I have a Ford that after 13 years is reaching the point where I'm considering replacing it.

Their homemade infotainment system prior to CarPlay was awful, and has an overflow error which hits me about once every 6 months which requires pulling the fuse to hard reset it. As far as I can tell they keep adding new songs to a stack, and never flush it so at some point you'll reach the end of a song and it won't play any more. Once you reached that you can only use the phone function, attempts to use music result in you getting your Bluetooth connection terminated.

I have the Nothing Phone 3a now, before that, I had all flagship pixels. 0 were not slow. I always figured it had to do with the infotainment centers implementation of the protocols or simply their hardware.

It was always stable for me, just sluggish.

If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.

The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.

It's funny you mention Toyota, my Dad's 2022 Civic Hybrid is the one I get to witness being buggy garbage pretty much non-stop with CarPlay. Lord don't plug it into the USB port that does data if you're already on wireless Carplay. You might be done until you pull over. I also love the way using speech to reply to a text often resumes the wrong song (seemingly just starts a random song midway through, and multiple times the Joe Rogan Podcast which dad doesn't listen to and is not subscribed to - when this happens it always starts at the same point in the intro).

I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.

I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.

Ooo they do look badass. Really pretty shape.