# Phone Connectivity and Bluetooth Solution - FINALLY



## ricarmz (Aug 29, 2018)

Many of the phone connectivity issues being reported "SEEM" to be related to bluetooth but in reality they are not. I have a 2 year old Samsung NOTE 5 and upon getting my car in September I was unable to load any of my contacts to my Model 3. At first I thought it was bluetooth related. Telsa service told me it was the version of bluetooth on my phone, to upgrade my phone, my phone's firmware was outdated, etc.

Some of the issues I noticed which occurred continually for several months.

Bluetooth was continually connecting and disconnecting
My phone contacts would not load to the phone
My phone calls switched between my car speakers to my phone speaker while on a call
Summons feature kept saying I was not close enough to the car even though I was right next to it.
My car would connect and disconnect its ability to play songs from my phone
My web feature would intermittently connect
Tesla service told me I had too many contacts and the car could only read a few hundred at a time
After reading several threads, I thought my issue was bluetooth related but in reality it turned out to be my personal "CONTACT LIST" on my phone.

I have over 1800 contacts and I was told to reload my contacts 1 at a time to see at what point the contacts stop loading. Another potential solution was loading all my contacts to only view my "phone" contact list and not any other "contact" lists on my phone.

The second solution was almost correct. This solution below may work for you as long as your contact lists have never been combined and its clean.

*SOLUTION:*

After months of troubleshooting, I determined the following: I have an Android Phone and have a several GMAIL accounts on my phone. When originally setting up my phone 2 years ago, I downloaded all my phone contacts to my GMAIL account as a backup. By doing that it combined my Phone Contacts with my Email Contacts. When uploading all the contacts to my Samsung Note 5, I actually loaded *ALL* the contacts. Using the contacts on my phone is not an issue but for the Model 3 it was. As I looked thru my phone list I realized the following: All of my email contacts were translated into the First and Last Name field of my phone. The phone would read [email protected] as the Name of the contact or it would read Mom & Dad as the name of my contact. I decided to fix all the odd contacts with proper First and Last Names and removed the special character while doing that.

To go thru 1800 contacts on my phone, I basically searched for all the names that contained any weird characters in the Name field and modified them.

I connected my phone to the car and within a few seconds all my contacts and recent calls began to show. I did the same thing to my wife's phone and everything worked perfectly for her as well.

The amazing part was that I was no longer having any bluetooth related issues. My bluetooth was connected and stayed connected. All of the issues above disappeared.

*Recommendation to TESLA:*

Tesla should run a script to remove, replace or omit any contacts with special characters. By doing this upfront it would eliminate all the issues and potential issues with all the various phones.

Overall, I am glad I did not need to replace my phone just to load my contacts. I have seen many cases where people have bought new phones just to get the benefit of being able to use voice command to call someone on the contact list. This was extremely painful to troubleshoot but overall was good to know. I love my Model 3 but wish I didn't have to begin my experience in the shop to try and solve the issues. I get it. We are dealing with cutting edge technology and sometimes its not the obvious thing to correct the issue, but I wish it wasn't right after I purchased the car. The issue was not the phone, bluetooth or the car but the interpretation of special characters.

I am happy now and hope many people experiencing these issues can fix their problem as I have. Enjoy the heck out of your Teslas. In my case I am truly enjoying my Model 3 experience.

*Unknown:*

I am not sure if the Model S or X have the same software configuration but it surely is a problem on the Model 3.


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## JML (Jul 26, 2018)

Very interesting. I only have 200 contacts, but my first one alphabetically has a "ç" in the name. I have other contacts with some other non-alphanumeric characters, but nothing else that isn't on a US qwerty keyboard. I just went to test it, and the Tesla shows the cedilla correctly. Of course, this time the phone connected for contacts, call, and media all within 20 seconds, and looked like it was ready to go. Of course I don't have it quiet as bad as some people. Once connected my phone generally stays connected.

I'm glad you got your problems sorted out.


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## MelindaV (Apr 2, 2016)

before new years, I helped with deliveries in Portland and there was a new owner, with a new Samsung Galaxy and after driving off, and on his 220 mile drive home, he tried to call his son and realized his phone was not connecting (was set up earlier). So he came back before leaving the city.
We deleted his phone, tried to reconnect it, it just spun and spun. Tried my phone (iPhone) and it wouldn't connect (because it was jammed still on his Galaxy). 
So one of the service guys took it back to the shop and had to reset the BT module. Before coming back to the owner, he tried both an iPhone and Android and both connected perfectly. Came and got the owners phone, took it to the car and it would not fully connect again, so service told him it is specific to his phone and suggested he consider what apps/settings he has customized on his phone that could be interfering. 

I wonder if this was his same issue.


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## Love (Sep 13, 2017)

OT @ricarmz ...gave you a LOVE IT for the pics. Love the white


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## TrevP (Oct 20, 2015)

I think @Mad Hungarian told me he had a similar problem even on his new iPhone.


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## Mad Hungarian (May 20, 2016)

TrevP said:


> I think @Mad Hungarian told me he had a similar problem even on his new iPhone.


Indeed, the special characters in my contacts were driving it crazy. Cleaned them up and it's been mint ever since.


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## BluestarE3 (Oct 12, 2017)

ricarmz said:


> Tesla should run a script to remove, replace or omit any contacts with special characters. By doing this upfront it would eliminate all the issues and potential issues with all the various phones.


I'd rather Tesla spend the programming resources necessary to deal correctly with special characters so that this problem doesn't even occur in the first place instead of adding remedial code to modify owners' contacts as a workaround.

Great detective work by the way!


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## jdbunda (Nov 7, 2018)

It just amazes me in this day and age that a product reaches the field with these kinds of errors. Even the audio current track display for TuneIn can't deal with special characters. As they say on ESPN, c'mon man!


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## JML (Jul 26, 2018)

Mad Hungarian said:


> Indeed, the special characters in my contacts were driving it crazy. Cleaned them up and it's been mint ever since.


What kind of special characters? Non-Latin characters, like the cedilla I mentioned above? Or stuff like & or %, or things like emojis?

Too bad we can't just stick a `iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit` in the contacts import pipeline. Also, why are the contacts imported each time? On rental cars I've used, it seems like the contacts are downloaded and remembered, which is why I always factory reset rental cars. I guess there needs to be a way to sync changes.


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## sraatc17 (Jan 19, 2018)

I had the same issue of my s8 not staying connected and this has fixed the issue so far... 5 trips in the car over 24 hours and it has connected every time so far.


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## Bernard (Aug 3, 2017)

JML said:


> What kind of special characters? Non-Latin characters, like the cedilla I mentioned above? Or stuff like & or %, or things like emojis?
> 
> Too bad we can't just stick a `iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit` in the contacts import pipeline. Also, why are the contacts imported each time? On rental cars I've used, it seems like the contacts are downloaded and remembered, which is why I always factory reset rental cars. I guess there needs to be a way to sync changes.


So how is Tesla going to sell cars in China? (For that matter, I have cyrillic and chinese characters in my contact list, although I don't seem to have suffered from that.)
For navigation outside the US we'll need a way to input addresses or placenames using local characters, using modified keyboards or some standardized mechanism (such as Google Pinyin for Chinese) for complex character sets,. a;ong with some simple input combination to choose the language. All of this is well understood and trivial to use on PCs, and somewhat useable on most phones.
Perhaps Tesla was overly focused on the US market when it developed its interface...
I sure hope there will not be multiple regional versions of the software!


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## ricarmz (Aug 29, 2018)

Bernard said:


> So how is Tesla going to sell cars in China? (For that matter, I have cyrillic and chinese characters in my contact list, although I don't seem to have suffered from that.)
> For navigation outside the US we'll need a way to input addresses or placenames using local characters, using modified keyboards or some standardized mechanism (such as Google Pinyin for Chinese) for complex character sets,. a;ong with some simple input combination to choose the language. All of this is well understood and trivial to use on PCs, and somewhat useable on most phones.
> Perhaps Tesla was overly focused on the US market when it developed its interface...
> I sure hope there will not be multiple regional versions of the software!


I think a quick upfront prior to importing the contacts to detect or omit special characters would be ideal. I think the issue revolves around the languages used via the voice command. I guess when Tesla uses English for the voice command, it would fail or not be able to read the special characters appropriately. Just a guess.


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## Bernard (Aug 3, 2017)

ricarmz said:


> I think a quick upfront prior to importing the contacts to detect or omit special characters would be ideal. I think the issue revolves around the languages used via the voice command. I guess when Tesla uses English for the voice command, it would fail or not be able to read the special characters appropriately. Just a guess.


As a temporary patch for the next firmware, why not, but that's grossly insufficient for the future -- even the immediate future, as Tesla plans to reach a much larger public in Europe and China during this coming year.
Owners should be able to choose which languages they want supported for writing and display (using appropriate character sets and input mechanisms) and which for voice recognition, just as one does on a phone or laptop/PC.
Voice recognition works as well for Spanish or Chinese as for English, so that should be no direct barrier. Which languages to support and how to integrate multilingual support in the interface may require thought and additional work -- but there are plenty of existing models Tesla could adopt.
I'd certainly expect to see a multilingual interface starting at the latest with the release of HW 3.0.


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## jdbunda (Nov 7, 2018)

JML said:


> What kind of special characters? Non-Latin characters, like the cedilla I mentioned above? Or stuff like & or %, or things like emojis?
> 
> Too bad we can't just stick a `iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit` in the contacts import pipeline. Also, why are the contacts imported each time? On rental cars I've used, it seems like the contacts are downloaded and remembered, which is why I always factory reset rental cars. I guess there needs to be a way to sync changes.


A simple apostrophe, I've also seen it with ampersand - displays as &amp. I've seen the problem with several stations on TuneIn. No idea where the problem is, could be the stations themselves I suppose. This aside, I love TuneIn. I prefer real radio stations to Slacker channels (too narrow, too shallow). There are some great non-commercial stations in this country, it's cool to be able to listen without worrying about geography.


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## JML (Jul 26, 2018)

I created a test contact with some emojis in the name. It displays correctly on the phone, but this is how the car shows it:






That seems to be a pretty standard indication of a missing font. You can also see that the cedilla in a real contact also displays correctly. I'm not doubting what other people are seeing, I'm just having trouble recreating it. An additional piece of information: all of my contacts are stored in Google, they aren't "phone" contacts. Android makes that all work seamlessly in my phone dialer.

The phone and car have been in good moods the last few days, in that if I sit in the car for a minute or so, they will connect on their own. That does make me wonder if all of the playing I do with clicking on stuff and such is just superstitious behavior that I'm doing to kill time while the car and phone get connected on their own.

Another thing I noticed. If no phone is connect, then no contacts are visible. Once the phone connects the old contacts are visible. After the phone is connected for 5-20 seconds, the new contacts show up. To me, that means the car is keeping the contacts cached, but not showing them until the appropriate phone connects. Once the phone is connected, it redownloads (or syncs, or whatever) all of the contacts.


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## sraatc17 (Jan 19, 2018)

sraatc17 said:


> I had the same issue of my s8 not staying connected and this has fixed the issue so far... 5 trips in the car over 24 hours and it has connected every time so far.


Noticed my phone not connecting a couple times over the weekend again. Decided to try and delete my wife's iPhone from the car and see if that helps. So far so good. Back to connecting regularly.


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## crackers8199 (Jun 7, 2018)

this did not work for me...i still have issues with making calls. ugh.


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## Bobert Hepker (Sep 25, 2017)

Galaxy S8 here, just cleaned up my contacts (from 600 down to 89) and so far this is much better! Phone connected immediately. Full process: cleaned up contacts, deleted pairing from car and phone, "power off" car, re-paired, ???, profit!

Edit: Phone is still running Oreo.


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