Must have phased it out by 13. One of my company’s vehicles is a 13 escape and it had a Microsoft interface that would fail to communicate with my phone at least half the time unless I did the pairing process from the start every time I started the car.

I’m sort of in the market for a car but there’s a lot of factors. I’m 0% interested spending significant money on a petroleum vehicle and I don’t really think EVs are ready for prime time, nor do I want to spend what they currently cost. Plus, every EV I’ve seen is full of screens and I really do hate that. At the same time an older vehicle, especially at the price I’d care to spend, has its own problems. I know at some point I’ll have to face the music.

I (30s) recently had a modern rental and drove a fleet car with onboard infotainment systems. I’ve never felt more like an old man waving a cane in the air than I did just trying to connect my phone so I could get navigation and podcasts over the speakers. My own car is 12 years old and has a dot matrix screen that tells you the name of the song on fm radio and that’s it. It has a line in and I got a Bluetooth receiver that I keep in the center console. I would use this arrangement indefinitely over whatever is going on in new cars.