Intermittent bluetooth syncing

I have this problem most of the times I drive either our 2012 Prius v Five or our 2014 Sienna Limited away from our house and had similar issues with past vehicles. I rarely drive my wife's Prius but when I do, I back out of the garage and press the whatever buttons I need to press on the in-dash screen to connect the phone and media features. It's more of an issue in the Prius since its Bluetooth usually tries to and often does connect to my wife's iPhone 7. My phone is a Galaxy S5. Our household Bluetooth phone system is also competing to connect with our phones and sometimes doesn't want to turn loose of a phone until we drive further away from the house.

I don't even bother to try to connect my S5 to the Sienna's system until I'm at least a block from the house.

The method I use is to press the "off hook" buttons on the steering wheels to see on the in-dash screen which phone, if either, has connected. If my phone is not connected, I press the Connect virtual button on the in-dash screen and select my phone. I feel that I can do these actions safely while driving slowly out of my neighborhood. Sometimes even this doesn't work and I have to toggle Bluetooth on my S5 off and back on. I almost always have to stop at a traffic light within a few blocks of our house and do these additional steps while waiting for the traffic light to change. We always keep our phones in holders on the dashboards when we drive; it would be more of a pain if we had to fish our phones out of pockets and purses to do this.

 

FWIW neither my wife or I have never had issues syncing our iPhones to our car. She has an iPhone 4 and I have an iPhone 5s. We both send/receive phone calls, receive texts and our contacts are synced depending of course on who's phone is synced when either her or I drive the car.