Road Top Wireless CarPlay for Lexus with Small Touchpad/Joystick

This product is fantastic! I've had it for 8 months. The Carplay kit was easy to install, though it may take a bit of time if it's your first experience. I watched several YouTube videos, which made the process even easier. I really appreciate being able to switch between the Lexus and Road Top interfaces. Both Carplay and Android Auto work perfectly! I’m especially in love with the Airplay feature! Support is also 10/10

Install was not overly hard but took me about 2 hours being very slow and methodical. I could probably do it again in in 45 minutes. Unit works well and functions like it should. It took me a little to figure out the sound balancing and routing of the Bluetooth for calls. My wife is still struggling with it some. Display is great, functions great, very nice upgrade and it gave my car exactly what it was missing.

But customer service makes me give it 5 stars. Lexus in their wisdom decided against AA and ACP being native in their 2017 RX 350’s and this is an acceptable solution. The install isn’t hard but know that you must install the joystick cable and if you are going to use AA then you most likely will have some issues with BT connectivity and lagging response in the interface and choppy audio. I’m not instilling a lot of confidence in this am I? Well, if you ask Road Top for help you will receive it and it is good. I managed to work out all these issues with the unit and now I’m as happy as I could be with a unit that lays over the existing interface and is quirky from time to time. There are other units out there and they cost as much as $800 but from what I’ve seen when I listen to reviewers they have the same issues this unit does and, well, price is a consideration at that point so that’s why I bought this.

End up being more than it was worth. Did it work, yes. The sound was not as good due to tapping in though the aux port. Had mono sound and played passenger side no the driver side. I found it better to stick with the factory infotainment system.

Glunky but does add Apple play. Installation took about two hours and is semi complicated. The interaction with the existing Lexus menu is less than ideal. I have to hold the menu down to switch between Apple Play and the Lexus menu. While using Apple Play it doesn’t show the volume as you just turn it up/down. It will also display random popups while using. This morning it displayed a message “favorite teams” which looked to be from the Lexus menu while using Apple Play. Not sure why it did that. Using the joystick is now a challenge, right is now up and left is down. Very frustrating to use while moving. Lots of engine noise when using. Very noticeable when the car is quiet. Over half my calls complain about an echo sound now and I have to disable the CarPlay feature. They should engineer this so that it’s just a display for CarPlay and the audio runs through the existing Lexus audio system. It should just show the maps, visual of the audio and appointments. The Lexus audio is way better. I would look at other options prior to purchasing this.

Great product and great customer service. I used a car audio tech to have this installed. Works really well. The only concern has been that the microphone audio has not been that great.

At first I was skeptical about picking this up, as the popular choice for these decoders for my gs350 costed upwards of $700. I took the gamble, and I'm glad I spent less than half of what I would have. Now, installation can be easy or it can be a headache depending on your experience. For me, it wasn't hard it was just time consuming and at some points difficult to understand. This was my first time taking out a radio/screen, but I found some youtube videos on similar decoders and used that with the manual to figure it out. There are some cables that needed to be used on certain models, in my case I had to use the joystick one for my 2014 gs350. For whatever reason after installation I had a flickering line at the bottom, but I messaged the seller for update files and the update fixed it! I decided to not even mess with the audio cables and just used the cars OEM bluetooth, there is a setting in the decoder menu to use it. All in all it was worth the hours it took me to install it as a newbie, it connects and works the way it should. The joystick can be a bit finicky at times, but it was like that in the OEM system so I can't fault this product for it. Edit: There is now another new update that changes to a "mouse cursor" this unit is wayyyy better than before with this update, just reach out to roadtop for the files.

The product is just okay. It does work. That is it will allow you to use Apple Car play in your old Lexus, however at times it is so buggy that you'll question whether you should try to uninstall it and return it. At other times it works quite nicely. One thing that never feels smooth is the joystick, though I suppose that's no surprise at this price point. The most common bug seems to be "Hey Seri" not working however I also sometimes don't have audio output, and some times my phone refuses to connect at all. If you're a technology enthusiast like me, go ahead and get it, enjoy the install experience and have fun trying to outsmart the bugs, however if you want something that feels anything like an OEM system, you should get a more expensive one.