Rental Car BlueTooth Security Alert - Erase Your Phone!

Recently, I had to give my vehicle back to the dealer to fix an issue. They graciously provided me a loaner car and said it could take a week. As the dealer was five freeways and forty miles away from my home, I decided to pair my phone to the loaner car's BlueTooth sound system before leaving the dealer's lot. It's illegal in the state of California to talk on your phone while holding it. I also didn't want to waste time on re-programming the radio stations. By pairing my phone with the car's BlueTooth system, I figured to solve that problem, along with the music by listening to my Amazon music. Step #1 was to go into the BlueTooth Pairing mode on the car and make it discoverable. I then attempted to pair it with my SmartPhone but kept getting an error message denying me.

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As this has been my business for the last 25 years, I quickly determined the problem was capacity. The last three people to use this loaner vehicle had apparently also paired their devices.  You can only have three paired devices simultaneously and I was obviously #4.

​Two of the three users had actually downloaded and left all of their contacts. Next time you rent a car, or receive a loaner car, it's okay to sync the BlueTooth services. In many cases, you will even be prompted on whether you wish for all of your contacts to be downloaded. If you plan to use your phone for outbound calls, this is a good idea. If not, don't bother. In any case, before turning the vehicle in, make sure you go the car's settings>BlueTooth>Devices and be sure to delete your device which will also delete all of its contents. In my case, I deleted all of the other devices.