USB port under armrest

I would suspect you have a bad cable. The USB ports puts out 1 amp. I measured it with a digital meter. The power cube that comes with the iPhone puts out 1 amp.

 

That's the cable i used at home with the cube. I'm using it right now with a cigarette USB adapter, but I haven't been on a long ride to see if it stops the drain and keeps the battery charged.

It's funny you say that about the cable. On my 2014 Prius I used a MicroUSB cable with the Apple provided lightning adapter. (in some countries they are mandated to offer these). I never had an issue with it when I connected my phone to Entune in the car. When I switched it to the Prime, no joy. It said it wasn't an authorized accessory. So I had to switch the cable to an Apple Lightning cable.

 

FYI - the USB port only registers as a controllable USB device if you plug in an iOS device. Android devices do not act as playable devices for the USB port. You can plug in, you may even be able to send audio through the port, but you can not control them through the infotainment system. On my trip this last week to Chicago and back, we used an old Android phone to listen to Audible recordings. This we put in the Qi charger when we were using it because it is the only device we own that supports that (which is why I pulled it out of retirement). We used Bluetooth for both my phone and the media playing device. In the Bluetooth settings I selected media for the second device and phone audio for my phone. I received text messages and calls via bluetooth on my phone while we were listening to audible from the old device (with no cell service, just using it for audible stored on the device). I had noticed skipping when we first setup the phone so I tried to hook it up via USB, but it would not work, the system put up a message that it wasn't a recognized player. Tried with my Pixel phone as well and got the same message.

In the end after restarting bluetooth on the old device we got rid of 95% of the skipping which made listening to the book fine and it worked fine. The only downside is that when I forget to turn on the other phone it hooks up to my phone and plays music from my phone instead of the audio book and I have to go through a little work to flip out the bluetooth device holding onto the media controls to flip it over.

 

You can buy one of these usb testers on Amazon for around $10 to help troubleshoot

PS anyone else having trouble posting links and photos to this forum? I'm ?.

 

This is interesting. Will plugging in a phone charging cable result in drawing down the battery? (It seemed to drain my EV power and I have not tried it again since then. (It suddenly dropped from 26 miles to 0 EV miles.) Just curious if anyone else has experienced a similar issue?

 

Not necessarily true. Depend on the charger port if car charger support Turbo charger. That can surely work.