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Connected car data handover headache: There's no quick fix... and it's NOT just Land Rovers

Darren Forster

Of course this issue with being able to open the car, start the car and track the car is an issue, however there is another issue that I discovered that affects quite a few cars, and not just high end cars. During a recent trip to Europe my car broke down and I was lent a Skoda Rapid by the breakdown company to complete my journey. It was a very nice vehicle, it had built in sat nav and bluetooth for my phone and it even was able to use my phone to check for delays on the journey (although I have to admit the sat navs description of minor traffic jams on the German Autobahn might need a bit of work as a warning of "Life threatening condition ahead" is a little more unnerving than just telling me there is about 15 miles of queuing traffic or "Security threat ahead" is also a little bit more unnerving when it's just someone having had their car pulled by the police - maybe Skoda might want to work on their translations, especially as when I was back in the UK Oxford is apparently called Arks Ford according to Skoda!).

Anyway I've diverted away from the real problem I found - the big problem I found was when I connected my phone to the bluetooth in the vehicle. The minute I connected my phone it started importing the entire contact list from my phone into the car stereo. Not only that it also seemed to import things like call history, and text messages - and even when the phone wasn't connected to the car if I went into the phone section of the stereo I could see all the contacts there. As it was a rental car this wasn't exactly what I wanted because of course when the car goes back and on to someone else all my private data would go with the vehicle! Before returning the car I went into the menu system on the car audio system and told it to do a factory reset, this removed all previous data and unhooked my phone (it also unhooked another phone which was already listed - clearly the previous hirer hadn't done a factory reset and neither had Europcar when they re-hired the car out). So before you return a hire car if you've had your phone connected to it, make sure you do a factory reset on the stereo, and don't rely on the hire company to do so.

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