Here’s some interesting facts and observations from the new JD Power & Associates study which questioned owners of 3-year old cars.
Approximately a third of 2012 vehicles sold came with Bluetooth or voice recognition systems.
The top two problems reported by owners of 2012 cars are Bluetooth and voice control failing in their infotainment systems.
Specifically 7 percent of all car owners had a problem with Bluetooth and 6 percent had a problem with voice recognition after three years of owning the car.
Of those who experienced a Bluetooth problem, 55 percent said that their vehicle would not recognize their phone, and 31 percent said the phone would not automatically connect when entering their vehicle.
JD Power also found that the audio and navigation system moved up to the third highest category of problems experienced by consumers from the 5th highest last year.
So, even though Bluetooth and voice recognition were the top complaints there are many categories of complaints for engines, transmission, etc, so combined into categories the car exterior and then engine/transmission had the most complaints, now followed by audio/navigation.
The study also concludes that technology, including infotainment and advanced safety technology, is now playing a greater role in the car buying decision. Last year, just 4 percent said they avoided buying a certain car because it lacked technology. This year, that figure tripled to 15 percent.
JD Power surveyed more than 34,000 people who have owned their 2012 cars for three years.
I have found the two biggest reasons Bluetooth is having issues are.
1) Phone just received an OS software update and now not working right with car.
Usually the fix is to delete pairing in phone and car, reboot phone and pair again. Often customer doesn’t even know phone was updated.
2) Phonebook has a lot of non standard characters in contact names like / _ – ( ) ! @ etc. or Emoji or multiple duplicates of the same contact and car system is set to auto download phonebook every time it connects. This causes a lot of issues with systems hanging because they do not know how to deal with these non standard characters that are not expected as part of a contacts name.
The fix is to clean up the phonebook and make contacts simple to read in plain English. Then get phonebook downloaded to system and set auto download to off if the system has that setting.
JL,
Great method of removing “surprise” and frustration from your consumer’s potential experience with technology. Anecdotally I know it is true that consumers include technology in the new car buying decision making.
In Q 4 of 2014, several of the retailers I was working with reported that on more than one occasion consumers were looking at the cost of technology updating an otherwise perfect car. The expense of turning to a “capable and qualified” aftermarket installer of such technology was significantly less than the cost and aggravation of the new car buying process and the retailers prevailed in most cases. So much so that one retailer devoted an “information kiosk” on his floor to promoting the idea.
Well done!
Ray Windsor
glad to see that we aren’t the only ones with problems with technology. we now include in our sale presentation that Bluetooth is not perfect. we explain some of the things that could happen and we explain some of the fixes. It hasn’t affected our sales and it has helped with the amount of people waking in and saying my Bluetooth isn’t working.