I have a 2023 NX350h. Purchased it off lease from a dealer, and it was a CPO. Car is in good condition.

If I connect the phone via blue tooth (whether it is a phone call or digital conference calls, e.g., Zoom/Teams), there is a good 3-5 second delay consistently. If I disconnect the blue tooth and just use my speaker, the delay goes away. So I am pretty sure this is a car issue.

2 questions:
- Is anyone also experiencing this?
- If you are, is there a fix and how?

Thanks community.

 

Disconnecting Bluetooth doesn't indicate its a car problem necessarily, it only confirms its a BlueTooth issue. Even if the phone works in other situations with other BT devices, that's still no guarantee it is or isn't the car's or phone's fault.

Its pretty common for BT to have a few dozen (barely noticeable) to a few hundred milliseconds (starting to get noticeable) of delay (beyond the mobile phone's cell network delays), but 3 to 5 seconds is huge, beyond huge. Most of the time delay in BT is caused by encoding, transmission, and decoding issues. Your phone has to compress the digital audio stream, transmit it over BT network, and the car's receiver has to decode it for playback (and vice versa for audio going the other way). If your phone is busy (background app chewing on CPU resources) or low on power (may be in power save mode) the CPU may be unable to process the digital stream fast enough to keep the delay from being noticeable. During the transmission phase any interference can slow the transmit rate. Also, there are a bunch of major BT versions along with even more minor revisions. While all BT versions are supposed to be inter-operable, in real life if depends on the exact versions of BT on each device, which manufacturer implemented it, and how well they did testing with all other versions of BT (and the various devices that run them). Different versions implement different encoding features, and the two devices have to agree on which features to use and sometimes this just doesn't go well. Guaranteed most BT devices are tested with other devices on a very limited basis.

Some things to try:

• Unpair BT from car, make sure phone has been restarted to clear any potential misbehaving background apps (also maybe check your CPU usage by app if you have that to see if any are being naughty). Restart infotainment system. I know the NX's BT system is live all the time for the digital key, but I'm not sure it uses the same radio for phones as it does for the digital key, but restarting infotainment system possibly resets the BT radio in the car too. I suppose if the problem persists I might even entertain disconnecting the 12V battery just to be 100% sure the BT system within the car is restarted. Make sure phone is nicely charged, pair the phone again.
• Try a different phone with a different BT version as a comparison, see if any difference. Especially if you are using an uncommon or older phone model or the software on it is not recent. This is a good test to see if its a version/manufacturer implementation compatibility issue.
• See if anything changes in a different EM noise environment. Although this tends not to be a big deal for cars, just make sure you aren't near any serious radio towers or electric substations, or you don't have a passenger full of kids with BT earbuds, etc. This isn't too common, but again while BT specs say this shouldn't be a problem, in the real world devices don't necessarily conform exactly to spec. Even a device model and software that does accurately follow the spec, individual flakey hardware can make that moot.

Usually these things do end up in one of two categories, devices need restarting/re-pairing or certain device pairing just doesn't get along. For example, I have a TV I use with BT headphones. First pair I bought absolutely did not work with my TV, but worked fine with my phone. Bought a different pair, worked great on both TV and phone but takes several seconds to connect and sometimes I do need to turn the phones off and on again. The ear pads wore out on that one so I bought a different pair. This one connects instantly and flawlessly every time with my TV, but these ones probably have an extra 200ms of delay compared with the old. Every combination of devices just acts differently. To get to the bottom of issues means testing all possibilities.

Good luck

 

I agree. Never encountered anything like that, so the first thing I would try is the usual:
Remove the phone pairing from the car
Restart the phone
Pair them again

If you have a three second delay, there is something very, very strange going on. No way to blame it on either the car or the phone without trying everything else first.