Had a pleasant experience with Toyota until I realized that the main screen has no option for English. Strange because I researched this and Japan (and all countries) include this, but Taiwan explicitly hard-disabled the OPTION to choose English.
…Why? What is the point? My friends Toyota from several years ago in Taiwan can switch to English just fine. Why hard-code it to disable? I mean seriously, just an OPTION being there being taken away makes me feel truly salty.
They went out of their way to disable the option to change it. I just don’t get it. Laptops, phones, even cheapo devices all support the option of English if it was already coded in. Not even Toyota did this to their own products until sometime in the past year.
On a side note, I also discovered their new cars are filled with only 5 percent gas.
These are just small things but something truly urks me about how Taiwan’s Toyota handles this.
It’s because foreigners aren’t allowed to drive in Taiwan anyway, of course!
The only reasons I can think about are either a) legal reasons (maybe some law in Taiwan states that driving assistance systems need to be in Chinese and they want to make sure someone doesn’t accidentally change the language settings and later blames them for not understanding a warning message) or b) they want to make it more difficult for cars originally sold in Taiwan to be exported to other markets.
I have yet to encounter a manufacturer that pre-fills their new cars…
That reads like an AI response that’s just making up some information…
The “old” Carmax system in my Corolla Cross does support English. Maps are in Chinese, but everything else can be changed into English.
What’s that even supposed to mean?!? There’s no way hardware is being tailored for traditional Chinese characters.
Again, the older Carmax hardware handles English fine. So no - it’s not a technical hardware limitation or a storage limitation (compared to the GBs of data a map uses, English translations use a couple of KB).
That really must be a deliberate decision - the whole argument in the line of “they’re using LCDs and processors that are optimized for traditional Chinese” sounds like complete bulls**t reasoning to me - probably the AI is picking up what a used car salesman would be telling you…
Interestingly, the Easy Card I use (and the machine interface supporting it) is fully multilingual, as is the youbike system (the buses in Taipei admittedly less so). As is High Speed Rail. As is Taiwan Rail.
So: Toyota in Taiwan is more monolingually parochial than (most of) the wider awesome public transit system available to me in Taiwan. It seems like a no brainer to me.
I know the 2022 RAV4 supported full English menus. It must be a deliberate reason. Foreigners do buy cars in Taiwan though. It’s not like it’s take a lot of effort since the hard parts support English (HUD behind steering wheel, maps).
As for memory savings, this isn’t a 1980 IBM. it’s a negligible amount to localize the menus, perhaps not much more than this thread! Remember they are just 1 or 2 words per button. I’m a programmer, so I call BS on this one
We didn’t consider one thing. Is it possible the Toyota decision maker is just an a-hole? I read some nasty things when I was looking into how much Toyota staff gets paid. Even for Taiwan rates, it’s… disturbingly low.
I read some nasty things when I was looking into how much Toyota staff gets paid. Even for Taiwan rates, it’s… disturbingly low.