And don't get me started on center consoles. At least my last rental supported CarPlay and I was pleased to discover that it pretty much just worked. Other systems I've had seemed far more intent on downloading all my contacts rather than doing something useful from an entertainment or navigation perspective.

Heh, that reminds me of my last rental, where, not half an hour off the lot, the touchscreen sound/navigation/??? system got stuck in some sort of reboot loop. Cursory online research suggested the problem was a known firmware bug that was unfixable without a service appointment.

A reasonable person would probably have turned around and exchanged the car with the rental company at this point.

I am not a reasonable person.

Instead, I headed directly to a truck stop and purchased a heavy-duty power inverter, dropped the back seat, and crammed my portable PA speaker into the trunk, connected to the car's trunk-mounted battery through the inverter and to my iPhone through a shielded audio cable run from the trunk to the front seat.

The result sounded far better than it should have, and what it lacked in convenience (I had to pop the trunk to power it down) and channel separation (one speaker = mono), it more than made up for in dB SPL.

(for the record, I've also repaired eBay purchases that arrived in worse-than-advertised condition rather than returning them, for no other reason than that learning how to fix things is more fun than going through the hassle of returning them)

This is also the kind of 'hacker' mindset that got me interested into technology. But instead of fixing to see how it worked, I broke it apart to see how it did.