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This is another benefit of truly analog manual controls: Memory. Used to be your stereo volume knob was just at a certain level; when you turned it on it was at that level. Now they're all software controlled. At least some stereo equipment maintains this paradigm but I'm with you on the phone volume as it's dictated by your phone and the volume for one device could be drastically different than another.

>>> "However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio."

Yeah. In the same boat and my wife like to play pranks when she uses the car. Turns the volume to max right before removing the key. When her phone is not found it defaults to radio. That "saved me" from having to drink my morning coffee in the office on more than one occasion + it's good training for the heart.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the volume knob is ignored until the system fully boots up and the audio starts as soon as you twist the key.

This is what I used to do to torment my mom when I was a kid. Except with the physical knobs she had in her car (in the 80s), I could crank the volume without having to turn on the car.

My VW Jetta has Apple Carplay and similar issues abound.

> it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency.

I've got one better. Controls during bootup in my car are simply ignored, and the bootup duration for Carplay in particular is so bad that it makes the bluetooth delay seem acceptable.

> However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.

This is ironic because I wish mine would start playing. There's no setting for playback behavior either. The only setting, in fact, is the ability to reorder and add/remove third-party apps.

Oh, worse still, sometimes audio doesn't play even when you manually select something. The UI will register it as playing but the audio doesn't come through. When this happens, you have to disconnect and reconnect your phone, which is dangerous in motion. It's a joke. It makes me wonder what the deal is, and I have no idea who to report the bug to.

> All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.

Yup. My beater in college that came with some random aftermarket radio was better. Carplay is pretty but beyond that it feels like an afterthought as an experience.

The wild variability in boot times for the entertainment center is what gets me. Sometimes, my bluetooth will start playing immediately, other times the car company's logo will grace the screen for a good 30 seconds before I can interact with it at all. There doesn't seem to be any relation to frequency of starting it up, time since the last drive, etc.

Running fsck. We're now in the era of low effort embedded systems. Just slap Linux on it and don't bother tuning for usability in non-desktop use cases.

Hah our Subaru does this where it defaults to playing the radio at some volume whenever you “boot up” the car. I’ve got no idea what station is selected as the boot up station but every time I turn on our car it plays static.

How about no sound? How about defaulting to silence? Nope…

I understand your critics against touchscreens and they are justified. Your car doesn’t have a good touchscreen interface from what you say and also from my experience when I drove the corollas from the car pool. However it’s not because many cars are bad that the technology is bad.

A touchscreen from an 20 years old Archos MP3 player is extremely bad while an iPad Pro M1 is very good.

Some tools are just not good for the job.

At least to me, I haven‘t seen a compelling reasons that touchscreens replacing analog car controls isn‘t a square peg going into a circle hole.

I'm wondering if part of that is that the companies producing these awful interfaces don't see themselves as 'software' companies, so they put these things in but no one has the time or passion or interest to make it a better experience.

Not saying they'd definitely be good if only some one loved 'em, but judging from the car touch screens I've used I believe no one has tried yet.

Well, analog controls are not very good to control a gps map or browse a music collection.

I find that a round knob with a push-button click, when coupled with a non-touch screen, is far superior to swiping around on a touchscreen to browse a music collection.

Why do we need screens on everything when we have a phone? A mobile computing device.

The last gen Citroen Ami uses the phone. You can check how it looks.

I don't think it's really about the touchscreen. I think very few manufacturers, if any, are putting very much thought into this. Apple Carplay, for example, is just a jumbo, uber-simplified version of ipadOS/iOS. In my car it has a great, high resolution 10" touchscreen but a very lackluster experience. It's pretty damning if even Apple, a tech company at heart, is doing it poorly. It doesn't autoplay audio, store memory of what you were doing when last connected, or have any available preferences. "Car" is right there in the name but nowhere to be found in the experience based on everything drivers have expected from vehicles for the better part of a century.