For drivers who enjoy listening to podcasts and music or those who desperately need navigation help, a car’s infotainment system can be crucial to their happiness. And nothing sours that happiness faster than a system that refuses to cooperate or has a screen that goes blank.
In fact, in our most recent exclusive Auto Survey, one of the most common reliability complaints from owners of newer models involved infotainment problems, such as when the display screen goes blank or freezes, or the navigation system stops working properly.
Hardware reliability can be an issue with some systems, but we’ve found in our testing that in many cases there are tricks to getting them back up and running quickly. Sometimes it can be as simple as unplugging your phone from the USB port and plugging it back in. Other times, simply turning the system off and on again can do the trick.
Occasionally, something more drastic needs to happen. That’s where these reboots come in.
To be clear, these are meant to be quick fixes to bring the system back to a fresh state, says Mel Yu, CR’s automotive analyst, kind of like hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete on a Microsoft-powered computer.