MMI crashing every 20 mins on a 2013 Q5
 

I just started having this issue on a 2013 Q5. MMI crashes very reliably (sarcasm) every 20 mins. It will then reboot almost all the time, but once or twice it died and stayed dead until I rebooted the car itself.

I brought it to a dealership, they updated the firmware to the latest version, and tested it in their garage: no problems. When I picked up the car, they told me that this could be an unresolved firmware bug. That when your phone's contact list is very big, it then creates issues with MMI, likely it runs out of memory and the firmware watchdog forces it to reboot. And 20 mins seems to be the time it takes for the MMI to fill its memory and then crash.

Today I tested it with and without the phone synced -- I turned Bluetooth on and off -- and the results are consistent with the thinking that the Bluetooth connection is what causes problems. That's why they couldn't reproduce the crash in their garage. I left the dealership with a loaner and thus my phone wasn't nearby.

Quite disappointed with Audi engineering, to be honest. The dealership couldn't do anything, and that's understandable, but Audi engineering should do something about this. I downloaded an app to automatically remove the hundreds of stupid no-name contacts that Outlook 2013 + iTunes puts into my phone's contact list. We'll find out if this remedies the problem when I drive home from work. If this doesn't work I'll probably re-set MMI's phone connection because I think when you first do the Bluetooth sync, it downloads all the contacts from your phone.

There is/was a bug with too many contacts and also if you had special characters in your contacts, but I don't know what the status is. The bug was found over a year ago, so I would expect that it is fixed in the latest firmware upgrade. What firmware version did they install? The latest update is K0814.