For six months, I fought with the Ford Sync in my 2010 Fusion. First with a Motorola Milestone 2 and then with a Nexus 4. The promise was great: Audio from your smartphone through the car’s sound system with no wires. Problem was, it didn’t work. Every time I got in the car I had to argue with it about making a connection.

Ford Sync: Line in, please say a command.

Me: Bluetooth audio.

Ford Sync: No Bluetooth device is available right now. I will try to connect one.

Then…nothing. I would turn Bluetooth on the phone off and back on again, push the button on the steering wheel and repeat myself until eventually, maybe, Ford Sync would chime happily and I’d get to listen to my podcasts.

Finally, I gave up and bought an audio cable, turned off Bluetooth audio and went back to life sans-Sync. When I got my new Nexus 4, I had high hopes that it would be able to converse with Ford Sync but it behaved mostly the same.

Then a few days ago I found the answer and it’s been completely reliable ever since. I get in the car, turn the key and audio starts playing exactly where it left off when I exited the vehicle. No palaver required. How did I achieve this miracle of technology? I turned the audio system off. That’s right, just hit the power button and Bluetooth picked right up.

I’ll tell you, I spent a lot of time searching for the answer to this problem and I tried a lot of people’s suggestions but this one never occurred to me. No one ever said, “oh, just turn the sound system off and everything will work great.” So that’s my message today to all the other Ford Sync owners who can’t get their Bluetooth audio to work. I hope they will be as unreasonably excited about it as I am.