Should the car already come with it installed? Yes. Is it a big deal to rectify? No.

I mean, that's absolutely fair - I'm just saying that this is such a trivial issue to fix that it's not even worth worrying about(IMHO).

So, where a car still can collect bonus points is infotainment and interior in general. If you offer some touchscreen-blandness, you have to go down with the price significantly, because I see where money was spared. I use the built-in wireless CarPlay daily, so I expect it to work without occupying myself with fixing Volvo's incompetence.

I'm thankful for whichever Chinese engineers reversed the protocol for CarPlay to make this work. But my experience with these adapters is they are more fiddly than you're describing.

And what about switching drivers and quickly switching phones? Or just having the passenger quickly switch to their music.

Every driver (me and my wife) is in the system and car selects the iphone available in the car, but I can also switch it manually if required.

The passengers have in general to stay off my infotainment system, they can do whatever they want in their own car :)

Most car trips are under an hour long, and many phones have batteries that last 18-24 hours.

Personally, I mostly never use a car charger unless my phone missed the wireless charger that night.

Not really sure why!

Whoever came up with that wasn't entirely right in the head: so now people will stare at the device for another five seconds wondering what they did wrong. Sound of impact.

It's not impossible, just a very annoying way to control something precisely.

It's literally the worst way to interact with anything. It's infuriating how bad it is, especially for someone whose first language isn't English. It understands maybe 20% of the commands I give it, and the delay between clicking the button, it doing the "bong" to indicate it's ready, then listening to my command, then it processing and finally giving me a response(usually "sorry I didn't understand that") is just horrendous.

Not to mention that it's still physically impossible to use voice controls to dial people with non-English names if you have your OS set to English - try saying "Dial Jan Szczepanek" and it will never recognize it, no matter how you pronounce it. If you have OS set to Polish it will work fine, but I cannot be expected to keep switching my OS language!

However, it also has a "hey Google" like feature, where it's always listening and triggers voice control when it hears the words, without the push of a button. And it triggers randomly when I'm talking with my wife, even when we say nothing remotely close to the keyword.

Funnily enough, we also didn't know this feature existed, and neither did the dealership. So for a while we thought it was a random bug. Eventually, my wife figured it's a feature, and it can thankfully be turned off.

But for other stuff (changing tracks or albums - "play xxx from spotify") it works just fine for me. And yes, I use a louder "computer" or "command" voice when talking to digital assistants (had to learn how to do that to control Amazon's Alexa devices). ;)

Does that work with foreign titles? Dragostea Din Tei? 爱的就是你?

This is just the modern allergy to allowing user configuration. (God forbid someone use your software to do what they want to do!) The problem was solved in the 90s, when speech-to-text sucked, by letting you define your own words.

https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/tutorials/Customizing_Dra...

Obviously, that solution will still work today.

But you are still allowed to configure your contact information, so there's an obvious solution: instead of calling him Jan Szczepanek, just call him John Stevenson. Everyone wins! ;D

It's just not reliable enough for everyday use.