Does Prius Prime automatically silence phone?

I've spent more time than I'd have liked troubleshooting this issue with Apple over the last couple days, and it turns out it might not be my phone but my car.

IOS 12.1 on my iPhone 7 has a feature called "Do Not Disturb While Driving." I have it set to "activate manually" because I actually want to receive email notifications and, if I'm not using the Toyota on-board navigation system, I also want to be able to get audible navigation directions via my iPhone. However, when I start driving in my Prime all audio shuts off--even the clicking on the keyboard when texting (at stoplights of course). It will play sound when sitting still in my garage, but as soon as I pull out and start driving everything on my phone goes silent. I still can get phone and text alerts via the Bluetooth connection in the car, but the actual phone goes silent.

I've gone as far today as completely reinstalling everything on my iPhone, and it still did the same thing in my Prime. Then I just tested my phone in my wife's Subaru and the iPhone works the way it's supposed to--it provides audible directions in navigation, plays a tone when a new email comes in etc.

So, it seems it's my car causing this problem.

Is there a feature in the Prime that forces the phone to turn off the audio? I did a quick search (both here and Google, as well as the Prime owner's manual) and couldn't find anything. For now I am puzzled, so hopefully someone else has experienced something similar and can help me out. Thanks.

 

Thanks all. I actually thought I had set this thread to send me email notifications when I got replies, and I didn't get any notifications, so I'm glad to see there are some responses in here to chew on. This is the first time I've checked back on this thread since posting it.

I've done my own bit of research throughout the week, along with working with both Apple and Toyota on this question. So yes, when in the car Bluetooth basically takes over the audio functions of my phone. To disable it from doing this you can either (1) manually change the settings in Bluetooth (on the car menu) to see your phone as a phone, audio player, or both (default is both, and it seems you have to select this every time you get in the car) or (2) switch off Bluetooth on the phone entirely. You can also set your audio source as Bluetooth, which then plays all the sounds that would come through your phone on your car instead. But then you can't listen to radio or a separate MP3 player (I still use a Zune, and love it). So that's not an option.

With Bluetooth turned on (on my phone), I get text message alerts and phone calls through the car. That's fine, and useful. But there are also settings for email notifications in the car menu, and I do not get those. I've walked through all possible settings with both Apple and Toyota--even changed my email software on my phone from Outlook to the default Apple email app--and nothing works. All I really want at this point is to know I have gotten new emails while I am driving, especially work-related emails that I might need to reply to. Toyota ended up giving up and telling me to talk to my dealership. They said it's possible that depending on exactly what kind of phone I have, service provider, etc., the email notification function may not even work on my car. I've also read some things while searching that this is not even possible, and that Toyota left the email settings in the software almost by mistake or something (or maybe because they might bring it back sometime). It would be very helpful to know that something is not meant to work rather than something is not working the way it's supposed to.

So ... long story short: Do any of you get email notifications while in your cars?

 

That’s understandable. But I’d assume if I could get it to work the way I’d want it to (perhaps a generous assumption) I could control from my phone which email account(s) I got notifications from and when. In my case that would dramatically reduce the number of junk messages for which I’d receive notifications via the car. As it is, it appears I have no option to get any.