The New Vehicle Technology Disconnect
March 15, 2007

While Bluetooth’s day appears to be here, that’s not as true in vehicles as it is in stand-alone headsets, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why that is. Or maybe I can.

I am first and foremost a consumer and as a result want to believe claims made about things I enjoy, two of which include new cars and technology. So when I leased my new Audi and found it equipped with Bluetooth, I was pleased. How cool to simply get in the car, have my phone Bluetooth connect to the Audi’s audio system ready to make and receive calls. And that is exactly what I did along with my two sons and wife with their phones for the first four months I had the car. And then two weeks ago, it all ended, or better said became “intermittent,” which, for technology, is the bane of all possibilities. None of our phones would maintain a connection through the Audi’s Bluetooth. They would initially connect but within two to five minutes the connection would simply go away.

So I spent this morning at Audi hoping they would upgrade the car’s Bluetooth firmware or some similar magic bullet repair. No dice. All the technician did was refer to a very limited Audi list of phones that would work with Audi’s Bluetooth — lists that included my wife’s phone, but not mine or my son’s. No matter that I told him all worked fine in the Audi for four months, that they all worked with our headsets and that they worked with my son’s handheld Garmin. He repeatedly insisted that they would not work in the Audi no matter what we did, and no, he said, there is no firmware to be updated.

There is a solution out there — one that Audi and the other car manufacturers will have to find when they are overwhelmed with complaints from dissatisfied users such as me, and/or when the inevitable march to hands free vehicle use forces them to make their product work as they advertise it will. In the meantime this is just one more example why the aftermarket for audio, video, navigation, communication and related technologies will remain viable. Car companies are just that, car companies, and all the add-on stuff we have all grown to demand in our vehicles will best come from someone else for a long time to come.

I would call Audi and tell them that, but I can’t make the connection.

Posted by on March 15, 2007 | Comments (0)