem: When 2 digits were being used to store 99 (implied 1999) and you get to 2000, the 2 digits will be '00'. Humans can infer the the implied prefix is 20 and 00 is 1 year After. The computer program would check stop with overflow fault as the computer does 00 - 99. {Early engineers/programmers were not idiots they simply wanted to minimize resources needed at that time.)

Speculating on what could be going on:
There was an update happened overnight.
Forced reset for your vehicle happened once Lexus service department logged an issue.
Vehicle reset ... many of the functions get reset by turning off the vehicle [and at times by disconnecting the battery]. It may take few cycles as the thing gets cleared from one component to another.
I am sure there are more ..


Best outcome:
Since we can not pin point the root cause or the fix, lets hope the problem never reappears.

Worst outcome:
You randomly run into the loss of audio.

Lets hope you encounter the best outcome.

Salim

kudzurunne

Thanks for your great reply, Salim. Your "speculating on what could be going on" make sense. It seems as though I've encountered the best outcome! (Or at least that's the short-term result.) The sound system has been working perfectly for the past few days, ever since coming back on line.

The dealership certainly made every possible attempt to ferry me to and from my chiro appointment; in that respect, they were exemplary. They charged me $65 for the update labor, exactly what they said they would. (The 2 1/2 hours time that the update actually took didn't require constant attention from the service department; that's merely the time it took to download the nav update.)

They definitely blurred the line in the matter of what was actually wrong--because, in retrospect, they just didn't know what was wrong, and it's hard for the licensed service department of a top-end luxury car dealership in a major metro area to say, "We just don't know what's wrong." They did insist, however, that whatever WAS wrong had nothing to do with the nav update. They talked about the amplifier "overheating," but they never suggested why that would suddenly decide to happen at some point right after they took possession of the car.

They made a series of judgment calls, in other words--and I think you've done a great job of clarifying, from your perspective, what those calls were. By the same token, I could easily have done what they asked (although didn't pressure) me to do, which is give them the go-ahead to order a new amplifier. I told them I wanted to wait, think through the issues, and would call them within 48 hours. They were fine with that. Within their established protocols (loaner cars, etc.), they really tried to help me. But their diagnosis was flawed--the amplifier did NOT need replacing--and it's important to point that out, too.

The point of this post is simply to be real. Even the best repair shops sometimes confront issues that they've never seen and can't explain, and customers who encounter that scenario are sometimes asked to give the go-ahead on unneeded repairs. FYI, I called both my service rep and the head of service, both of whom had given me their cards and encouraged me to check in, and I left voicemail for both to tell them that my car sound system had suddenly decided to start working again. I also ventured the Y2K theory to the head of service and encouraged him to explore the issue further.

This was the very first time since purchasing the car that I'd actually brought the car to the dealership for service; all other service, as I noted, has been performed, and well, at a local Toyota dealership. It's unfortunate when this sort of thing happens the very first time in a shop. But I'm definitely planning on bringing it back in a month or so for a comprehensive detailing. I have no rancor against the shop. Quite the reverse. But I've got a keener sense now of the sorts of anomalies that can occur when servicing a highly evolved luxury car.

Love my Lex, btw! It's a remarkable car and I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

Droid13

It sounds to me like you may have had an issue with the hard drive that contains the map data. The sound/nav system really is just a computer, and just like any computer when you turn the system on you'll see the computer's startup screens, but if the hard drive fails to respond within a timeout period the system does not become fully operational. The drives are mechanical, which means day to day use the drive works mainly within a certain part of the disk, especially in a system where a vast majority of activity is reading data. A major change, like writing in an entirely new map version will force the drive to work on new areas of the physical disk. Areas maybe never read or written to before in its life. The drive may either be cranky making read/write movements it hasn't done much of and maybe it will continue to work fine finally having loaded up, or it may be a sign that you've hit some bad or weak areas of the disk with the upgrade and issues may sneak back in the future. I haven't heard of many disk failures with this vehicle, so the drives seem to be high quality, but perfect they likely aren't.

kudzurunne

Droid:

Your explanation makes a lot of sense. Here's the thing: a day or two after I posted my most recent post on this thread, the sound system quit for a second time, for 18-24 hours. Then it magically resurrected, once again, and it's been working flawlessly ever since. How can we explain those two failures--one coinciding with the nav update and lasting roughly 20 hours, the second a few days later and lasting roughly the same length of time? One guy on Reddit suggested that the power amp was on its way out, and that I should definitely get a new one. When the sound system went down for the second time, I was initially convinced that he might be right. But it's been working flawlessly now for the past week. With every day that goes by, that explanation seems less likely.

Your explanation, on the other hand, helps explain those two dropouts--and you didn't even know that the second failure had occurred! Yes, it feels like a hard-drive-settling-in issue, and it now feels as though the nav update and whatever stress it inflicted on the hard drive has now settled in, and settled down.

Of course, a third temporary sound system failure might convinced me to rethink and perhaps raise the probability that I'm dealing with a slowly dying amp. By the same token, if no further sound system failures occur, the amp clearly was NOT the problem.

salimshah

Intermittent problems are very hard to pin down. Regrettably, one has to add on test equipment which constantly monitors the inputs and outputs of modules to determine the failing part. These days software (with its gremlins) confounds the observations. One of the failure prone hardware component is the electrolytic capacitor and they start failing with age and temperature.

Personally I am with you that it does not seem like the amplifier is bad as it keeps resurrecting itself. If you press the dealership they will most likely say the same that they can not guarantee that the problem will be solved by replacing the Amp. One ends up swapping the modules till the problem goes away or one moves on to swap the next module. Price of module and labor and NO RETURNS on electronics and parts makes the whole procedure pretty expensive. Base and extended warranties help defray the cost.

Salim

kudzurunne

The sound system is still working beautifully, without faltering. I just don't think it was the amp.