Toyota Corolla is a extremely popular car in approximately every part of the world, counting Pakistan and is said to be one of the most budget friendly and feature rich sedans.
In Pakistan, nevertheless, the car market is discriminated and car brands weaken their product line’s quality to reduce the cost and eventually increase the profit on each sale.
Similar goes for Corolla, the Pakistani version does not come with international grade features and mechanism. On the latest Corolla’s Altis 1.8 and 1.6 variants, the infotainment system is so poor that the users have flooded local online forums with their complaints because of its mediocre functionality.
A few are also criticizing the substandard cameras positioned in front and at the rear of the car built to make the driving experience more contented and easy. Here’s what one of the owners had to say about their Altis;
“Dear Indus Motor Company. The infotainment unit in Altis 1.8 and Altis 1.6 facelift are not up to mark and should be recalled immediately.
They are a blot on the face of such a nice car.
In 1.8 variants, the player despite updates installed by the vendor still freezes a lot and lags. Plus the quality of front and the rear camera is also substandard as the display is full of waves and distortion and night view is very bad.
All we want is a recall this unit and restore it with some latest model whose hardware is capable enough to run the latest version of android with sufficient ram.”
It is relevant to mention here that some are also in conflict that unit in the pre-facelift Corolla was much better regardless of running on older version of Android OS.
Another Toyota owner said;
“Agreed, I’ve the Grande FL head unit.
The HU is poor and the hardware used in it is outdated, it is running an extremely old android OS (4.4.2) and the processor used is a few years old as well (ARM Cortex-A7) with 1GB RAM (usable RAM is 833MB).
HU lags and hangs on Google maps.
Has issues with Bluetooth and would randomly stop playing music after 20-30min and would only work after turning Bluetooth on and off.
When the device is lagging, turning volume up/down from steering can take up to 30-40 seconds to take effect.
Since, it has a very old android OS, a lot of apps are not compatible with the HU.
Even their vendor admits, it is a slow device so we have to deal with it and in one instance said, these issues are in Civic turbo as well (same vendor) like that justifies the issues in grande’s HU.
I hope someone from IMC is reading this and gets the issues resolved because it looks like a dated hardware issue.”
Some people even send complains to Toyota Headquarter in Japan, which they headed back to IMC. Consumers are condemning IMC insistently and demanding to recall the cars with the new head unit and fix it.
Optimistically, Toyota will recall all the defective cars and fixes this issue because a Corolla Altis does not come cheap; the class of its features should justify its cost and has to no less than come close to the international variants.
