I just leased a new 2024 Toyota Corolla. This is a low end model and historically, shouldn’t contain a lot of luxury or advanced features. And yet, it has a very integrated tablet mounted to the dash, from which too many of the car’s basic features are tied. If you take out the tablet, then you would loose too many critical basic features that are critical to the normal operation of the car. I don’ t like that. I don’t want any learning curve and that learning curve is big. And to sync to my phone, I have to have a one-inch tall Toyota notification (the whole Toyota logo) stay active on my phone’s drop-down notification bar at all times. If I disable notifications to the Toyota app, the car refuses to work with my phone at all.
The radio does display visual advertising on that big display which becomes the radio when you select the radio icon from other menues. I get the Visual advertising, weather I like it or not. The large one-inch square icon that displays the radio station occasionally changes to display an ad. It does that on AM, FM, and on Serius XM. The radio app doesn’ look like a radio at all. It looks more like a Netflix menue of large icons. There is no pretense of making it look like a real car radio with familiar controls. It gives me a big page of XM and local radio station presets and doesn’t display my favorite stations most of the time. You do get a real physical volume knob. But tuning using anything other than with the available icons requires you to navigate properly to the correct menue. Everything else about the radio and the car’s other controls is also found in various menues that are not intuitive to find and use.
The car accepts “hey Toyota” voice commands. So it’s listening all of the time and responds every time I call on it. It does a lot of things from voice commands. I only know how to use it to change the radio station and that is often because too often, I don’t know how to navigate Android Auto to get to the radio interface. So I just say something like “Hey Toyota, Serius XM channel 8”. I set that one as a Favorite. But that icon is rarely on the selection page. Big icons for stations that I hate are always on that page. I don’t know how to remove them.
I doubt that I have any privacy in that car. But since I don’t plan to have sex in it, nor to commit any crimes with it, I guess I can live with that until a better option becomes available (probably never).