JLR PSA: Don’t remote start your vehicle and expect CarPlay to work, seen on 2017 & 2018 models with 18C
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Since 18C went wide, I’ve read more and more people saying that CarPlay doesn’t work properly if you try to use it after remote starting the car via the mediocre Land Rover Remote app.
Last night I saw it first hand, and it’s even worse than it seemed.
After the fifth attempt of killing and restarting the app on my phone, signing in and out, it telling me my PIN was incorrect (it wasn’t), it FINALLY started the vehicle remotely. Further info – my phone had a good internet connection and when I got back to the car it had full 3G service. Entire process just continues to be horrible – embarrassingly bad and a real joke.
Anyway – I get in car that’s been running tap the brake to tell car I’m physically there. Then I connect the phone for CarPlay – CarPlay logo appears on iPhone quickly and dreaded pop-down user-unfriendly message appears on Range Rover screen ‘Apple CarPlay’ not available. All modern JLR owners have seen this type of message at one time or another.
So at this point the system is confused – I get the CarPlay icon on the bottom toolbar which means I lose standard phone functions, the media input screen also lists CarPlay but won’t switch to it. I got an incoming call and couldn’t answer it hands-free because of this. And then had to leave the iPhone unplugged from the vehicle so it wouldn’t keep thinking it was on CarPlay. What if my battery was low and I needed to charge it via the car but also needed it to actually work?
Do you think the engineers who didn’t test anything before shipping it thought that since the Remote Start is so bad, there’s a slim chance a user would hit this bug and try to use CarPlay? Or did they not even test these scenarios and this is all a surprise?
This system has always had odd issues for me when using it after a Remote Start. Sometimes the cameras wouldn’t work, sometimes you’d just get a black screen. Those bugs seem to have been resolved for me at least.
