New 2015 Prius 4 - Numerous Audio System Problems

Hi all. I’m new to this forum, and just bought a 2015 Prius 4 a few days ago and have been struggling to get the media system working as advertised. It seems buggy as crap. I’m trying to use an iPhone 4S running the latest version of IOS (8.1.2). Here are my observations (some of which others have reported in this forum):

1. The dealer made a big deal about the Entune features and demonstrated a bunch of them by pairing his phone over Bluetooth. Turns that this only works with Android phones. Toyota is not very upfront about this, but a web search (which brought me to this forum) indicates that in order to utilize Entune wirelessly with an iPhone, you need to create a personal hotspot on your phone and then find the arcane DUN/PAN setting under the Connect for Internet option for your paired device. (Presumably this means it’s using the local wi-fi network my iPhone creates, rather than Bluetooth. Good thing AT&T is allowing tethering these days at no additional cost with their data plan.) And even with the hotspot enabled, the requires Bluetooth to be connected for the internet apps (Entune) to function; it doesn’t function via USB.

2. Bluetooth functionality for music playback from my iPhone works unidirectionally; i.e., as long as I use my iPhone’s Music or Podcast app to control discovery and selection of title to play, it seems to work okay*. But the Prius display options to List and Browse are greyed out. On order to utilize the Prius touchscreen to access my iPhone’s audio library, I need to attach a cable to the USB port and switch the Prius to IPOD mode.

3. Using the IPOD selection and USB cable is flakey. Sometimes it gets stuck loading the metadata from my iPhone’s library for display and I need to exit and restart IPOD mode (or power off the vehicle and then power it on again.) When it works, it does allow me to navigate my phone’s audio library from the Prius touchscreen (unlike in Bluetooth/wireless mode). (*)However, if I have Bluetooth turned on, all sorts of havoc ensues: playback stutters, the play/pause button stops working, the Prius display shows the seconds incrementing as if the music is playing, but there’s no sound playing through the speakers, etc. I finally found a passage in one of the manuals stating that with the iPhone, running the USB cable and Bluetooth together may be unstable. Wth? This means I can’t use the USB port to power my iPhone when connected via Bluetooth.

4. Often when attempting to use the IPOD mode with a USB cable, I get an abrupt message that "Power consumption of USB device too high. USB device will therefore be turned off." Sometimes it turns the audio system off entirely. How can a USB port not be designed to power a frigging iPhone? (I’d understand if I had connected an iPad, perhaps.)

5. The User Manual states that if you have the JBL sound upgrade in the DSP menu you can turn Surround Sound on/off. However it doesn’t appear (only Automatic Sound Leveler). The dealer’s service tech said he guessed that’s because this JBL system doesn’t have a sub-woofer. (If so, the User Manual wasn’t QA’d very thoroughly.)

6. Toyota’s compatibility matrix states that I should be able to use the TEXT features of the phone app (with one exception: can’t send a text). But no TEXT features work.

Bottom line is, as long as I never connect to the USB outlet (and instead use a 12V adaptor to power the phone) and use both Bluetooth and a personal hotspot together, I can mostly get things to work.

When I presented this to the dealer, they ran a diagnostic and concluded that everything works just fine and the problem must be my phone or a bad USB cable. I subsequently tested with 3 different phones (2 4S’s and a 5S) and 3 different USB cables. The behavior of the 4S’s was consistent. When I connected the 5S to the USB port, the IPOD selection remained greyed out and didn’t function at all. This totally contradicts the compatibility matrix on their website.

Am I nuts for expecting that the system function as advertised, or that at a minimum the dealer admits that it’s really buggy and poorly supported, and then offer to compensate me in some way? The only thing I can conclude is that a lot of owners either never bother to try out all these features, assume they’re simply operating the system wrong, or don’t care. Else how can Toyota get away with delivering a software-centric user interface which doesn’t adhere to even minimally acceptable industry standards for quality?

Any suggestions out there for where to go from here? Other than the audio console I really like the car, but feel cheated by paying for features that don’t work. What’s your experience with Toyota support; is there a regular cadence of software updates which I can reasonably assume will fix these bugs anytime soon?

Thanks.

 

Thanks for your replies. The dealer has been good about spending time with me to recreate the issues, and is now talking to district support to determine how to respond. For the most part I've settled on some awkward workarounds - using data tethering via Personal Hotspot for Bluetooth connectivity in order to utilize Entune; never connecting via USB cable while Bluetooth is running (and even there some problems persist with non-Apple cables); and relying on a 12V adaptor for charging instead of USB. Still no explanation why reading texts via the console doesn't work. I live in silicon valley, and the gap between the software culture here (inc. agile development/QA and basic transparency) and Toyota's software approach is pretty extreme, sadly...