MINI Cooper CarPlay/ MINI app unpredictable!

Maybe, but maybe I'm an exception. I don't see a car as an appliance, though. For me, I see the Mini as a toy. It is joy to drive, and I just want to be immersed in the experience of driving. Technology is a distraction to that. I'm actually glad than I have the 6.5" screen rather than the 8.8" screen. I use CarPlay to give me familiar music or podcasts. That's about it. I was very grateful for the built-in nav last weekend, as I was camping deep in the woods, far from any service. The Mini did know about the unpaved forest road I was on. And it even let me put the trailhead in as a lat/lon coordinate which was great!

 

Even though iOS 15.0.2 has CarPlay fixes for audio, it's still not releasing the audio correctly on my SE. It will go back to playing music if I'm listening through CarPlay, but still won't go back to the radio.

 

iOS 15.1 just came out, and I'm happy to say it fixes the CarPlay audio issue!

 

Interesting. I have no problem with apple car play. It connects wirelessly and works perfectly. Maybe try updating your phone to latest IOS.

 

I think if you share one key amongst multiple family members it can cause some issues. Sometimes the car connects to my phone if my wife takes it and I am still in the house. I am going to try to use my own key to see if that helps, since the car profile is determined by the key fob used.
I usually charge my phone anyways so I will just use it wired if that doesn’t work.

 

Yeah, when I'm talking on my phone when my wife drives our SE past the window next to me, she finds herself participating in the conversation I just lost. Such spontaneously transferred calls could get awkward if I had a secret girlfriend!

 

Sometimes I will be working from home and called into a meeting. If my wife chooses to go run an errand, the call typically transfers into the car mid-meeting. The best solution I've found for this is to turn off bluetooth on the phone.

 

Hi all, 48-hour owner of our new 2022 SE (woot!) and have probably used more battery poking the infotainment settings than driving, haha! So I was interested to see above in this thread that Key fobs are assigned to driver profiles... did not know that! Might be the answer to our dilemma.

My wife set up her carplay and all seemed fine (though it wasn't popping right up... had to poke around to find it)...then later in the day I connected MY phone and carplay, for when I drive it sometimes, and then everything went wacky. When we were both driving in the car later on (she was driving) and MY carplay came up, not hers. And then I turned off Bluetooth on my phone to try and help things and her carplay was nowhere to be found... just kept getting the Mini Infotainment display, no matter where I poked on screen. It said her carplay was connected, but it took toggling on/off between the Mini interface and Carplay interface check boxes in mobile device settings to get her set back up.

I also deleted my phone as she said I "messed everything up" haha! I do want to get my phone reconnected and have my carplay come right up when I'm driving... but can this system handle two different carplay setups and switch depending on which driver profile is active? Or is the KEY FOB that's behind this issue? (we have since assigned the keys to ourselves) ... So maybe she was using the Key Fob assigned to me? Is that why my carplay came up and not hers? AND is setting up a bluetooth-only connection (which we both did the first time by mistake) also making things wonky? Seems like you don't need the BT connection checked if you're already doing carplay. Seems redundant.

So is it: A) use your own key fob assigned to you and then B) Select your driver profile to get EACH person's respective carplay to come right up when you get in the car?

Thanks in advance. And yes, learning it all is half the fun. Not really.

Derrick

 

I’ve had the same dilemma. I use the car 90% of the time, so just have CarPlay setup for me. When my wife wants to use the car, she just plugs it in and connects to USB. We actually both prefer the Mini built-in navigation since the turn-by-turn directions come up on the heads up display. I believe that it is pairing via wifi for carplay, so I think you could disable wifi on the phone that you don’t want to pair, but I might be mistaken there.

 

I don't think device assignment is part of the driver profile (associated with the key fobs) but is instead a vehicle setting. That's how pre-CarPlay MINIs behaved, and they had a preference order, so if two phones are in the car at the same time the highest-priority phone is the one that the car connects to. CarPlay may behave differently, I haven't tried two CarPlay phones at the same time.

Configuring as bluetooth and then CarPlay may confuse the SE, since they're different connections. Bluetooth communicates with the phone as data streams, with access to audio and things like phone contacts. CarPlay, on the other hand, is a remote display of your phone. It uses bluetooth to authenticate initially, and then uses wifi to show phone contents on the display. The infotainment screen literally becomes a second display on your phone, which you can see by taking a screen shot on your phone. You will actually get both your phone screen and the CarPlay screen as two separate images:



That's for wireless CarPlay. You should also be able to use a cable and use connected CarPlay, which should then eliminate any confusion on part of the SE.

 

That's for wireless CarPlay. You should also be able to use a cable and use connected CarPlay, which should then eliminate any confusion on part of the SE.

Ahh...I didn't think the SE did connected CarPlay. That would totally clear things up. Somewhere I thought I read it only does wireless CP, but I've read a lot in 3 days so I could be wrong. Also, at first glance, I didn't see where you can prioritize phones (I do that in my Jeep) but TBH I haven't played with it enough in the car to really do a thorough search. That would help immensely too.

 

Is voice control on the steering wheel only the MINI system or can I use Siri with that button when in CarPlay? In my old car it worked that way.

 

Hold the button down longer and you should hear the Siri prompt.

 

If your car does have CarPlay, just buy a dongle. Convert Your Wired Carplay to Wireless! It will reduce lots of your worries.
https://carlinkitcarplay.com/products/carlinkit-wireless-adapter-for-factory-carplay

 

Dunno if its BMW or Audi but both my friends have had poor performance/disconnects with those kinds of adapters. If you buy one, buy from a shop that has a generous return policy, some seem to be more flakey than others.