Talking on My Phone in My Car over Bluetooth

Question

Talking on My Phone in My Car over Bluetooth

If I get a phone call while driving, my phone doesn't always switch to bluetooth. Often I can't hear anything at all.

When this happens, I can click on the iPhone's speaker button to pop up a menu with three choices: iPhone, Speaker, and my car's bluetooth. As soon as I choose bluetooth, I can hear my caller fine. But when I'm driving, the last thing I want to do is take my eyes off the road to mess with a popup menu! It's not even legal in my state. This is unsafe. It's a very bad design. (I drive a 2008 Prius. My car's BT just handles phone calls, so I always plug my phone into my car's audio jack for music. That may be confusing the phone.)

It would be ideal if my iPhone always used my car's bluetooth when it's available. I can't find a way to do that. It should be the default setting. Is there a way to tell my phone to do that?

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 16

Posted on Mar 21, 2023 8:51 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

barberlives123

Community Specialist

Mar 22, 2023 3:02 PM in response to Miguel_Muñoz

Hello, Miguel_Muñoz,

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities, it's great to have you here.

We can definitely appreciate how important it is that you are able to use the Bluetooth audio output in your vehicle while you're driving. We can absolutely help you get this resolved! To start, we want to recommend that you set up automatic call routing on your iPhone. This is a feature that will automatically send calls to the audio output of your choosing; in this case, your vehicle's Bluetooth connection.

Here is how you can do that:

"Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Call Audio Routing, then choose an audio destination.
Tap Auto-Answer Calls, turn on Auto-Answer Calls, then set the duration of time before the call is answered by tapping - or +."

Read more here: Route and automatically answer calls on iPhone

We hope this does the trick for you!

Cheers.

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Answer 2

Mar 22, 2023 4:40 PM in response to barberlives123

Thank you. Do I need to turn on Auto-Answer Calls for this to work? I really don't want to do that. I get a lot of phone spam. I can answer my calls manually in my car without looking by hitting a button on my steering wheel.

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Answer 3

jmarse1

Community Specialist

Mar 22, 2023 4:51 PM in response to Miguel_Muñoz

Hi Miguel_Muñoz,

For this particular scenario, that seems to be the only way to automatically route the calls to use Bluetooth. With that said, you can submit feedback on this here if you'd prefer: Product Feedback - Apple

Cheers.

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Answer 4

Mar 24, 2023 10:27 PM in response to jmarse1

I've tried it out. While I've only received one phone call, so I can't yet speak to its reliability, it worked fine with Auto-Answer Calls turned off. So it looks like Auto-Answer isn't necessary. But thanks for the suggestion.

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Talking on My Phone in My Car over Bluetooth

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