Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideally people wouldn't feel the need to use their phone while driving at all I understand what you’re saying, and agree, but I just want to play some tunes. On our Nissan Leaf, it takes seven taps on the screen to get BT to connect to my phone, because my phone isn’t the “default”. Seven, and plenty of opportunity to make a wrong choice along the way. And I have to do this every time the car restarts, and it can onl…
I drove a Leaf for a while, and while I do agree the center console had its share of UX issues, I think you are being a bit too demanding. For the default paired phone, the Leaf will re-connect with zero taps, just do it automatically. So you're probably in a shared car--yay, single electric car households are the future--and since you say you only want music, the solution is to leave a USB cable in the car. I was in…
Had I not previously written code that handles this exact scenario, I might agree. Hell, my iPhone does this exact thing to determine whether or not I'm driving. "Are we driving? I dunno, let's go iterate through all of the automotive BT IDs that I know about. Whoop, I see the Leaf's BT, I guess we're driving." I see no reason that the Leaf can't go, "hmm, I don't see the wife's phone. But I do see mikestew's phone, and that's in my list of known devices. I'll throw a prompt asking, or maybe that's too intrusive so I'll put a one-touch button on the screen to connect. But what I absolutely, positively won't do is make the driver push seven goddamned buttons to connect to a device I already know about."
I know this can be done because when I did work for a major athletic shoe maker, they put incredibly low-powered and incredibly dumb BT pucks in their shoes. In an amazing show of optimism, what if the customer bought two pairs of these over-priced shoes? And the implementation I wrote eight years ago did not involve seven taps. (IIRC, it was along the lines of "I don't see your usual basketball shoes, but I see the running shoes. Wanna use those?")
That's why this annoys me more than it should.
Do other cars/manufacturers handle multiple paired phones better?
The single-DIN, $89 head unit in our old VW does this better. You push a single button. (The downside is that it only pairs with two phones and an audio device.) It connects to the last thing it saw by default. The $700 Pioneer (would have to look up the model #) that replaced our Scion OEM unit connects to the last device it saw, and if that doesn't do it, three taps to connect (Settings/BT Connect/Device). Oh, that reminds me of another annoyance with the Leaf: one of those seven button taps is to decide between "Hands-free" or "audio device". Well, how the fuck should I know? No other thing I own asks this question. Because the Pioneer and the skeezy $89 Kenwood both say, "meh, don't worry about it, I'll load the appropriate profile depending on what you want to do. I mean, hell, it's pretty stupid to put a CPU in here if I can't even figure out that simple task, amirite? LOL!"