Remote Connection lost / “set up phone key” ?

[Mark2sday]

I went out of town yesterday and have been checking in on my truck and everything was fine until about an hour ago. Now the app says “set up phone key” and I can no longer remotely control the vehicle or look at the sentry cameras or anything. And I set it to hold a 50% charge but now it’s draining and I can’t tell it to charge. Is this normal? I thought I was supposed to be able to remotely connect to the truck whenever from anywhere?

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[Woodrick]

So, first mistake, don't check the vehicle when it is sitting, checking it only makes it drain faster.
Next mistake, if it's going to be over a few days, turn sentry mode off, it's what is draining the vehicle.
Did you maybe uninstall and reinstall the app?

The vehicle will drop to about 20% and them turn most everything off to keep the battery from draining.

What do you mean "can't tell it to charge". Did you stop the charging from the app previously? If plugged in, it is going to periodically charge when it needs to. Don't tell it to stop from the app unless you are about to pull the plug.

 

[Gogster2k]

Try using your key card (center console) while in the vehicle with your phone. It should reauthenticate your phone/profile. It happened to me once with my son’s M3 and the remote stuff over the phone app should work again.

 

[Mark2sday]

I can see in the app that it’s keeping its charge at 50% now. That’s what I had set it to. So that’s good. But I’m unable to control remotely because the phone key is wiped. Shouldn’t we be able to check the status of our vehicles from the app? Why does the phone key keep getting wiped?

 

[Woodrick]

I can see in the app that it’s keeping its charge at 50% now. That’s what I had set it to. So that’s good. But I’m unable to control remotely because the phone key is wiped. Shouldn’t we be able to check the status of our vehicles from the app? Why does the phone key keep getting wiped?

Just STOP worrying about it and checking it. Until you get back to it.

 

[Mark2sday]

Woodrick, I need to troubleshoot this now for the next time it happens.

“Just STOP worrying about it” —Is that what customer support would say? (If there was such a thing as customer support..)

I’m on this forum to get help from other owners.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a feature they offer to work? We need to be able to rely on the tech.

Has anyone else had this issue?

 

[Woodrick]

Woodrick, I need to troubleshoot this now for the next time it happens.

“Just STOP worrying about it” —Is that what customer support would say? (If there was such a thing as customer support..)

I’m on this forum to get help from other owners.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a feature they offer to work? We need to be able to rely on the tech.

Has anyone else had this issue?

I AM troubleshooting it for you.

At this point there is nothing that you can do. Period. So leave it alone and stop worrying about it and draining the battery.

Next time, turn Sentry mode off if leaving over a few days and NEVER check the vehicle on the app.

Did you uninstall the app?

In any case, re-pair it when you get back and that probably will be the last time it ever happens. You are remote now, you can't pair it.

And I'm guessing that you have the vehicle set for 50% charging and got worried when it hit 48% or maybe 47%. That's the way it works. That's normal.

 

[Mark2sday]

NEVER check the vehicle!!!??? Then what’s the point of the app??? Sentry isn’t a battery suck when the vehicle is plugged in.

I‘m so confused.. please help me understand. It sounds like you’re telling me to disable security and then NEVER check in on my $130,000 vehicle when I go out of town, is that right?

 

[Ray in montana]

I went out of town yesterday and have been checking in on my truck and everything was fine until about an hour ago. Now the app says “set up phone key” and I can no longer remotely control the vehicle or look at the sentry cameras or anything. And I set it to hold a 50% charge but now it’s draining and I can’t tell it to charge. Is this normal? I thought I was supposed to be able to remotely connect to the truck whenever from anywhere?

Mine will do that on occasion and the manual says turn your phone settings off then on again. Works everytime.

 

[Woodrick]

NEVER check the vehicle!!!??? Then what’s the point of the app??? Sentry isn’t a battery suck when the vehicle is plugged in.

I‘m so confused.. please help me understand. It sounds like you’re telling me to disable security and then NEVER check in on my $130,000 vehicle when I go out of town, is that right?

Okay, so now you added "when the vehicle is plugged in" and "sentry is on"

You know what dude, why didn't you mention these to begin with? Your entire thread seems to have left out every important, obvious detail.
Let's rewrite it with the information that you should have included:

I went out of town yesterday, left my truck plugged in and have been checking in on my truck and everything was fine until about an hour ago. Now the app says “set up phone key” and I can no longer remotely control the vehicle or look at the sentry cameras or anything. And I set it to hold a 50% charge, it was at 80% before I left, but now it’s draining to 48% and I can’t tell it to charge. Is this normal? I thought I was supposed to be able to remotely connect to the truck whenever from anywhere?

In that case, my, and probably every other answer would have been:

A few percent change in charge level is common and expected. No issues.
The phone key problem is odd, but nothing that you can do till you get back home.

You see, it's REALLY important to include the details, because it is a VERY COMMON thing that people leave their vehicles unplugged at the airport, of course with sentry mode on, go away for multiple days, continually check their vehicle, realize that the battery is draining and is about to die.

And in that case my answer was the standard, cookbook response.


And if the keycard keeps getting wiped, then stopped doing whatever you are doing, because there are literally millions that don't have that problem.

 

[Mark2sday]

Yes I left it plugged in. That’s what I meant when I said I set it to hold at 50%. I meant I set it to charge to 50. But I can see how that wasn’t clear in my first post.

You’re still blaming me. “If the keycard (phone key) keeps getting wiped, then stop doing whatever you are doing”

All I'm doing is opening the app.

Anyway, this is an owner’s club, not Reddit, and we should be more respectful. Sorry this escalated.

 

[cybertruckwaldo]

This exact thing happened to me on this past Friday morning. I went out of town and had the same experience within the app. It was the weirdest thing.

I left my truck plugged in and sitting in the garage but could not control it. I saw the "set up phone key message"

My charge limit was set to 50% before I left. I could see that it did charge to the 50% but could not see the actual battery level as it drained over the next 3 days.

After some brainstorming while I was away, I wondered if my phone connected to my wife's vehicle in the driveway when she turned it on to take me to the airport and I lost connection to the truck at that time.

It is the only thing I could think of as this has never happened to me before and this was the first time since I bought the truck that she dropped me off at the airport.

When I got back in town yesterday. My phone connected back to my truck but I did have to click set up phone key. The setup didn't proceed it just connected to my phone. The battery drained to 48%.

 

[FlykidCT]

So, first mistake, don't check the vehicle when it is sitting, checking it only makes it drain faster.
Next mistake, if it's going to be over a few days, turn sentry mode off, it's what is draining the vehicle.
Did you maybe uninstall and reinstall the app?

The vehicle will drop to about 20% and them turn most everything off to keep the battery from draining.

What do you mean "can't tell it to charge". Did you stop the charging from the app previously? If plugged in, it is going to periodically charge when it needs to. Don't tell it to stop from the app unless you are about to pull the plug.

I had the issue as well. They aren’t alone and they aren’t making mistakes. The app seems to have been updated and dropped the phone key authorization (including powerwall phone pairing for me) while we were out of town on our respective trips. Speaking of updates, a few app updates ago if sentry wasn’t running, opening the app would not wake up the vehicle- it still doesn’t right now. So it won’t drain the battery any more as you claim… the vehicle will just keep sleeping. I can’t speak to models other than CT because I just can’t.

I uninstalled the app restarted the phone reinstalled the app re logged in. No dice. The ONLY thing that fixed it was getting back to the CT and reauthorizing the phone key

What he means by can’t charge- well when I was out of town and my app updated an my phone keys dropped- I couldn’t stop charge, I couldn’t start charge I couldn’t adjust charge rate.. nothing.

Woodrick- you’ve come at me for saying there weren’t any real V4 chargers assuming I didn’t know what I was talking about (even our hero Kyle Connor says there aren’t real V4 in the US) just same V3 cabinets with fancy V4 posts except a few test sites that have different SOFTWARE same hard ware. You come at this guy for not knowing what he was talking about and making mistake #1 so on and so forth.. As far as I can tell- his trouble matches mine.. and he’s telling the truth and he’s doing nothing wrong by checking the app so long as he has a moderately current app

 

[Mark2sday]

Thanks guys, I thought I was going crazy.

So glad I’m not alone in this.

I think you might be right about it being due to an app update. I uninstalled and reinstalled, but didn’t help..

We need to be able to rely on this tech though.. hopefully if enough people experience issues, it will get addressed.

 

[Boyne]

Thanks guys, I thought I was going crazy.

So glad I’m not alone in this.

I think you might be right about it being due to an app update. I uninstalled and reinstalled, but didn’t help..

We need to be able to rely on this tech though.. hopefully if enough people experience issues, it will get addressed.

Just guessing, but I have experienced loss of remote access via the app, due to momentary power loss to my home WiFi router. This caused a disconnect between the ip address the car had been using and the new assigned ip address assigned by the router when it restarted. If you have remote access to your router, perhaps a restart would help. (I’m not an expert, but have seen this to be an issue in my experience.)

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