Stereo keeps rebooting?

Update to my Post 20,
A couple of weeks ago, I was going to "bite-the-bullet" and pay my local Toyota dealer $165 in hopes of diagnosing the issue while I was in for routine service, but they were already backed up and wouldn't be able to do that work that day; so I declined. BTW, the worst intermittent head unit restarting problem was 6x within an hour's worth of driving; then it stayed OK for another 3 hours. The last most recent times it would restart ~3x within 14 miles of driving; with the prior day it was ok for 3.5 hours of steady driving only to restart ~3x during the last 45 minutes before reaching my destination. Often times, there's something on the news or talk shows I really wanted to hear or I'm relying on the navigation to tell me where my next turn is only to have the head unit restarting (argh!).

Today, 6/6/24, I went to a locally recommended car audio shop (it's nice to have friends & acquaintances with personal experience/contacts in this subject) and had a SONY XAV-AX4000, along with various other install parts (facia bezel, wiring harness(es), and interface converter box) installed for ~$1000 ($280 install labor + $720 parts+sales tax). As I saw a Toyota replacement head unit would have been ~$5K+, before sales tax of ~9%, I was prepared & happy to spend $1K. My OEM head unit would be restarting whenever it wanted to from 3 to 6 times. Sometimes whatever audio was originally playing would come back. Sometimes the audio, upon restart, was off and I'd have to choose audio again (radio or iPhone, usually). I think if I was using navigation, I might also have to re-choose my destination, but unsure about that as I started relying upon my stand-alone Garmin GPS dash unit.

My local car audio store (actually ~25 miles away) recommended the Sony, even though they also sold and had in-stock Kenwood and Alpine brands at higher prices. I like the Apple "CarPlay" and voice command capability, but mainly hope I won't ever have the random restart issues anymore. After reading various advice on the internet and talking to the car audio owner, apparently, these Toyota head-units often fail. It wasn't the fuse, wires/connectors or anything else (although each Tacoma-owner's situation could be unique/different from mine). Apparently, I'm far from the 1st Tacoma owner he's had with this problem.

So far, I'm happy with this Sony head-unit as it didn't restart during the hour or so drive home as I stopped along the way to do errands. I'll just have hope it stays reliable as time goes on. BTW, I can easily live without a CD player as these head units don't have that feature/mechanism. This head unit or the additional accessories also included replacing the stock USB-A/B with the currently used USB-C, too, which I'll use for somewhat faster charging as the existing Toyota wireless charge pad has never worked when I have a case on my cell phones. Apparently, the SONY works fine using a Bluetooth connection and doesn't even use the USB to connect a phone (although I've not even read the manual/documentation; only going by what the car audio guy told me).

Toyota, $5K+ for an unreliable radio/head unit with zero Entune support is unacceptable. I was happier with my bare-bones 2015 Scion FRS stock Pioneer audio w/o navigation as it's always worked (cross my fingers as I type this).

I'll have my Garmin GPS with me for now as a backup piece of hardware as I've not used my iPhone to navigate much but can see phasing that out of this 2017 Tacoma or using it in the '15 Scion FRS.

 

That's a nice upgrade.